Nick Beech

18 May 2014

CCA/Mellon Research Project “1945–1975: British Culture for

Architecture”

From New Left to New Times: How Stuart Hall might help us

rethink post-war British architecture

[Slide 1]

This year will undoubtedly see significant historical reflection

on the evolution of the new left and on the formation and

development of cultural studies as both an academic discipline

and political force in Britain. Stuart Hall’s death on the 10th

February was followed, one month later, by Richard Hoggart’s. At

the same time 2014 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the

founding of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS)

at the University of Birmingham.1 In particular, the immediate

response by so many within academic, literary, political, and

media fora to Hall’s death is testament to the fact that he not

only provided many with the means to critically assess culture,

but that his work has itself become a significant cultural

phenomenon in Britain and beyond.2

Hall has been celebrated and maligned alike under absurd

‘godfather’ titles (godfather of cultural studies, –of the

cultural turn, –of multiculturalism, –of new labour, etc.) all

of which he persistently questioned and refused (on critical

grounds and on the grounds of historical fact). For those who

knew him or seriously engaged with his work, he is better known

1

as a teacher and as a public intellectual (as defined by his

colleague Edward Said),3 or, using Hall’s own reflections on his

intentions as Director of the CCCS, an ‘organic intellectual’

(Antonio Gramsci’s term): an agent developing and deploying the

technical apparatus of a particular social class, formed within

the dynamics of a specific social formation.4 The implications

of this, for how we historically situate Hall and engage with

his work as part of a project for a broader historiography of

post-war British architecture, will be touched upon at the end

of this paper.

Hall’s significance for public life in Britain through the

second half of the twentieth century is not in doubt. Hall

expressed—in his published writing, public speaking, and radio

and television broadcasts—key social, cultural and political

concerns of the left in Britain as these occurred at particular

conjunctures. He articulated those concerns with and through

popular cultural forms. He intervened in and generated practices

and methods of political organisation and research, influencing

policy (positively advocating and critically commentating within

and beyond the political institutions of the left), and

indicating, for a succession of generations, new possibilities

for dissention from the status quo and new socialist formations.

The following sketches out some of the contributions Hall made

to debates within and beyond the new left from the mid-1950s

through to the late-1970s (a limit defined by the purpose of

this research not Hall’s on-going career). I hope to sketch, not

only some of the basic positions Hall maintained, but also

elements of the structure of those positions—how he reformulated

particular questions and how his mode of critique operated. At

2

the same time, I hope to indicate the institutional forms and

material practices with which Hall conducted his critical work:

political organisations, educational and non-governmental

institutions, campaign organisations, journals, and mass media.

It is a premise of this research proposal that considering the

operation and structure of Hall’s approach to cultural and

political critique and understanding that operation in its

discursive and material dimensions, will offer a less

compartmentalised account of Hall’s intellectual history than is

usually found, in which Hall is so often figured as ‘cultural

theorist’, or ‘neo-marxist’, or ‘black intellectual’, or (worse),

dismissed as only ‘chasing the going trend’.

Finally, I want to make a number of open suggestions as to how

we might integrate the particular history of Hall’s work in a

wider historiography of post-war British culture and

architecture: that there is the possibility of mapping

architectural questions over Hall’s work, thus treating that

work as indexical to particular conditions to which architects

and architectural critics were similarly responding; that we

might consider the kinds of institutions, practices, and

networks which Hall engaged in, their structures and methods,

and consider how these were shared by (directly or in form)

certain architects of the period; or, finally, that we might

open up debates over the value and meaning of architecture in

the second half of the twentieth century to Hall’s form of

conjunctural analysis, disarticulating certain assumed,

canonical, or simply ‘working’ periodisations and locations.

