To do a project of cultural Studies is to work on the 'Radical Contextuality' [Stuart Hall]
"If you's just taken race as a black issue, you's have seen the impact of the law and order policies on the local communities, but you'd have never seen the degree to which the race and crime issue was a prism for a much larger social crisis. You wouldn't have looked at the larger picture. You'd have written a black text, but you wouldn't have written a cultural studies text because you wouldn't have seen this articulation up to the politicians, into the institutional judiciary, down to the popular mood of the people, into the politics, as well as into the community, into the black poverty and into discrimination."(Hall, 1998, "Cultural Composition: Stuart Hall on Ethnicity and the Discursive Trun")
This clearly shows that Hall has never worked on race and ethnicity as a kind of subcategory, but he has always worked on the whole social formation which is 'racialized'. And, that's why the heart of Cultural Studies to Hall is the radical contextualism /conjuncturalism, where no element can be isolated from its relations, even though those relationships can be changed and are constantly changing. This radical contextualism is embodied in the concept of articulation. If we see doing cultural studies is a way to produce the realities, even contexts and power, it thus is the transformative practice of making, unmaking, and remaking relations and contexts, of establishing new relations out of old relations or non-relations, of drawing lines and mapping connections.
[you can watch the whole lecture in seven parts in Youtube]
INTRODUCTION
CLIP: Spike Lee’s “Do the Right Thing”
SUT JHALLY: As the previous clip from Spike Lee’s film, “Do the Right Thing”
shows, racial slurs and insults trip easily from people’s lips. More and more, it
seems, the dividing lines within our society are being drawn along how we are
physically different from one another. What W.E.B. Du Bois called the differences
of color, hair, and bone; what everyone understands as visible racial differences.
This program examines the inner workings of the system and tries to unlock the
secret of how and why race matters so much to people. We are going to do this
by talking and listening to a leading expert in the field. Stuart Hall is a professor
of sociology in Britain and is a key figure in the development of what has come
known as cultural studies. His many writings now enjoy an international and
global audience. On the subject of race, culture, and society we could not be in
better or more insightful hands. I should point out, that in what follows hoards of
principal focus is not on the effects of racism. He takes those as his starting
point. Now, as a result, some people have accused him of not paying enough
attention to the practical outcomes and violence associated with racism. Nothing
could be further from the truth. Hall is passionately concerned with the
psychological, cultural, and physical violence that racism inflicts, but he believes
that’s a better fight against it we have to first understand the logic of how it works.
He wants to understand how racism is cultivated in our imaginations, of how it
works in our heads, so that we can better combat it on the streets.
What racism, as a philosophy, contends is that there is a natural connection
between the way people look, the differences of color, hair, and bone, and what
they think and do. With how intelligent they are, with whether they are good
athletes or not, good dancers or not, good workers, civilized or not. Racists
believe that these characteristics are not a result of our environment, but of our
biological genes. Blacks, for instance, are born not as intelligent as whites. Hall’s
basic argument is that all attempts to show this scientifically, that blacks are not
as intelligent as whites, have failed. And yet, there is a persistent and widespread
belief in the inferior mental capacities of black folk. To understand why this
should be the case Hall argues that we have to pay attention, not the objective
facts of the situation alone, but to the stories the culture spins for us about what
the physically differences we are born with mean. This involves examining the
discourses that surround race. Taking what he calls a “discursive position”. That
is, analyzing the metaphors, the antidotes, the stories, the jokes that are told by
culture about what physical racial differences mean. In fact, when we do this, we
see that historically things like skin color have been given many different
meanings over the years. There is nothing solid or permanent to the meaning of
race. It changes all the time. It shifts and slides. That’s why the title of this
program is Race: The Floating Signifier. What racial difference signifies is never
static or the same. This sounds very theoretical and abstract but Hall’s motivation
for insisting on this strategy are not at all academic. It is only once we understand
how racism works that we can struggle against it and understanding it takes
hard, analytical work.
The lecture that Hall delivered on this subject at Goldsmiths College in London,
which we’ll see shortly, is a starting point for this work. But first we are going to
see an interview I conducted with him where I asked him to talk a little bit about
why classification, putting people into different groups, is so important to human
beings and how race fits into that. I also asked him to address the political
implications of his analysis.
