The Spirit of Stuart Hall
James Chaplin Brown
Dedicated to the memory of Professor Stuart Hall, 3/02/1932—10/02/2014
Dear Goldsmiths Senior Management Team,
These days I often find myself moving around campus wondering where Professor Stuart Hall still resides among all these collapsing walls. To put it plainly, what I want to know is: ontologically, what is Professor Stuart Hall’s contemporaneous mode of existence at Goldsmiths?
Does his lifeforce still persist here among the world of the living, in the vestiges of this educational institution? If so, how? Where can we look to find him? Furthermore, unto what ends is his spirit now determined? Does it still retain an heir of self-determination or agency? Or has his utopian vitality been reduced to a merely inert image, a spectacle, a name and name only, whose activity consists in a perpetual slippage of meaning, a continual recodification according to what you call ‘the pressures of higher education today’? [1]
‘The Weston Atrium’, which you took great care in renaming after the beloved professor in 2014, has seemed the obvious place to start. Yet, there seems to be a certain ambivalence, a contradiction or dissonance hanging over your (continuous) practices of memorialisation. What future do you have in mind for the practices of remembering and venerating Professor Hall at our university? It would be highly concerning if, for example, you have plans to reutilise (or indeed restructure) the durations of positive-feeling, the aesthetic aura, imprinted on one’s encounters as they move through our institution, resulting from mediatory and communicative strategies designed at generating the presence of such a remarkable thinker, activist and person as that of Professor Hall, at the level of the synthesis of perception amidst the space-time of Goldsmiths; If, in actual terms, you do so whilst completely skipping-over Professor Hall’s historically momentous contributions and such as his unwavering (and unfinished) fight for justice, dignity, liberty, equality and democracy for all. And ultimately, if you were to utilise him only as an attractive name, as a market-ready avatar entirely detached and pacified from his radical actuality. Surely, such would be an unauthorised appropriation and subversion of Professor Hall’s legacy?
Thus, by orienting my search around the building you have attributed to the late-professor, it seems what is brought into question is not where to find Professor Hall, but which version of I will now find. That is, the Professor Stuart Hall Building (PSHB) seems to no longer be a site where Professor Hall is located, but a field of antagonism: a battlefield of forces, with anterior conditions of existence, where a play of power between the dominant and dominated works to determine his continued mode of existence in the concrete now, or what Professor Hall called the present conjuncture, of cognition and feeling: the condensation of a multiplicity of forces forming the historical conditions of the present, which also applies to our modes of sensing, the synthesis of our perceptions, and our sense of that space of encounter; where, like as Benjamin famously wrote, “the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins.” [2]
If Professor Hall is to be immortalised in a way which retains what was proper to him, what do you think that would look like? What kinds of activities and practices would it involve? Might it, at the very least, involve allowing the generativity of Professor Hall’s spirit, whose shock-waves still emanate among the world of the living as the power of a ‘Hetero-Transformation Programme’ (quite different to yours), to continue to live within these grounds without discrimination, alteration, censorship, revisionism, ‘content approval’ apparatuses, and more?
Thus, the continued mode of existence of Professor Hall’s spirit at Goldsmiths today seems to be split into two drastically opposed formulations:
An image generated in order to capitalise on a generic, passive and unchanging figure of “success”; an insidious duplication stripped of all real content, used to polish the university’s outward representation and generate a certain atmosphere or structure of feeling in relation to this representation.
A figure whose imparting legacy is the concrete practice of utopia itself: the rhizomatic proliferation of places of openness and hope, which is by definition diametrically opposed to the first formulation, and upon their internal collision, becomes a force of the para: an internal insurgency, a coup d'etat working within the molecular structure of the spectacle’s claim to authority; the spirit of Professor Hall as an autonomous, disembodied configuration assembling a heterogeneous multiplicity of peoples, contexts, and practices.
