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[On the black visual arts and race and diaspora]
Let me just say a few words about how these two things are connected. As you know, I don't like the word multiculturalism, but I am interested in the multicultural question. And what that is, for me, is this: how are people from different cultures, different backgrounds, with different languages, different religious beliefs, produced by different and highly uneven histories, but who find themselves either directly connected because they've got to make a life together in the same place, or digitally connected because they occupy the same symbolic worlds - how are they to make some sort of common life together without retreating into warring tribes, eating one another, or insisting that other people must look exactly like you, behave exactly like you, think exactly like you - that is to say cultural assimilation? How can we recognise the true, real, complicated diversity of the planet - societies produced by different forms of development, etc - which is what constitutes difference? Different histories, different cultures, over long periods of time, have produced a variegated world, but the barriers are now breaking down. People find themselves obliged to make a common life or at least find some common ground of negotiation. Cultural absolutism is the great enemy of this multicultural project. The multicultural question, then, is: how can we do that without giving up the investments which people have made in what makes them who they are, which is what I call difference.
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The 'multicultural question' has now arrived right into the middle of the societies that have lived the last two hundred years pretending that they could draw a boundary between themselves and the others; or that they could govern the others but at a safe distance which didn't threaten their cultural homogeneity; or that they could regulate the lives and the economies of other people because they were or looked different, and this provided a legitimate basis for their exploitation. I am interested in the impact on these European societies in particular - since that's the most 'developed' form of life we have - of having to live with difference, with people who dress differently, speak differently, have different memories in their heads, know a different way of life, follow a different religion - how are they going to live in greater equality but also with difference? How are these often conflicting objectives - equality and difference - to be reconciled?
If I give up my burka will you give up your union jack? What is it the difference that I'm willing to die for? What difference is so important to me that I'm going to fight for it, that I'm willing to murder you for it? Or am I willing to have a trade-off? Am I willing to negotiate with you to live in relative peace? That trade-off is going to be an untidy row. Don't think it is going to be what is called, these days, social cohesion - which is a polite form of assimilation of 'the other', and represents in effect the abandonment of the multicultural principle. There is going to be nothing cohesive about it at all. It's going to be a bloody great row. Any form of democratic life - and I'm not talking about political democracy only now - is a big, staged, continuous row. Because there are real differences, and people are deeply invested in them and so they have to find ways - difficult ways - of negotiating difference, because it's not going to go away.
Now, you can have a political argument about that, and I'm interested in the politics of negotiation that could make multicultural societies a possibility in the future … But I am also interested in how the other - how difference - operates inside people's heads. And if you want to learn more, or see how difference operates inside people's heads, you have to go to art, you have to go to culture - to where people imagine, where they fantasise, where they symbolise. You have to make the detour from the language of straight description to the language of the imaginary. Unless we can deconstruct the colonised imaginary which governs the heads of a substantial number of British people we will never live multiculturally with difference. I have always been interested in the 'straight' argument, but also in the argument by indirection. So, the visual arts is not a surprise. I've always been interested in culture because it is the domain of indirection. As Shakespeare once said, 'By indirection find direction out'.
Of course the real world, the historical world, the political world, has the most enormous bearing on culture, but the one thing we can't say is that culture simply reflects this other world. It is connected with it, but unconsciously, at some profound level - and we can't decode one world directly into the other. This is the mysterious place where art arises from experience, is at the same time different from experience, and reflects critically back on it. This is the invisible point of intersection between the social and the symbolic. We have to take one step back and go through the imaginary to enter the domain of culture.
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Of course culture isn't everything. But culture is a dimension of everything. Every practice exists in the material world and simultaneously signifies, is the bearer of meaning and value. Everything both exists and is imagined. And if you want to play in the area where deep feelings are involved, which people hardly understand, you have to look at culture. People don't understand what it is that terrifies them about difference. They don't know what it is that disturbs them viscerally about people who don't look or think like them. What is it? It gets them somewhere in there, but it is not a place that you can get to by reasoning with them. (Have you ever tried to say 'you should give up your racist prejudices because they are rather irrational'? Forget it.) The common response to our fears about difference is to split the other from ourselves, symbolically expel them from the body social so that we can project on to them our deepest fears and fantasies. So, if you are interested in a society which somehow learns, painfully, how to begin to live with difference, to recognise the way in which it has constructed the other as the opposite of itself, you have to understand how the culture is working. In the arts things get said in ways in which they can't get said in any other domain. So I'm interested in people who are living here who come from different cultures, whose route to the present is different from that of the 'native', and who now also confront the difficult conundrum of difference. And in what this has done to the dream of equality and justice. I'm interested in what people imagine, how they imagine, how they represent themselves, figurally, in the visual and literary field, how they position themselves in the narratives of self and society. And I am committed to the wider society having a greater access to these visions and dreams and nightmares and traumas and fears. So, the turn to the visual arts.
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[On the new left and culture]
That was a very important moment for me, and one of the most important things was the recognition that political and economic questions were grounded in, and dependent on, the cultural. The conception of politics had to be expanded in order to deal with cultural questions. So it wasn't simply that we liked to go to the cinema, or we were interested in Look Back in Anger and the theatre and so on; we saw these things as constitutive of political subjectivities. You couldn't be a political subject - having an economic programme, urging political mobilisation, identifying with the oppressed, the exploited, etc - without also thinking about what were the ideas that held these structures in place, legitimated them. Culture, we came to believe, was constitutive. Economics was constitutive but so was culture. The conditions of existence were cultural, political and economic. All three things had to be articulated to make sense of any situation, event or conjuncture. That's why people like Raymond Williams, who expressed this idea in what may now seem rather simple terms, were so important to us in the early days of the new left.
This may come as a surprise to many people, but I saw cultural studies as the pursuit of that politics in another place rather than as a career. I went into it because I wanted to go on pursuing those questions. I saw cultural studies, in the early stages at any rate - it later became something else - as a way, within an academic and intellectual framework, of pursuing the same kind of questions that lay at the root of what had created the new left in the mid 1950s.
But at that time we didn't recognise, any of us, that this too was a new conjuncture, the conjuncture in which culture, in terms of the cultural industries, was beginning to play an economic and political and social role of enormous importance. The cultural industries were becoming part of so-called material production. Culture is now as integral to how these societies work, how the global society works, as the economic itself. All economics these days is cultural, as all culture is economic. In that sense, I am not talking about having a politics, and then being interested in the cinema, I'm talking about a redefinition of the political itself, an expansion of the notion of the political to include the cultural.
These are extracts from a conversation between Stuart Hall and Bill Schwarz that will appear in Soundings 37, due out in early December. The original conversation took place at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in February 2007. Thanks to Ruth Borthwick and the South Bank Centre Talks Department for making this talk available.
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