STUART HALL: As you, you know, in human culture, I would say, the propensity
to classify sub-groups of human types; to break up the diversity of human society
into very distinct typings according to essentialized characteristics, whether
physical characteristics or intellectual ones, or characteristics of the body and so
on. This is a very profound kind of cultural impulse. In a way, it’s a very positive
cultural impulse because we now understand the importance of all forms of
classification to meaning. Until you classify things, in different ways, you can’t
generate any meaning at all. So, it’s an absolutely fundamental aspect of human
culture. What is, of course, important for us is when the systems of classification
become the objects of the disposition of power. That’s to say when the marking
of difference and similarity across a human population becomes a reason why
this group is to be treated in that way and get those advantages, and that group
should be treated in another. It’s the coming together of difference, or
categorization of our classification and power. The use of classification as a
system of power, which is really what is very profound and one then sees that
across a range of different characteristics. You see it in gender, the ascription of
clear masculine and feminine identities and the assumption from that that you
can predict whole ranges of behavior and aspirations and opportunities from this
classification. Classification is a very generative thing once you are classified a
whole range of other things fall into place as a result of it. But, another important
point about classification is that it awakens, well let me put it another way, it is a
way of maintaining the order of any system, and what is most disturbing is that
anything that breaks the classification. So, you know, its not just that you have
blacks and whites, but of course one group of those people have a much more
positive value than the other group. That’s how power operates. But then,
anything that attempts to ascribe to the black population, characteristics that
used to be used for the white ones, generates enormous tension in the society.
Mary Douglas, the anthropologist, describes this in terms of what she calls
“matter out of place”. She says every culture has a kind of order of classification
built into it and this seems to stabilize the culture. You know exactly where you
are, you know who are the inferiors and who the superiors are and how each has
a rank, etc. What disturbs you is what she calls “matter out of place”. What she
means by that is you don’t worry about dirt in the garden because it belongs in
the garden but the moment you see dirt in the bedroom you have to do
something about it because it doesn’t symbolically belong there. And what you do
with dirt in the bedroom is you cleanse it, you sweep it out, you restore the order,
you police the boundaries, you know the hard and fixed boundaries between
what belongs and what doesn’t. Inside/outside. Cultured/uncivilized. Barbarous
and cultivated, and so on.
And races, of course, one of the principle forms of human classification, which
have all of these negative and positive attributes kind of built into it. So, in a way,
they function as a common sense code in our society. So, in a way, you don’t
need to have a whole argument, you know, about “are blacks intelligent?” The
moment you say that blacks, already the equivalences begin to trip off peoples
mind. Blacks then, sound bodies, good at sports, good at dancing, very
expressive, no intelligence, never had a thought in their heads, you know,
tendency to barbarous behavior. All these things are clustered, simply in the
classification system itself. What I’m interested in then is how these definitions of
race come to operate, how they function. I’m interested partly of how they
function, of course, in the systems of classification, which are used in order to
divide populations into different ethnic or racial groups and to ascribe
characteristics to these different groupings and to assume a kind of normal
behavior or conduct about them. Because they are this kind of person, they can
do that sort of thing, and we’ll believe that sort of thing, and we’ll suffer from that
set of problems, etc. Everything is kind of inscribed in their species being, they’re
very being because of their race. So, I think that ones seeing there is a kind of
essentializing of race and a whole range of, diverse range of characteristics
ultimately fixed or held in place because people have been categorized in a
certain way, racially.
These are very big cultural principals we’re talking about and a whole lot in terms
of power and exclusion results from having the system of classification. So, in the
lecture I want to talk about how this, how race as a principal of classification
operates to sort out the world into its superiors and inferiors along some line of
biological or genetic race and how as a consequence of that all the conduct of
society towards black people is inflicted and shaped by that system of
classification.