3

Positions of the New Left: 1956–1961

[Slide 2]

We start this at a moment of great difficulty,since we are losing the services—as Editor—ofStuart Hall. Stuart has been at the centre of “thelot” since 1956, was one of the editors of[Universities & Left Review], and edited [New Left Review]since its inception. More than this, he has been—attimes almost single-handed—the New Left. CND, LeftClubs, trade union schools, cultural organisations—Stuart has found time, in and out of editing, toaddress about six meetings a week withoutintermission for several years. His personality—warm, intuitive, affirmative—carried us out of thenegative, defensive style so common in socialistcircles before 1956. We’ll thank Stuart properly inanother issue. But he has now done more than histerm. He wants some time to write and settle whenhe leaves the editorship in December.5

So announced the newly configured editorial board in the

September–October 1961 edition of the New Left Review (NLR), marking

an end to Hall’s editorship and, in its focus on Hall’s

personality, hard work and dynamism, masking as much as it

revealed as to what Hall understood the purpose of a new left

journal to be. For the tacit assumption of the warm thanks is

that Hall was able to conduct the editorship of an intellectual

organ of the new left in spite of the fact that he was so fully

engaged in direct, educational, political and cultural

activities. The direction subsequently taken at the NLR was of a

discrete forum for intellectual work, ‘freed’ from concrete

political and cultural activity.6

4

That Hall was involved in a project with a very different

conception of the NLR is evidenced in that journal’s formation.7

The original NLR was the product of a merger between the

Universities & Left Review (ULR)—founded in 1957 by Hall, Gabriel

Pearson, Ralph Samuel and Charles Taylor—and the New Reasoner—

founded in the same year by the historians Edward Thompson and

John Saville.8 Both journals were a response to crises

identifiable in imperialist operations of the Soviet Union in

Eastern Europe, and Britain and France in the Mediterranean,

North Africa and the Middle East.9 The actions and reactions of

political institutions in those events—from the main political

parties of the left and right, through to the Communist Party of

Great Britain (CPGB)— are treated in the journals as indicative

of a deep crisis in socialist thought and organisation. Hall’s

own writing of the period provides details of both the new

intellectual paradigm and socialist activity being developed.

In his political essays, Hall mobilises the concepts and

categories of a ‘socialist humanism’, then being developed by

Thompson and others, breaking from the doxa and dogma of

Stalinism, intellectually pathetic forms of de-Stalinisation, or

flights to (and embrace of) Trotskyism.10 Invoking a ‘state of

extreme moral confusion’, Hall’s critique is embedded in an

altered Marxist ‘base/superstructure’ model, in which a

reductive economism is rejected and attention turned to class

struggle and formation. It is an analysis of its time, elements

of which—particularly the reading of superstructural cultural

forms as epiphenomenal to economic relations—Hall would begin to

put under extreme critical pressure.11

5

At the same time, an initial conception of ‘culture’ as a

category encompassing literature, visual and performing arts, is

broadened out to popular music (‘skiffle’, jazz, folk), film,

street fashion and more. Reading literature at Oxford as a

Jamaican Rhodes scholar, initially utilising the tools of

Leavisite literary analysis, but viscerally refusing the

stultifying Arnoldian conception of culture (‘the best that has

been said and thought’), particularly as that disguised

structures of deep, unexamined imperialist codings (in the

‘cultivation of good taste’), Hall not only abandoned his

doctoral study of Henry James in so fully engaging with the new

left, but positively embraced and contributed to the development

of new forms of cultural analysis pioneered in Richard Hoggart’s

The Uses of Literacy and Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society.12

Crucially, this broadened conception of culture allowed Hall to

identify new points of political contestation in the social body

that were otherwise dismissed or misappropriated by traditional

political discourse (of the right and left).

