Conversations with Stuart Hall: Unravelling and Resistance
A keynote lecture given for the Stuart Hall Foundation's Third Annual Public Conversation at Conway Hall, London
-Public lecture given in February 2020
-Subsequently published as an article by Soundings in Summer 2020
In 2004, Stuart Hall sat down with the broadcaster Philip Dodd to reflect on his life so far and on the political reality that surrounded them. It had been a quarter of a century since the advent of Thatcherism, and the start of a new political paradigm - one that Hall had illuminated and interrogated better than anyone, right from the outset, most notably in his 1979 essay ‘The Great Moving Right Show’. Since then, Francis Fukuyama had proclaimed the ‘end of history’, and a New Labour government had come to power that shared many of Thatcher’s basic political instincts - ushering in an era of managerialism, technocracy and gradualism, one in which the horizons of political imagination, of ideology, were tightly-bordered.
‘I feel the world as stranger to me than I ever felt before’, Hall told Dodd, adding that for the first time in his life he felt out of time. He went on to explain that something had turned, fundamentally, in the 1970s, that a system change had taken place in which all that was solid had melted into air, and the parameters in which political debate could take place had suffocatingly closed in. And then he said something else, quietly, and certainly. ‘It will unravel’, he warned. ‘Since that unravelling will mean the death or suffering of large numbers of people, I can’t say I’m glad about that. But unravel in a way that I can’t now predict, I don’t have any doubt at all.’
Six years on from Hall’s death, we are all living in real time through that unravelling: a moment, once again, like the late 1970s, in which things are falling apart and we can feel the birth pangs of contested futures all around us. It began in 2008 with a financial crisis that upended the global economy, and the stories that were told to justify it, and it has developed since into an amorphous churn that is scrambling elections and governments, nations and nationalisms, culture and identities; a churn that fills the air around us, and seeps into all the cracks. I want to briefly explore here what it’s like to live through such an unravelling, and to reflect on its complicated relationship to resistance, and the hopes and dangers that are lodged within it. And to do so, I’m going to talk about two young people who live thousands of miles apart - Kyle, in Oldham, Lancashire, and Kamal, in Cairo, Egypt. Kyle and Kamal have never met; their circumstances and life contexts are in many ways entirely different. And yet despite those differences I believe that there are some threads which bind them together, threads that may indeed bind all of us together, and which perhaps tell us something useful about the ongoing unravelling that Hall so rightly predicted.
Kamal and Kyle
Kamal is a friend and colleague of mine in Egypt, from where I’ve just returned. Needless to say, at least for anyone who knows anything about the Sisi dictatorship - which currently holds an estimated 60,000 political prisoners in its jails, is responsible for the forced disappearance of up to five citizens a day, and has established one of the most expansive systems of media censorship on the planet - Kamal is not his real name. Kamal is in his mid-twenties and has curly hair and an unruly beard. He’s from Port Said originally, on the Mediterranean, but in 2011, when the revolution started, he came to Cairo because it was there that yesterday was crumbling, and if you saw something promising in that crumbling, something that made tomorrow look brighter, then Cairo was where you wanted to be. On the day it all began he passed out in the fighting and woke up handcuffed to a hospital bed. When he tells the story of his escape - which involves a sympathetic nurse and a botched attempt to drug the police guard, as well as many nights in the torture cells of Gebel El-Ahmar - Kamal’s eyes widen and vivify, and he rocks back and forth impulsively on his seat.
He has the same look when he remembers the marches, the feeling of the air distorting as police panicked, dropped their weapons and fled; the giddiness of watching the ground around him tilt a little, and power seemingly slide out from behind high walls and watchtowers and darkened windows, down towards the streets; the overwhelming vitality of finally being able to write his own story, rather than playing a bit-part role in somebody else’s. These days, however, more often than not, Kamal’s eyes are slightly glazed, and they rest on the middle distance.