To put it bluntly, might Professor Hall be the mass of bodies forming a blockade by any means necessary to confront the violences of our time? The practices always-already at work in the production of an alternative? A revolutionary spontaneity locked away in the very creaking of the floorboards? An infrapolitical ghost?
Thus, this battle over Professor Hall’s continued mode of existence is one for the establishment of a structure of feeling associated not only to the PSHB but Goldsmiths as a whole; to generate, through a strategy of governance, a feeling within the infrastructure, or what Ruth Wilson Gilmore delineates as an infrastructure of feeling. [3] And moreover, to plunge this antagonistic arena of infrastructural feeling into flux, to be determined according to those ‘tough demands’ you speak of. [4] What we are witnessing is a battle at the level of infrastructural feeling between the spirit and simulacrum of Professor Hall. This is a battlefield of antagonism where the latter seeks to subsume the gaze within its machinery and assert a dominant and monotonous mode of sensing, and the former seeks to burst asunder the whole operation, and in doing so, assemble a utopian infrastructural sense of justice, radical democracy, and equality, one synchronic with the black radical tradition R.W. Gilmore paints so emphatically.
This is a conflict between the two polarities of infrastructural feeling: the morbid and the utopian. What is happening at Goldsmiths particularly (but not exclusively) in relation to Professor Hall serves as an immediate and concrete basis for tracing a wider stream of:
Violent restructuring processes, quintessential of neoliberalism, taking place one way or another across capital’s global configuration;
Those resisting it, drafting up alternative and ‘para’ schemes of restructuring, and constructing new ‘positive’ relations of production.
What is happening with the continued mode of existence of Professor Hall has reverbances all the way up to the running of a world-educational mechanism, a vast infrastructural space of knowledge and feeling(s), and their production, both for those who ‘use’ it and, as a uniquely epistemological and sense-making infrastructure, as a site where modes of relation in-general are demarcated; a space undergoing the brutal incursions of privatisation and economisation, felt sharply in the UK, but also across the Western-world and beyond.
This battlefield, the tussle between the spirit and simulacrum of Professor Hall, manifesting itself at a phenomenological level where sense and feeling is established, where the synthesis of perception is divided between the empty-grandiose of the saturated image and the programmatically anti-fascist reconstruction of world-subject relations, forms a culmination of heterogeneous historical forces in the genesis of the present conjuncture, whose stakes are nothing short of the reconfiguration of sense, feeling, of seizing control over the infrastructure, the frame and conditions of possibility of the restructuring of contemporary life par excellence, the means of producing structures of sense, feeling, and durations of relation, encounter, knowledge, control, resistance, hope, defeat, and victory; forthcoming durations which are always in anticipation of both the end of possibility and the beginning of a new world.
The image is itself a container or archive for what, in his 1983 lectures on Cultural Studies and Marx, Professor Hall called “the thick empirical texture of historical reality:” the most basic and immediate way the concreteness of the present appears to the subject. [5] A purely somatic, subterranean temporality of being-somewhere, becoming-something, of one’s spacement into a thinking-feeling body, and the opening of oneself unto the world. The thick-texture internal to the molecular structure of the image is a duration in-itself: a movement encapsulating both the virtual and plastic activities of the mind and the material activities of space, configurations of exchange and extraction, the structural actualities of xenophobia and private property relations hardening into forms of space and time, all of which could not exist without the agency of the image, its (infra)structures of feeling, and its thick texture. Thus, the thick texture of lived temporality is formed — in this historical and material condensation into the sensory field of subjectivity — as a mediated-middle and synthesis in a material sensory flow. As Professor Hall has highlighted:
[T]he ability to grasp the real relations in concrete historical instances depends upon the production and mediation of theory… one can only begin to theorise phenomena by breaking into this apparently seamless phenomenological web… with concepts which are clearly formulated… by developing, using, and refining concepts which are able to break into the thick empirical texture of historical reality and produce what Marx calls “the concrete in thought” [6] [7]
Where,
The concrete… appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. [8]
The self is not simply received in finalised form. Rather, it is ‘found’, out there, amidst the crowd, in a continual process of individuation, (re)assembly, and transformation, in the impersonal field Gilles Deleuze called “Life”: the material site of Becoming where the world and self are furnished simultaneously.[9] And wherein the stasis of the saturated image’s dominance asserts itself in the production of aggregates of individuation(s) and collective structures of feeling and sense. The present conjuncture marks a historical mode of inquiry into the anterior or abstract forces condensing diverse elements in the genesis or individuation of this concrete conjuncture of feeling, sense, and thick texture, concerning the restructuring of Professor Hall into an appropriated, pacified and more-equitable optical-effect, a representational and mediational device, a contentless but attractive spectacle striped of Professor Hall’s radical oeuvre, working at the level of the imagination and feeling, propagating a ‘feel-good factor’ in the phenomenological space-time of Goldsmiths, varnishing over the real violences of the present.