[Slide 3]

By 1959, Hall’s readings of the problems raised by the changing

dynamics of class composition and whether the operating

categories, functions and structural positions of class,

culture, the political and the economic, was opening up a

critical debate within the new left itself.13 What I would argue

(and in so doing, indicating potential for further research) is

that these developments are not only the product of Hall’s

response to other intellectuals of the period, but are a result

of the material and organisational activities which Hall engaged

in. Writing is only one element in a wider range of practices. I

6

am thinking, of course, about the establishment of the new Left

Clubs (which the NLR of the 1960s would abandon altogether) and

particularly the Notting Hill Left Club, the working practices

and conditions of the editorial team in Soho—including the brief

life of the Partisan Coffee Shop—and the development of the

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.14

But also, and for the purposes of this event, the identification

of and work within new conditions of contestation: the urban

struggles of West Indian migrant communities in Notting Hill,

the contests over education reform (especially over the new

secondary moderns), the debates over the development of new

towns and the hollowing out of the metropolitan centre, and

intimations of North America’s growing cultural and political

hegemony. Empirical sources for Hall’s activity in this period

might be brought into relation with the published work, allowing

us to understand how the latter are one part of a wider set of

material practices: pedagogical (in his work as a secondary

modern teacher, and in extramural lectures, seminars and

discussion groups), performative (in demonstrations and

protest), and organisational (in the development of ‘grass

roots’ support networks).

The Popular Arts and Education: 1961–1968

[Slide 4]

Hall did not leave the NLR to ‘write and settle’. Rather, he

continued his campaign work (at demonstrations and in writings)

with CND,15 and began developing analyses and pedagogical

material for the study of popular film at the British Film

7

Institute (BFI). The latter work was developed with Paddy

Whannel, the Education Officer of the BFI, through a series of

educational programmes, culminating in the publication of The

Popular Arts.16 Neither a textbook for pupils or students, nor

strictly a guide for teachers or lecturers, The Popular Arts was

informed by the broadened conception of culture developed in the

1950s, discussing popular cinema (as opposed to auteur or foreign

language cinema) as a medium in and through which children in

secondary modern schools could interpret and begin to come to

terms with their own lives.

The period is one in which Hall’s activity becomes embedded in a

new set of institutions and practices. Research and critical

analysis of the development of teaching programmes at the BFI by

Hall and Whannel allowing for the identification of continuities

and new developments in Hall’s understanding of the role of a

new left teacher.17 It was Hall’s attention to the possibilities

for developing both an analysis of contemporary social

conditions, and the provision, through education, of tools with

which to intervene in and so take command of popular art forms

that encouraged Richard Hoggart to invite Hall to join him in

his new ‘Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ at the

University of Birmingham.

From its inception, the Centre was understood as necessarily

interdisciplinary—drawing on sociology, social psychology,

social history and literary criticism of mass media and popular

cultural forms—identifying the inadequacy of traditional

disciplines in the humanities and social sciences for

understanding of the effects of emergent popular arts and their

reception.18 The Centre was supported by Allen Lane (a result of

8

Hoggart’s contribution as an expert witness in the Lady Chatterley’s

Lover obscenity trial in 1960), and in its interdisciplinarity

enjoyed both a dialogue with established departments within the

University of Birmingham and a constant marginalisation and

rejection of its aims and working methods. Major research work

in the early period was the product of collaboration with

external non-governmental agencies—particularly the Joseph

Rowntree Memorial Trust and UNESCO.19 It’s clear that cultural

studies was a research field that fell outside of existing

academic disciplines, had intentions beyond the production of

knowledge and toward the transformation of society, and that as

a field of research would necessarily require new theoretical

and methodological tools.

Because of the centrality and significance of the Centre for the

emergence of cultural studies—today a highly heterogeneous field

of research and activity—a great deal has been written about the

Centre’s intellectual developments and research programmes.20

What I would propose offers a site of potential research remains

the question of ‘68’ and how Hall’s work within the Centre post-

68 might be better understood. Such might seem peculiar—a

revisit of 1968 hardly seems necessary. But I have some specific

questions in mind.