Kamal counts out the beats of his adult life by the political events which have shaped it, most of which have been concerned with resistance, and the actions of those seeking to thwart it. Comedy show X came out after rally Y, but before court decision Z. So-and-so’s friend got married three weeks after this massacre; they took their honeymoon just as that sit-in was getting under way. Places and times collapse into one another, which is a messy business when you’re physically navigating a metropolis as large as Cairo while simultaneously trying to keep the ghosts of the past at bay. Mostafa Mahmoud, for example, is a street to the south-east of Tahrir Square, but in Kamal’s mind it’s also November 2011, when protesters battled to reach the interior ministry and the police resisted by blinding them with birdshot. Ittihadiya is the presidential palace in leafy Heliopolis, but it’s also December 2012 and fierce fighting between opponents and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood. Rabaa al-Adawiya is in suburban Madinat Nasr near the stadium, but it’s also August 2013 and the time Islamist demonstrators wrote the names and phone numbers of their parents on their arms so that their bodies could be identified, and the ensuing slaughter that left a thousand people dead.
Kamal is not an Islamist, but he knew seven individuals who were killed at Rabaa. ‘The first time I was arrested and beaten, I was nineteen’, he told me once, matter-of-factly. ‘The first time I carried a corpse, I was twenty.’
Military service in Egypt is mandatory for those insufficiently moneyed or connected, and Kamal has been ‘extending’ a long-finished undergraduate degree for years in an effort to avoid being called up. But he knows he can’t do this indefinitely; he could get out of the country and try to claim asylum in Europe, but then he wouldn’t be able to return and see his mother who has hepatitis, the same disease that killed his father, and she relies on his support. So he stays and smokes weed and goes to cafes to play backgammon, because that way he can avoid talking. ‘I’ve become a master in backgammon’, he told me. ‘I concentrate on playing because I don’t want anyone to ask, “How are you?”, and because I don’t want anyone to ask the next question, which is, “What happened?”, or the question after that, which is, “What will you do now?”
Every few weeks that isolation gets too much. In the aftermath of the Rabaa massacre, unable to find a common language with the large numbers of people who cheered on the state’s violence, but also desperate for human contact, Kamal pretended to be interested in renting a flat and accompanied a simsar, or property broker, around several Cairo apartments purely so he could indulge in conversation. He chatted with landlords about utility bills and deposit arrangements and walking distances to the metro, because that was so much simpler than talking about the things he’d seen in the morgue. He describes this city, the one he came to because it promised to open every door, as an open prison. ‘I’m just waiting’, he declared abruptly, during one of our conversations. ‘I’m just waiting, and I don’t know what for.’
I asked Kamal about imaginative horizons and how they expand and contract, about his capacity to visualise a different future. ‘The expectations we had, they didn’t just disappear’, he replied. ‘They became their complete opposite’:
It’s not that our dreams didn’t come true, it’s that we tasted them and then they turned into the worst of nightmares. I think that when high hopes are suppressed, they become a deep sadness, because energy - you know this from physics, right? - energy never dies. It has to turn into something else, another kind of energy or action, but here there’s no outlet for any of that, just a vacuum.
A continent away, in a small room on the outskirts of Greater Manchester, Kyle is flying pteranodons: his feet in stirrups, body half upright to take the reins, surface noise fading to zero. Like Kamal, Kyle takes refuge in games - not backgammon, in his case, but an Xbox video game called Ark, which is populated by fantastical creatures. Up high, Kyle explained to me, there’s nothing to thud against your eardrums but the soft grunt of the creature’s breath, the rhythmic flapping of its wings. When Kyle speaks of the things he sees from a pteranodon - the crags and overhangs of great granite mountains, sweeping waterfalls throwing up huge clouds of water vapour, mottled plains so vast that it’s impossible to tell where or if they come to an end - his eyes shine and his frame slants forward, bobbing with excitement. It looks as if a part of him is launching into flight, even as we talk.