Is this material battlefield of antagonism, encapsulated in the PSHB, one fought between yourselves — armed with a sterilised but successful image of Stuart Hall — and the restless spirit of Professor Hall himself — a disembodied force persisting throughout these walls, emanating as the concrete practice of utopia? It seems to me, atleast, to be a war concerning collective practices of memorialisation, collective consciousness, and the production of collective structures of knowledge, and, most importantly, the future for these infrastructural conditions which produce knowledge, sense, and feeling not only at Goldsmiths but at educational institutions across the world conforming to similar operational patterns.
The spectacle is a meagre existence, it knows only the dusty wasteland of the uniformised brain: a camera-obscura, a vantageless telescope, a micro-perspective, a grain of non-historicised phenomenological time adrift in the ocean of world-historical time, stunned amidst its fetishistic photochemical reactions, looking only outwards, blind to its base and internal structure. As Debord teaches us, the spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relation between people, mediated by images. [10] But this sociology of the spectacle can be advanced further into a transindividual realm of sense: sense is transindividual insofar as any individual or singular mode of sensing is itself an expression of the ensemble of social relations which compose the collective without being reducible to it. [11] Thus, the spectacle cannot serve as a pedagogical event so long as it is merely a dazzling of the senses: it must become a map of the structural configuration through which its genesis of sense takes place.
The antagonism underpinning the spectacle indeed remains firmly within the boundaries of a Marxist problematic of a critique of ideology, yet in a way neither idealist or even anthropological. It takes as its object a synthesis of the faculties and mode of interpellation which is material in multiple ways: moving from the material configurations of space-time(s) to their (re)organisation at the level of the materiality of light and sensation. It demands us to think-thought as a surface where interiority and exteriority are pressed together on an interface between language and events, where discourse hardens into concrete actuality, and where mental images, structural modes of sensing, and logics of feeling live in the world. It requires a mode of inquiry traversing disciplines, concerned with the constitution of presentation (darstellung), the structured processes which organise the world into singularities of appearance, and as an investigation into the conflict of forces working to actualise intensities in a multiplicity at-once material and spiritual, the actualisation of a fleshy/intellectual mass yet to be realised.
As Deleuze defines it, “[s]ense is the fourth dimension of the proposition. The stoics discovered it along with the event: sense, the expressed of the proposition, is an incorporeal, complex and irreducible entity, at the surface of things, a pure event which inheres or subsists in the proposition.” [12] Sense is prerequisite to any of the three moments in the circle of the proposition (signification, denotation and manifestation) and therefore, rather than form a fourth moment, becomes the condition required for the expression of any of the three moments in the proposition. “We will not ask therefore what is the sense of the event: the event is sense itself.” [13]
Therein, what are the historical, abstract, or external forces structurally or immanently active in the determinations of this conjuncture of sense, of this interior/exterior nexus, a site becoming subsumed by the acrobatics of the spectacle, of endless empty significations of attraction and success? What is this phase transition, contemporaneously occuring in the (production of the) thick texture of the concrete, of sense(s), feeling(s), and modes of relating in-general, transformations occurring across both local, and the broad restructuring process of global capitalism, and the condensation of world-historical durations, we now find ourselves in?