One might suppose—given Hall’s pedagogical work and given the

publication of the May Day Manifesto, first drafted with Thompson

and Williams in 1967—that Hall was well prepared, indeed had

helped prepare the ground for, the student revolts. Documents at

the newly founded archive of the CCCS, including the University

of Birmingham student magazine Mermaid—in which Hall, his wife

Catherine and other close colleagues contributed both arguments

9

for and organisation of the student movement there—clearly

suggest as much. Yet, if the events around 1968 confirmed the

need for a critical rethinking of the pressures exercised on the

social formation of post-war Britain, as supposed in his

research on sub-cultural youth forms of the mid- to late-1960s,

it is clear that 1968 marks both a point of ‘arrival’ and

‘departure’ for Hall. In his private reflections on the period,

Hall has suggested that, as much as he embraced the rupture of

1968, he felt singularly ill equipped, at that moment, to

comprehend the social and cultural forces at work or its

consequences.

I would argue that the subsequent developments in research,

organisation, and contestation over cultural studies at the

Centre—including the engagement with neo-marxist theory, the

emphasis on new political subjectivities of race and gender, and

the relationship between intellectual labour within the Centre

and wider political activity beyond it—need to be understood

from that perspective. That is, a perspective which extends the

temporal frame of 1968 backward into the critique of the

corporatism of Welfare state Britain, the exercise of cultural

and political hegemony by North America, and the contestation of

such through new cultural forms, the ground for which was laid

in the new left of the 1950s and forward as it signals the crisis

in political consensus over social democracy and the composition

of class and class subjectivities in Britain. Such a broadening

of the historical framing of 1968 would require a very careful

attention to the records of the Centre—which leave some trace of

the contestations, arguments, and responses in the University

10

and beyond—so that we might begin to identify the emergence of

new arguments, expressions, and subject positions.

Crisis and Conjunctural Analysis: 1968–1978

[Slide 5]

I want to restrict this last section of the overview to only one

area of research and activity that Hall was engaged in during

the 1970s, which I would suggest is both a product of 1968 and a

significant movement by Hall beyond the specific dynamics of

that moment—the research with Chas Critcher, John Clarke, Tony

Jefferson and Brian Roberts that culminated in the publication

of Policing the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the state and law and order in 1978. The

restriction is crude but necessary for the purposes of this

presentation—Hall’s work, as single author and often in

collaboration with others during this period is prolific,

providing significant analyses of youth sub-cultures, mass

media, colonial subjectivity and the African diaspora, and

theoretical developments in Marxism and cultural analysis, as

well as problematic but serious engagements with feminist

thought and action in the Centre and beyond.

Understanding Policing the Crisis, and the wider work produced through

the period on ‘deviance’ in youth cultures, without reference to

key concepts and categories developed by Hall in the CCCS’s

reading group on Marx—structural and conjunctural crisis, over-

determination, hegemony, and so on—is not possible, and it is

hard to imagine Policing the Crisis being produced without the

theoretical and methodological apparatus Hall produced through

his readings of Marx, Gramsci and Louis Althusser.21 However, I

11

refuse to try everyone’s patience in a super-compressed précis

of either the theoretical or the empirical work of that period.22

I only want to say here that I think it is too reductive to

suggest—as so many scholars continuing to work on the history

and development of Marxism or historical materialism do today—

that the innovations in theory and practice conducted by Hall

and the Centre (and I would argue similar to innovations that

occurred internationally, if with quite different results) were

a product of ‘misreadings’ or ‘lack of sufficient scholarly

understanding’ of the newly translated and disseminated texts of

classical Marxism, such as the Grundrisse or Gramsci’s Prison

Notebooks. Those translations were made and published not

coincidently, but as a product of the growing demand by

intellectuals, students and the wider radical left for material

that would allow for some critical comprehension of their living

present. The readings, and the purpose to which that material

was put, directly relates to the political needs of their time.23

The research for Policing the Crisis was sparked by a particular

incidence of urban crime. They write:

