The Dirty World: On Stuart Hall’s “The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities”

The "dirty world" supplied cultural studies with its questions, and the traditional humanities with its points of departure and return.

Invoked more than once in Stuart Hall's 1990 essay for October, "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities," the expression "dirty world" colloquially captures what made the Birmingham Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies a distinct intellectual residence. Cultural studies in its early years operated within universities but involved an intelligentsia unwilling to comply with traditional definitions of humanist education. Cultural studies practitioners pursued inquiries about the social order that the humanist tradition seemed incapable of accommodating, including questions about the influence of mass cultural forms. Rather than adjust to a single discipline, they activated a range of disciplinary practices, drawing in particular upon methods of literary criticism and sociology. In the battle to legitimize the "dirty world," they enlisted all resources at hand.

Hall produced several statements on cultural studies as theoretical practice, including "Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems" and "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms."1 The rapid institutionalization of cultural studies in the US demanded accounts with identifiable origins and legible trajectories.2 Beginning in the 1980s, debates about the politics of theory — broadly construed — furnished the context in which cultural studies could be re-described as part of the story of Theory. The distance in time from the early years of cultural studies made possible retrospective explorations of its "theoretical legacies" and relation to Marxism in particular.

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis in the Humanities" remains closely tethered to the everyday educational settings within which cultural studies arose, wagering that new observations come into view from such perspectives, however ostensibly mundane. We find Hall working as a teacher "in and around London" in the 1950s. Even after being hired as a Research Fellow at the Birmingham Center, Hall "had to pay my dues by doing my lectures on Henry James to undergraduates, lecturing on the American novel, which was my own area of research."3  Contending with a "dubious reception" — traditional departments refused to put out welcome mats — and making "pragmatic adjustments" so as to remain within university spaces were very much a part of cultural studies in its early years.4 But Hall and others resolved to undertake research about postwar British life and to do so by bringing into the university questions "first reckoned within the dirty outside world."5 By doing so, they could become part of socially consequential struggles. Hall is careful to convey the humility of the project: "We didn't have the illusion that we were where the game really was. But we knew that the questions we were asking were of central relevance to the questions through which hegemony is either established or contested."6

The "dirty outside world" was not supposed to trouble the university. The humanities, in particular, was understood as an arena unencumbered by — and unbeholden to — the world beyond its doors. In Hall's view, the humanities practices of the 1950s continued "the Arnoldian project," even if it was not professed as such, by making literary works serve as "touchstones of the national culture, transmitted to a select number of people."7 The rapid changes in British life, perhaps above all those involving the rise of consumer society, constituted a crisis for traditions of humanist thought. It became more and more difficult to see the humanities as an "integral formation" untouched by the "emergence of mass society" and the "undermining impact of the mass media" and their disruptive effects upon traditional hierarchies. The picture of the humanities as an integral formation began to erode — a pivotal moment in establishing the conditions for cultural studies, according to Hall.8

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies" attempts to comment on both the early days of cultural studies and the pressures within it by the late 1980s. The essay brings into view, however schematically, two different moments and, effectively, two different cultural studies: an emergent version and a later version, in which cultural studies has an international academic standing, figuring in debates about Theory and a range of social questions.

Describing the first moment, Hall emphasizes the highly circumscribed character of the questions that could be posed within the humanities. The humanities, construed as "an ongoing, integral, integrated exercise," continued apace, but could not altogether elude the postwar disruption of traditional class cultures that began to be felt across all manner of social organization.9 In the second moment, the "humanities are invoked as the last bastion in a primarily defensive operation" that is itself part of a larger defensive operation called Thatcherism, within which "who can really still be English" becomes perhaps the recurring social question as world migration and other dynamics decenter "hierarchical traditional culture."10 How would Britain come to be defined as the twentieth century unfolded?

The cynical and defensive use of humanist tradition in Thatcherite Britain prompts Hall's exploration of the humanities in the 1950s and its place in the cultural studies story. For all of the friction between cultural studies and the humanities, the former needed the latter. If cultural studies departed from the humanities, it could not be altogether severed from it. It would be too simple from Hall's perspective to call the traditional humanities the problem and leave it at that. As Hall admits, "many of us were formed in the humanities; my own degrees are in literature rather than sociology."11 Hall had to leave the humanities to think and theorize culture, but the humanities did not leave him.