What is at stake in this struggle for sense is not only a struggle to control the individuation of an aggregate of sense(s) via the ideological and specular apparatuses, or generate utopian configurations of sense, but to seize control over the conditions of possibility for the production of sense itself and to distribute the (in)capacity for knowing one’s own conditions of existence. That is, to be able to affect and delimit the interior/exterior nexus in a way which can either override all the classical boundaries of sovereignty, or radically liberate subjectivity by, experimentally and aesthetically, providing a means for the establishment of ‘positive’ relations of production immanent to novel, transindividual modes of sensing. As Spivak has mapped out, the global university today provides the unique site for such a struggle as the (infra-)space for the training of the imagination for epistemological performance. [13] And thus, its violent restructuring concern the future for the production of what could be called the ‘collective-brain’ (or noosphere), and moreover, the collective-body (or somatosphere), infrastructurally underpinning the somatic logic driving the collective-brain’s advanced schemas.
What can cinema offer in the present conjuncture for documentation, exhibition, and mapping of the genesis of sense, caught in motion amidst a battlefield of antagonism composed of concrete empirical circumstances whilst, simultaneously, determined by abstract, that is absent or immanent, causes?
As Andre Bazin famously wrote in 1945, cinema constitutes the medium of reality (i.e., actualité, reportage, vérité), a new format of memory, transcending the photographic image as ‘the mummification of change’. [15] Can we say, therein, that upon each and every exhibition of the cinematic (or moving-image) artefact, regardless of its origins in ‘high-art’ or the most ‘vulgar’ of digital social-networks, a world is opened and (re)constituted within reality itself? The opening of a new (virtual) space, a territory with its own social relations, its battlefield of antagonism? In short, do we receive, if only virtually, all that which is brought forth in the ontological establishment of a world; a new phenomenological spatiotemporality which embeds itself into the relations which govern the materiality of the world?
Cinema has a twofold relevance here. Firstly, what is happening to the specular apparition of Professor Hall could also be described as cinematic, an avatar constituted in the cinematic imaginary, that is, the cinema of the mind or a cinema without-cinema. And secondly, cinema-proper provides an ethnographic medium for both mapping the intricate transformations of sense, thought, and feeling taking place across concrete and abstract determinations of the contemporaneous local/global flux of power and capital, encapsulated by the current circumstances at Goldsmiths concerning Professor Hall’s continued mode of existence; and additionally, form a second-order analysis of cinematic ideation in-motion, as both descriptive and reflexive (or ‘thick-descriptive’). This begs the question: to what extent can cinema, in the hands of the practitioner (who forms a dual function as a critic in this regard) still become a cognitive art in the Jamesonian sense; of constituting a reflexive camera capable of mapping, and framing concrete phenomenological temporality, of the acrobatics of the spectacle (etc), within a world-system, and within uniformised circuits of ‘mummified time’ materialising in the mental cinema of the subject of late-capitalism’s ‘restructured’ space-times? To what extent can cinema, as the medium par excellence capable of reconstituting actuality within reality, ‘slice into, with necessary abstractions and concepts’, the ‘Transformation Programme’ and its looming consequences, as to produce “the concrete in thought” of its conjuncture? [16] [17] That is, as to map its burgeoning ramifications, the violence of its restructuring, and field of antagonism, emanating in its patterns of mediation, particularly in the mental cinema of the imagination and the feelings generated according to its economy of images, working to reorganise of a sense of place at Goldsmiths in accordance with the utilisation of a particular representation of Professor Hall.