Until we started the study, crime was not a specialfield of interest to us. We became involved in apractical way when, in 1973, sentences of ten andtwenty years were handed down in court to threeboys of mixed ethnic background after a seriousincident in Handsworth Birmingham, in which a manon the way home from a pub was ‘mugged’ on a pieceof waste ground, robbed and badly injured.24

Published after five years of research at the Centre, Policing the

Crisis begins with an analysis of a moral panic, produced and

circulated in newspapers and television, on ‘mugging’ or urban

12

street crime, and from there identifies a deep crisis in the

social democratic state, positing the emergence of a new,

powerful hegemonic tendency toward ‘authoritarian populism’.

Sensitive—in careful readings at various discursive and material

levels of analysis, providing close readings of popular press

material, oral testimony, policy and juridical documents;

prescient—in providing the grounds for Hall’s later

identification of neo-liberalism and the particular forms that

took in Thatcherism; and provocative—in that in the work, an

argument is made that cuts the rug from under both labourist and

orthodox Marxist responses to the economic and political crises

of the 1970s, crucially identifying the racialization of social

conflict and disintegration of traditional class bonds—Policing the

Crisis provides a perspective of the period which links specific

urban and racial conflicts to a much broader discursive field.

Continuing with the arguments produced in this overview so far,

I want to suggest that any historical assessment of that work,

and any contribution it might make to a history of the cultural

landscape of post-war Britain, lies, once again in the way in

which it was produced in a broader set of practices which Hall

was engaged in. I am thinking in particular of the advocacy and

policy work that Hall contributed to in Birmingham and beyond,

directly intervening in the very urban and racial conflicts

which Policing the Crisis analyses. Finally, that work which reached

beyond the Centre as an academic institution, provides grounds

for identifying how counter-hegemonic practices were being

produced by Hall and his colleagues: institutional,

organisational and political practices that were informed by the

theoretical work of the Centre, supporting the urban polities,

13

then fragmenting and under assault from ‘authoritarian

populism’.25

Some Possibilities for Rethinking Architecture of the Period

[Slide 6]

If nothing else I hope I’ve indicated the rich and complex

history that is available to us in considering the trajectory of

Hall’s work through the period of the 1950s to 1970s. I’ve tried

to compress and condense as much as possible, whilst keeping the

material open to discussion and consideration. I’d now like to

set out some options, for discussion, as to how this work might

add to a historical project which has architecture and

architectural developments as, if not exclusively, still

necessarily, a point of focus.

First, I think it’s quite obvious that we could treat Hall’s

work as indexical to problems and questions in a wider public

discourse. To take only one example from the mid- to late-1950s:

the failure of the left—within labourism or orthodox Marxism—to

adequately respond to the condition of ‘post-Welfare’ Britain;

arguments around ‘aspirational’, ‘consumer’ and ‘mass’ cultural

forms and their effects; the evolution of bureaucratic and

corporatist structures in state and private capital enterprises;

and, the cultural pressure felt by the new dominance of North

America in cultural and political spheres—all these questions

are clearly resonant with the debates on the appropriate

direction which modernist architecture should take in the post-

war period. Not only that, but the demand made by the new left,

and Hall in particular, for a disarticulation of assumed

14

relations between class location and cultural forms and

practices, again, resonates with the internal critique of

architecture, and the battle lines drawn over townscape, new

humanism, new empiricism, new brutalism and so on.