Hall's take on F.R. Leavis is particularly revealing. On the one hand, Hall notes that Leavis inherits the Arnoldian project of guarding matters of language and national culture.12 On the other, he admits this is partly caricature. He does not dismiss Leavis out of hand, for he "took questions of culture seriously" and was persuasive in his contention that "any serious scholar must be engaged in the question of the nature of language and what it is saying."13 Hall even gives Leavis something of a retrospective Gramscian cast, writing that "there was an educational project deeply lodged in the Leavis project because Leavis and the Scrutiny group paid careful attention to winning over and transforming English teachers in the schools."14

Hall's essay considers how the concern with national culture in Leavis informed cultural studies, making it significant within the set of intellectual nutrients that fed the educational and interventionist orientation of the Birmingham researchers. It is hardly an accident that the word "serious," attributed to Leavis, returns as a way to understand the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies itself; "studying seriously" was inscribed within it from the beginning.15 "The Center did not say, 'All you have to do is to be a good activist and we will give you a degree for it,'" Hall writes.16 "The Emergence of Cultural Studies" suggests that by absorbing and to an extent implementing the "Leavis ethos," cultural studies would remain of the humanities.

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies" also returns to the seedbed of the humanities by centering translation and making the textual surround of the field a way into its workings. Cultural studies began with the problem of postwar Britain; its continued survival hinged on the circulation of texts made available by way of an "enormous program of translation of European work undertaken in the late 60s and 70s by the New Left Review."17 Without that program — which included the initial Anglophone translations of Gramsci, Benjamin, and Frankfurt School works — cultural studies would have had a very different path into the second half of the twentieth century. Hall's discussion of translation foregrounds a period of political rejuvenation in cultural studies that made any subsequent relevance possible. Translations of Marxist theory returned cultural studies to its beginnings: the analysis of capitalist social formations. "The Emergence of Cultural Studies" registers Hall's worry that the "problematic of Cultural Studies" might easily be styled an "intellectual project" alone when "it is in fact born as a political project, as a way of analysing postwar advanced capitalist culture."18

It was appropriate that this version of the cultural studies story should appear in the arts, humanities, and theory journal, October, which carried an "emphasis on contemporaneity" and regarded the "renewal and strengthening of critical discourse" as its foremost concern.19 "The Emergence of Cultural Studies" keeps with this aim, touching on several conjunctural elements that made cultural studies in Britain possible. At the same time, the essay marks a certain end of the story, or a phase of it. For all of his avowed skepticism of origins ("if one believes in origins"), Hall tenders a tale of origins that accentuates the modern British dimensions of cultural studies and implies that the US intellectual trajectories of cultural studies represent something new and also bring something to a close.20

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies" was for Hall a kind of US academic print debut.21 The essay was his first in a US-based American arts and humanities journal, rather than a mass communication studies journal, and circulated his ideas among writers and academics interested in the humanities and theory. The essay also brought Hall himself into more direct contact with US academic and critical discourse. Another essay in the same issue of October was Cornel West's "The New Politics of Cultural Difference," which Hall would reference in "What Is This 'Black' in Black Popular Culture?" (1992).

If the US served as backdrop for Hall's essay, so too did the postcolonial. The editors of the Summer 1990 October issue note the "end of empire and of attendant notions of European superiority" after the Second World War and the continuing "power relations of neocolonialism" as the proper historical frame for reading the humanities and its crises.22 In Hall's essay, the references to empire are sparse, but they're there. The question of postwar Britain, and consequently of cultural studies, is what comes after "commercial, economic and imperialist empire."23 It's the question of the dirty world.

"The Emergence of Cultural Studies" closes with the collective task of understanding the "larger historical/political project that now confronts the humanities."24 Not, of course, an easy task, then in 1990 or now. Hall cautions that the questions arising amid crisis — such as "Shall we respond vigorously to the assault on our economic and funding base?" — might not be simply and uncomplicatedly "open for us to ask," for to think so would signal our inhabiting of one of the "last of the humanist illusions."25

Hall argued against reverting to the humanities as an "ongoing, integrated, integral exercise" and seemed to equally oppose the idea of the humanities as that from which answers to sociopolitical and economic contradictions could straightforwardly be obtained. Such were the illusions that persisted. There are two ways in which his closing reference to humanist illusions continues to resonate. Hall had no interest in propping up the humanities through justification and hubristic conceits. This is different, I think, from advocating for the humanities within specific settings and contests. Hall wants to make humanities inquiries more trenchant, and more capable of introducing questions not previously posed. His late twentieth-century writings continually presented questions that had yet to be asked or reckoned with — precisely those that humanist illusions obscured. "What is a politics in which you are already complicit with the violence in which you are trying to struggle against?" he asked in one notable instance.26 His essay showed why cultural studies became a source for such questions. Inquiries meant to evade humanist illusions and facile conclusions: cultural studies insisted upon these. Whether we feel compelled to invoke cultural studies today or not, whether we see its various phases as relevant to our own questions, Hall's critical posture toward humanist illusions and commitment to inquiry divested of them might be his most salient contribution for our present.

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Jay Garcia is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. He is the author of Psychology Comes to Harlem: Rethinking the Race Question in Twentieth-Century America and co-editor of Retrieving the Human: Reading Paul Gilroy.

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