Thus, continuing with these Marxist concepts we inherit from Professor Hall, fundamental to his intellectual and practical oeuvre, whilst, in following Deleuze, reconceptualising them as in a non-dialectical way, as not formed upon sets of classical oppositions, and moving in favour of an ontology of the virtual where no opposition exists between the existent and non-existent, and the logic of absence is no longer taken as given. At the most basic level, absolute absence is impossible: for something to be conceivable it must therefore positively exist in or through the world. We must employ a poetic, animist ontology, concerning not only a process of finding something already there, but which actively engages in collective practices of reconstituting and propagating the generativity of Professor Hall’s spirit, his virtual force, which continues to energise us and emanate as integral to our practices, continuing its paths of transformation, as we seek to assemble something capable of confronting the violence of the present.
Therein, the question of the continued disembodied agency of Professor Hall, whose determinations(s) are realised on a field of antagonism, no longer thought as a contradiction between groups and their claims to the earth (at least not at the highest level of abstraction), but as the determination of sense(s) through the play of forces and intensities: the determination not only of Professor Hall but, and by extension, a sense of place, a sense of the world, of the possibility of constructing new senses of the world capable of affecting it, and new collectives formed on the basis of these collective modes of sensing. Memory is not only episodic recollection, but also the pure memory of an agency or force embedded within the genesis of a spatiotemporal duration, or within an event. The field of antagonism concerning Professor Hall’s continued mode of existence among the world of the living in our present situation is one existing virtually to the materiality of space, a field of bodily, conceptual and abstract relations materialising as durations of activity, as bodily, mental, and spatial modes of being: a virtual domain we could call an economy of sense-making.
What is the role of the artist and critic at the global university today if not to test the world against this hypothesis, to enframe the ongoing subversions and uniformisation of schemas of sense through new practices of cognitive mapping, affective mapping, sense mapping; and as to admit to experimentation, with previously unseen forms, practices and rigour, to develop means of describing and remediating the ongoing restructuring of feeling defining the the global university today as a site of encroaching violence at the level of the production of (or the possibility of producing new) structures of feeling and of world-sense in general; of generating collectives through the practice of constructing maps as both the constitution of a new relation between the collective and territory and critique which can inform an alternative pedagogical production sense today? What would a ‘Professor Hall strike’ — a refusal of his appropriated specular apparition — look like?
I will leave you with this final speculation: What utopian vestiges will remain at Goldsmiths in this decisive blow after many years of gradual decimation, of privatisation and neoliberalisation, and the reengineering of national education, and by extension, the collective-brain and body, in the UK and across the world? Whilst you are continue your commitments to ensuring a fantastically vibrant and dynamic future at Goldsmiths, I wonder what will be left of the university which once housed Professor Hall, and which (yet still) presents a rare site of possibility for new the production of configurations of practice and knowledge, the production of new structures of world-sense(s), particularly for those who arrive here seeking shelter and, most importantly, view it as a final hope for construct a lasting alternative capable of affecting, or atleast withstanding, the violences of the contemporary world?
Regards,
J.C. Brown
References
[1] “Transformation Programme,” Goldsmiths, University of London, 2024, https://www.gold.ac.uk/staff-students/info/transformation-programme/.
[2] Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn. (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 255.
[3] Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Abolition Geographies: Essays Towards Liberation, eds. Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano. (London: Verso, 2023).
[4] Goldsmiths, University of London, “Transformation Programme”.
[5] Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 113.
[6] Hall, Cultural Studies, 89.
[7] ibid., 112-3.
[8] Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Books, 1973), 34.
[9] Gilles Deleuze, “Immanence: A Life…,” Theory, Culture & Society 14, no.2, (May 1997): 3-7. https://doi.org/10.1177/026327697014002002.
[10] Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, trans. D. Nicholson-Smith. (New York: Zone Books, 1995), 12.
[11] Ettienne Balibar, “Philosophies of the Transindividual: Spinoza, Marx, Freud,” in Spinoza, the Transindividual (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press).
[12] Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester and Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas. (London: Continuum, 2004), 19.
[13] Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 22.
[14] Gaytri Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalisation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
[15] Andre Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” trans. Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960): 4-9. https://doi.org/10.2307/1210183.
[16] Hall, Cultural Studies, 112-3.
[17] Marx, Grundrisse, 34.