I don’t think that’s a particularly exciting offering in

research terms— it doesn’t achieve much more than running

certain histories beside one another and it runs the risk of

over-riding the specificities of particular discourses within

architecture and outside it. More interesting, I think, would be

to consider how the new forms of political practice that Hall

engaged in—grass roots organisation, development of publishing

fora, engagement with government and non-governmental

institutions, and utilisation of mass media forms—were shared,

either directly or in similar modes, by architectural

practitioners. I have in mind something like Cedric Price’s work

with Joan Littlewood on the ‘Fun Palace’, and the kinds of

interdisciplinary practice instantiated in the development of

that project. I think that particular project could be usefully

considered in relation to the work conducted by Hall in the new

left and at the BFI in the same period. I think that would be

useful because it would bring our attention to the ways in which

those architects sensitive to the problems raised by the

particular social democratic state formed in Britain in the

post-war period—and I think Cedric Price was such an architect—

were not only developing architectural solutions to those

problems (I’m tempted to say not even), but were also engaged in

the formation of new cultural and political practices. That would

at least have the corrective function of dissolving the frame

15

which so often constricts interpretations of Price to ‘utopian’

or ‘paper’ architect.

Finally, perhaps more speculatively, I would propose that paying

attention to Hall’s work—in terms of his practice and in terms

of the substantial arguments he made at particular conjunctures—

might allow us to rethink the temporalities and locations of

architectural production in the post-war period in Britain.

Within Policing the Crisis, there is an argument for rethinking the

crisis of the social democratic state, and the emergence of a

new ‘authoritarian populism’ in which an increasingly fragmented

social formation is fixed to identifications with individualism

and nationalism (and the developments of racism that such

entails), but also for recalibrating the historical framework

within which particular historical moments are understood.

Policing the Crisis makes the claim for an identification of a

conjunctural crisis in the 1970s—in which the ensemble of social

relations, technology, economic production, political

ideologies, discourses and cultural forms of the preceding

period rupture and a new conjuncture is born. But as that

identification is grounded in a conception of the ensemble as

composed of relatively autonomous trajectories—as social

relations are determinate but not determined by the economic,

and so on—this opens the very real question as to the ‘when’ of

the opening and closure of the conjunctural moment.

A question as an example: should we consider Price’s ‘Potteries

Thinkbelt’—a project which clearly posits the mobilisation of

spatial and communicative technologies to resolve the conflicts

and social fragmentation caused by corporatisation and de-

industrialisation in the 1960s—as still bound within the pre-

16

crisis conjuncture of the social democratic state? Or can we see

in ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’ an early beginning of the conjunctural

crisis of the 1970s? I think Pier Vittorio Aureli’s recent

reading of ‘Potteries Thinkbelt’—in which that project becomes a

possible site for thinking through the political consequences of

capitalist ‘post-Fordist production’—suggests that such

questions might be useful, if nothing else because it’s clear

that we are in a process of rethinking the historical location

for such projects. As I’ve said, I recognise the speculative

nature of this suggestion, and these last remarks are hardly

worked through.

17

1 Representative obituaries of Stuart Hall and Richard Hoggart include, John Ezerd,

‘Richard Hoggart: Obituary’, Guardian (Thursday 10 April), p. 39; Lawrence

Grossberg, ‘Rage Against the Dying of the Light: Stuart Hall (1932–2014)’ (Saturday

15 February), http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/21895-rage-against-the-dying-

of-a-light-stuart-hall-1932-2014 (accessed 9 May 2014); David Morley and Bill

Schwarz, ‘Stuart Hall: Obituary’, Guardian (Monday 10 February), p. 39. An

exhibition marking the 50th Anniversary of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural

Studies (CCCS) opens on 9 May 2014 at the Midlands Art Centre, Birmingham, one part

of a wider research project assessing the CCCS and its legacies, for details see,

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/historycultures/departments/history/research/

projects/cccs/index.aspx (accessed 9 May 2014).

2 Obituaries, reflections, shared memories and personal histories, radio and news

broadcasts in relation to Hall have been extensive, particularly on blogs and

online journals. For examples, see, http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03tt50m

(accessed 9 May 2014); http://www.opendemocracy.net/ourkingdom/collections/stuart-

hall-cultural-theorist-1932-2014 (accessed 9 May 2014);

http://www.lwbooks.co.uk/stuarthall.html (accessed 9 May 2014); and,

http://progressivegeographies.com/2014/02/10/stuart-hall-obituaries-and-tributes/

(accessed 9 May 2014).