One of the reasons Kyle is so enraptured by computerised life in the air is that he’s spent too much of his physical life on the ground. Some of that ground lies at the western end of Manchester’s Ashton Canal: on the pedestrianised ramp that leads down from the Piccadilly station concourse; in half-crevices dotted along the edge of the concourse itself; and in the elevator that ferries passengers between platform level and the trams. ‘It was the only place I could find where the floor had a bit of warmth, everything else was freezing’, he said. ‘Benches are the best, and air vents too. Then anywhere flat and sheltered where you can lay a blanket.’ There were times, during the two-year period in which he was homeless, when Kyle had to get by on a single meal a day. At one point, he lost a stone in the space of a fortnight. ‘It’s weird’, he told me. ‘Being on the streets was kind of a relief, because I felt like I could finally be myself and do what I wanted. I was still attending school, so I hadn’t stopped caring. But I wasn’t looking forward to growing up.’ The first time we met, Kyle had just been placed in temporary accommodation by social services. He was seventeen years old.
Kyle is from Oldham, a town that once spun more cotton than all the spindles in France and Germany combined. Today, it is the most deprived urban community in Britain. Kyle took me on a tour, pointing out his old schools, the takeaway place in Rippenham Road where he used to work and that nearly everyone agrees is the best chippy in town, the beautiful and expensive homes nestled into the foothills of Saddleworth that seem forever distant and out of reach, and the streets around Sholver, St Mary’s, Shaw Road and Derker that he knows much more intimately, and now tries to avoid. We wound up at the estate where he grew up, staring out at the grassy fields that played host to his childhood football games, and up at the window onto what was once his bedroom. Kyle’s mother still lives there, but we didn’t knock on the door. ‘It’s fine, it’s life,’ he said, when I asked if he was OK. ‘It’s what makes you who you are.’
When Kyle was eleven, his mother was diagnosed with a mental health condition and suffered a series of breakdowns. Kyle became the primary carer for his sister, who was nine, taking her to and from school each day and cooking her tea. Their older brother ran away, and so did the family dog. By the time he was in his mid-teens, Kyle’s mother’s condition had deteriorated; she was taking drugs, lashing out, and verbally abusing Kyle on a regular basis. The two remaining children shut themselves away in their bedrooms to protect themselves, and became increasingly isolated. One day, when Kyle was fifteen, things reached a tipping point; he fled from the house, and didn’t come back.
Manchester has one of the highest levels of homelessness proportionate to its overall population in the UK; thirty new households in the city are forced into emergency accommodation every week, while the number of rough sleepers has risen thirteenfold since 2010. Over the same period, thanks to heavy financial and regulatory support from the council, tens of thousands of high-end, luxury apartments have been built in the city by private developers - so many that the Financial Times has warned of oversupply in the top echelons of the market. On the nights when he tried to evade security and sleep in the Piccadilly station elevator, Kyle was just yards away from great swathes of empty new housing units piled up in developments like Cotton Field Wharf, part-owned by an investment vehicle backed by sovereign wealth funds in the Gulf and headquartered in the tax haven of Jersey - or Crusader Mill, a new private housing block that received £25.5 million in state aid and boasts a secluded courtyard ‘complete with fire pits, barbeques, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth speakers’.
Like Kamal, Kyle’s story is a microcosm of some of the wider dynamics that have moulded the country around him over the past decade. In Kyle’s case, those dynamics include an economic model rooted in financialisation, marketisation and property-led regeneration, which has created a sharp demarcation between winners and losers, and in Greater Manchester was presided over by a Labour council firmly embedded in the Third Way liberal consensus. And they also include the political decisions made about who would shoulder the burden of that economic model’s failures, when they came. Since Britain’s austerity programme began in 2010, Oldham has been made to cut a total of £208 million in public spending - 42 per cent of its total budget - and that cut has had a direct impact on Kyle at every stage of his path into homelessness. The year his mother was first diagnosed with a mental health condition, the mental health charity Mind - which was responsible in Oldham for delivering many of the council’s mental health support services - had its funding in the town slashed by 80 per cent. The following year, a local initiative specifically designed to tackle youth homelessness by mediating between families and runaway teenagers was shut down completely. In the years that followed, hundreds of thousands of pounds were cut from local mental health services, adult social services and children’s care. Had different decisions been taken - to insulate people like Kyle from the fallout of the financial crisis rather than to protect the institutions and systems that created that crisis in the first place - Oldham might have been able to intervene at the various stages during which Kyle’s family life got harder, including at the point when he had to leave his mother and family home..