3 See Edward Said, ‘Opponents, Audiences, Constituencies, and Community’, Critical

Inquiry, vol. 9, no. 1 (September 1982), 1–26; Edward Said, ‘Representations of the

Intellectual’, BBC Reith Lectures, broadcast in six episodes, BBC Radio 4, 23 June–

28 July 1983. Available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00gmx4c/episodes/guide

(accessed 9 May 2014).

4 See Stuart Hall, ‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’, in Lawrence

Grossberg, Carry Nelson, and Paula Triechler (eds), Cultural Studies (London and New

York: Routledge), pp. 277–94.

5 ‘Notes for Readers’, New Left Review, no. 12 (November–December 1961), inside front

cover.

6 This line hardened as Perry Anderson’s editorial control tightened in 1962.

7 See Hall, ‘The “First” New Left: Life and times’, in Oxford University Socialist

Discussion Group (eds), Out of Apathy: Voices of the New Left 30 years on (London: Verso,

1989), pp. 11–38.

8 Both journals had their manifestations in earlier forms. Hall had prepared a

special issue of Oxford Clarion: Journal of the Oxford University Labour Club, vol. 1, no. 5

(1957); Edward Thompson and John Saville had cyclostyled The Reasoner in reaction to

Nikita Kruschev’s ‘Secret Speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress of the Communist

Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956 and the resulting revolutions in Eastern

Europe and their suppression by the Red Army.

9 See, for example, Hall, Gabriel Pearson, Ralph Samuel, and Charles Taylor,

‘Hungary, H-Bomb, Germany’, Universities & Left Review, vol. 1, no. 2 (Summer 1957), 3;

and, Malcolm MacEwen, ‘Striking the Balance’, The New Reasoner, vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer

1957), 61–4.

10 For Thompson’s own fleshing out of ‘socialist humanism’ see, Thompson,

‘Socialist Humanism Part 1 and Part 2’, The New Reasoner, vol. 1, no. 1 (Summer

1957), 105–43.

11 See in particular Hall, ‘A “Reading” of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse’,

Stencilled Occasional Paper, no. 1 (Birmingham: CCCS, 1973); ‘The “Political” and “The

Economic” in Marx’s Theory of Classes’, in Alan Hunt (ed.) Class and Class Structure

(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), pp. 15–60; and, ‘Rethinking the “Base and

Superstructure” Metaphor’, in Jon Bloomfield (ed.), Class, Hegemony and Party (London:

Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), pp. 43–72.

12 Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957); and, Raymond

Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1958).

13 See Stuart Hall, ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities & Left Review, no. 5 (Autumn

1958), 26–32; and, ‘The Big Swipe: Some Comments on the “Classlessness

Controversy”’, Universities & Left Review, no. 7 (Autumn 1959), 50–52; and critical

responses to it, Ralph Samuel, ‘Class and Classlessness’, Universities & Left Review, no.

6 (Spring 1959), 44–50; and, Edward Thompson, ‘Commitment in Politics’, Universities &

Left Review, no. 6 (Spring 1959), 50–55; an account is provided in Michael Kenny, The

First New Left: British intellectuals after Stalin (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1995), pp. 54–68.

14 Archives identified to date include the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, LSE

Library, London; and the New Left Archive, Bishopsgate Institute, London.

15 Including a number of articles for War & Peace: the CND Quarterly, and Sanity.

16 Hall and Paddy Whannel, The Popular Arts (London/Boston MA/New York:

Hutchinson/Beacon Press/Pantheon, 1964).

17 The work of The British Film Institute Research Project, led by Geoffrey Nowell–

Smith and Christopher Dupin at Queen Mary, University of London makes consultation

of the British Film Institute archive considerably less daunting than might

otherwise be the case. See Geoffrey Nowell-Smith and Christopher Dupin (eds), The

British Film Institute: the government and film culture, 1933–2000 (Manchester: Manchester

University Press, 2012).

18 See ‘Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, First Annual Report, 1964’, CCCS

Archive, University of Birmingham, http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/Documents/college-

artslaw/history/cccs/annual-reports/1964.pdf (accessed 9 May 2014); and, Richard

Hoggart, ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society: Inaugural lecture as

Professor of English’, Speaking to Each Other: Volume Two (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),

pp. xx–xx.

19 See in particular Trevor Blackwell, Elizabeth Immirzi, and A. C. H. Smith, The

Popular Press and Social Change, 1935–1965, a project for the Joseph Rowntree Memorial Trust

(Birmingham: University of Birmingham, CCCS, 1970).

20 Succinct overviews are provided in, Ann Gray, ‘Formations of Cultural Studies’,

in Ann Gray, Jan Campbell, Mark Erickson, Stuart Hanson, and Helen Wood (eds), CCCS

Selected Working Papers: Volume One (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 1–14; and,

Lawrence Grossberg, ‘The Formations of Cultural Studies: An American in

Birmingham’, in Valda Blundell, John Shepherd, and Ian Taylor (eds), Relocating

Cultural Studies: Development in theory and research (London and New York: Routledge, 1993),

21–66.

21 Those readings relevant to the period under discussion include: Stuart Hall and

Paul Walton, ‘Introduction’, in Hall and Walton (eds.), Situating Marx (London: Human

Context Books, 1973), 1–6; ‘A “Reading” of Marx’s 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse’,

Stencilled Occasional Paper, no. 1 (Birmingham: CCCS, 1973); ‘The Hinterland of Science:

Ideology and the “Sociology of Knowledge”’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 10

(1977), 9–32; Hall, Bob Lumley and Gregor McLennan, ‘Politics and Ideology:

Gramsci’, Working Papers in Cultural Studies, no. 10 (1977), 45–76; Hall, ‘Rethinking the

“Base and Superstructure” Metaphor’, in Jon Bloomfield (ed.), Class, Hegemony and Party

(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), pp. 43–72; Hall, ‘The “Political” and the

“Economic” in Marxist Theory of Classes’, in Alan Hunt (ed.) Class and Class Structure

(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1977), pp. 15–60; Hall, ‘Marxism and Culture’,

Radical History Review, no. 18 (Fall 1978), 5–16; and, Hall, ‘Some Problems with the

Ideology/Subject Couplet’, Ideology and Consciousness, no. 3 (1978), 113–121.

22 Policing the Crisis was the major work, but needs to be understood as part of a wider

project. See, Stuart Hall, ‘Deviance, Politics and the Media’, in Mary McIntosh and

Paul Rock (eds), Deviance and Social Control (London: Tavistock, 1974), 261–305; Stuart

Hall, ‘Television, Violence and Crime’, in Research Methods and Results Concerning the

Relationship between Violence, Television, and Criminality (Turin: Editiones Radio-Television

Italiana, 1975); Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson (eds), Resistance through Rituals: Youth

Subcultures in Post-War Britain (London: Hutchinson, 1976); and, Stuart Hall, ‘The

Treatment of “Football Hooliganism” in the Press’, in Roger Ingham, et al (ed.),

Football Hooliganism: The wider context (London: Inter-Action Inprint, 1978), 15–36.

23 For a succinct reminder of this point see Eric Hobsbawm (hardly one to embrace

the unorthodox), ‘Discovering the Grundrisse’, How to Change the World: Tales of Marx and

Maxism (London: Abacus, 2011), pp. 121–6.

24 Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, Policing

the Crisis: ‘Mugging’, the state and law and order Second Edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan,

2013), p. 2.

25 Such research would rely upon the newly formed CCCS Archive at the University of

Birmingham as well as published material in Stuart Hall’s own collection of papers,

and interviews with key collaborators from the period.