‘I’ve lived politics’, Kyle told me one afternoon, as we made our way alongside other young people to Piccadilly Station, where the group were planning to occupy the concourse in protest at youth homelessness and take on any police who tried to stop them. ‘Anyone who thinks this, all this, can carry on is mad.’
The reckoning
According to the Cambridge political scientist Helen Thompson, ‘The post-2008 world is, in some fundamental sense, a world waiting for its reckoning.’ Kyle and Kamal may be strangers to one another, but both are children of the financial crisis, who have come of age alongside the disintegration of an economic status quo that previously appeared unassailable, and who discovered politics at a time when elites were trying and often failing to stitch that status quo back together. They both watched a deeply-entrenched political settlement break apart in their respective countries, settlements that in different ways attempted to detach citizens from politics: in Egypt, a paternal, exclusionary state allowed its subjects to petition leaders for concessions but never to trespass on its private fiefdoms; in Britain, a model of liberal market democracy was adopted that claimed to transcend ideological debate and reduce electoral politics to a spectator sport - and to have assumed the status of scientific law.
Each of them saw an opportunity to exploit that fragmentation, to re-animate politics with some form of individual and collective agency that would enable them to change things for themselves, and each - albeit to drastically different degrees - is now confronted with a top-down attempt to stuff politics back inside its black box, to reseal its borders. Kyle and Kamal have both entered adulthood after the end of the end of history, and are now ranged against political forces that use history selectively to try to cling on to power amid the ensuing storms. All this has at times enlivened them, and at times mired them in a deep depression, taking a corrosive toll on their mental health. Both are still waiting for their reckoning.
Just as Kyle and Kamal’s conditions are at some level interlinked, so too are those responsible for maintaining them, and clamping down on dissent. In Egypt, the Sisi regime’s fiercest enemy has always been the collective memory of an uprising that remains evergreen, especially in the minds of the ruling class - no matter how cleanly the walls are scrubbed of graffiti, or how completely online archives of the revolution are deleted from public view. Suppression of dissent is justified by an appeal to nationalistic unity: a strong leader is the only thing preventing the country’s enemies from wreaking havoc - enemies that lie both beyond its borders and within. In Britain, a political project by the hard right to capitalise on the unravelling - one that seeks to exploit popular discontent with economic liberalism as a means of dismantling other liberalisms - is also rooted in the muscular assertion of ethnocultural borders. And it has likewise depended heavily on the activation of certain historical memories, and the stifling of others.
The leading proponents of Brexit, a process that is not solely the preserve of that hard right project but is certainly entangled with it, describe their mission in terms of both imperial nostalgia and anti-imperial insurgency. ‘We want our country back’, insists Nigel Farage. ‘Above all, we can find our voice in the world again’, declares Boris Johnson, that last word - ‘again’ - freighted with a meaning that dare not openly speak its name. ‘There is a pattern consistent throughout history of oppressed people turning on their oppressors’, said the Brexit Party’s former MEP Ann Widdecombe last year - ‘slaves against their owners, the peasantry against the feudal barons, colonies against empires, and that is why Britain is leaving’. Stuart Hall, of course, saw all this before. ‘This is not a crisis of race’, he wrote forty years ago. ‘But race punctuates and periodises the crisis. Race is the lens through which people come to perceive that a crisis is developing. It is the framework through which the crisis is experienced. It is the means by which the crisis is to be resolved.’
In both countries, albeit from alternative angles, narratives of colonialism are being excavated and burnished to smother more disruptive fractures. In both cases, leaders attempt to legitimise themselves by rendering both invisible and hyper-visible a hazy ‘other’ - traitors, enemies of the people, disruptive foreigners seeking to degrade the security and prosperity of honest, hard-working authentic citizens - that is lurking in the nation’s midst. And in both Egypt, and Britain, elite visions of power are contingent upon one another. Sisi’s regime depends on the financial and military support of its sponsors in the global north and the political cover they provide him; Britain’s exit from the European Union has left it more than ever in need of other international trade partners such as Egypt. This is why Britain proudly boasts of being Egypt’s biggest foreign investor and continues to supply Sisi’s regime with arms. This is why the red carpet was rolled out for Sisi at Downing Street earlier this year, even as downtown Cairo was transformed into a low-key warzone ahead of the anniversary of the revolution on 25 January, with young people being stopped, searched and arrested at random on the streets and apartment doors kicked open in midnight raids. As the writer Pankaj Mishra has observed, ‘The barbarians, it turns out, were never at the gate; they have been ruling us for some time.
When we talk about resistance today then, amid the unravelling, these are the forces that are ranged against each other . On one side, there is a generation afflicted with what the anthropologist David Graeber calls ‘despair fatigue’, charged with both hope and hopelessness. This is a generation that is already persuaded - by virtue of its gross economic disadvantages, the repeated nullification of its voices, and its knowledge of impending climate catastrophe - of the falsity of Thatcher’s maxim ‘there is no alternative’ - a generation for whom the idea of radical change is woven into their lived experience. And on the other side are the existing structures of formal power and those who occupy them, who no longer have a centre ground to snap back to, and who are convinced that their survival, their salvation, lies in tacking ever further to the right - laying new borders across the bodies of the most vulnerable, and reaching across old borders to sustain one another through the tempest. We can see these divisions here, and we can see them in Egypt, and in the recent period we have seen them rise to the surface in Chile, in Hong Kong, Lebanon, France, Haiti, and a dozen other countries too.
People often ask if I’m optimistic about all this - a question that seems to me somewhat to miss the point. This new landscape of political struggle contains possibilities that are emancipatory but also deeply revanchist; as Hall predicted, the unravelling is taking place at the cost of immense human suffering. But it is only by understanding the contours of the new landscape that we will be capable of finding within it the people, the communities, the stories, that do give cause for optimism. As Stuart Hall put it,
There are always energies, people, societies, on the margin, those who can’t express themselves within the dominant structure, whatever it is, and what is to come will come as a result of those forces who are outside beginning to trouble, undermine, subvert, haunt the nightmares of the present, just at the moment when the present thinks ‘it’s closed’.
My journalistic career has always been about seeking those people, those energies, and make no mistake - they are out there, even if they rarely make it to the front pages of most papers, or lead the evening news.
Fresh from his battles with homelessness and austerity, Kyle has joined a radical education programme called ‘Demand the Impossible’ that seeks to bring together young people in open conversations about capitalism, culture and identity; and, arising from these discussions, groups have gone on, as Kyle has, to occupy public spaces, go on marches and agitate among their friends. Demand the Impossible is part of a new wave of organisations and social movements bringing together those marginalised by the old ways and emboldened by the unravelling: from private renters banding together to face down landlords, to insurgent trade unions representing the most precarious workers, to migrant rights’ collectives successfully subverting the Home Office and its vicious hostile environment regime.
In Egypt, where anti-government protests are completely outlawed and offenders liable to be swept up into mass death sentences handed down several hundred at a time, Kamal thought he might never see a march through the streets again. He was as shocked as the police were when, in September 2019, hundreds if not thousands of young, mainly working-class Egyptians - people who were only children when the original revolution took place - erupted in organic protests, without any central direction, to brave batons and tear gas - and inevitable defeat, at least for now. ‘No matter how, we’ll bring Sisi down’, the crowds chanted, as security forces closed in. The state reasserted itself, of course; more than 2000 people were detained in the following fortnight, including hundreds of kids; human rights groups believe that since his ascendancy, Sisi’s regime has arrested 4000 children. That is a statistic that speaks not of strength, but of weakness. Behind the guns and armoured vehicles, the lavish international receptions and photo-calls with western leaders, Egypt’s dictatorship is terrified, and it is absolutely right to be.
Kyle and Kamal are but small cogs in all this - not revolutionary leaders or public faces, just two young people, picking their way through the unravelling with all of the dreams, and all of the disasters, and all of the contradictions that involves. They continue, despite everything, to believe in politics itself, at a time when those above them are attempting to discredit and eliminate politics. Stuart Hall’s friend and ally, Raymond Williams, once argued that to be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing. Despite being laden with pain, their tales - and those of many others like them - do just that for me.