I end the lecture with the phrase, “politics without guarantees”, and what I mean
by that is that in a funny way race itself, if you think that race is a fixed biological
characteristic, and that a whole number of other things: cultural qualities,
intellectual qualities, emotional and expressive qualities follow from the fact of
being genetically one race or another, if that is your image of race. You will think,
then, that the very fact of race can actually guarantee a whole range of things
including, just to name two, whether the works of art produced by a person who
biologically belongs to that race is good or not. So, you know, if they’re black it
means that they’re also very expressive, it also means they’ll produce a certain
kind of work of art and it’ll be good because it’s black. And similarly, a certain
kind of politics that defends the race, tries to protect us against discrimination,
etc. In which all black people will be figured as people who are holding the
correct position and when you ask what positions do they hold what you will
respond is not the normal political argument: “well they believe in the following
things which I think are viable and progressive things for black people to vie for
now in order to change their circumstances”. You will say well they’re like that,
they think like that because that’s how black people think, its right that black
people should --. So it’s right that these functions act as a kind of guarantee that
the work of art will be good because it’s black and will be politically progressive
because it’s black. Now, we actually know that the word does not come out like
that. Some of the words are not good. Though black, made with the best of
positive intentions to reverse negative stereotypes, to praise the diversity of black
people, they just don’t work aesthetically. And similarly, we know black people
have a range of different political positions: conservative, reactionary,
progressive, and so on. And that these fall out in a way in which is not defined by
their genetic or biological disposition. So, I’m trying to end the notion that our
politics is to cure. We know it’s correct entering the very, very difficult debate. Are
we correct? What is the right strategy now? What are the tactics we ought to
adopt? Who can we be in alliances with? What is the strategic thing, in this
moment, to go for? You know, the normal game of politics. It sort of in a way
prevents us from having to play that difficult game because we have another
guarantee. We know it is because we wrote it and I think in a way it leads to a
kind of mechanistic anti-racist politics, not a thoughtful one, not a self critical one,
not a reflexive one. So, by ending the guarantee, I don’t mean by that of course
that it’s black people or black politics that’s involved. The reason why it matters is
not because what’s in our genes it’s because of what is in our history. It’s
because black people have been in a certain position in society, in history, over a
long period of time that those are the conditions they’re in and that’s what they’re
fighting against. And of course that matters, but then black, the term black, is
referring to this long history of political and historical oppression. It’s not referring
to our genes. It’s not referring to our biology. And in order to fight a politics, which
is effective in ending the oppression of black people, you have to ask what is the
right politics to do. You can’t depend on the fact that it’s blacks doing it; that this
will guarantee in heaven that you’re doing the right thing. So I want blacks to
enter into what I think they’ve been reserved in doing, which is, you know the
hard graft of having arguments with their own fellows, men and women who are
black, about it. And that’s a difficult thing because in a way you have to mobilize
effectively, you can’t depend on just the race to take you to your political
objective. And it’s not therefore that I have a counter-politic to the existing politics
of racism to put into the space but its rather a sort of approach to the political
which I always see as not a practice which has any guarantees built into it, its
not, there is no law of history which tells you we will win, we may lose. Just as
there is no law of history, which will human beings won’t blow themselves to bits,
they probably will. So one has to act in the notion that politics is always open. It’s
always the contingent of failure and you need to be right because there is no
guarantee except good practice to make it right to mobilization, to having the right
people on your side committed to the program. So I want people to take politics a
bit more seriously and to take biology less seriously.
LECTURE AT GOLDSMITHS COLLEGE New Cross London What More is There to Say About ‘Race’?
STUART HALL: I want, at what you might think a rather late stage in the game,
to return to the question of what we might mean by saying, what are the
implications of saying as I’ve done in a rather provocative title to this lecture, that
race is a discursive construct, that it is a sliding signifier. Statements of this kind
of acquired a certain status in advanced critical circles these days, but it’s very
clear that critics and theorists don’t always mean the same thing or draw the
same inference from the statement when they make it. What’s more, the idea that
race might be described as a signifier is not one which in my experience has
penetrated very deeply into or done very effectively the work of unhinging and
dislodging what I would call common sense assumptions and every-day ways of
talking about race and of making sense about race in our society today. And I’m
really talking in part about that great untidy, dirty world in which race matters,
outside of the Academy as well as what light we may throw on it from inside.
More seriously, the dislocating effects on the world, of political mobilization
around issues of race and racism, the dislocating effects on the strategies of antiracist
politics and education of thinking of race as a signifier have not been
adequately charted or assessed. Well, you may not be persuaded by the story
yet but that’s my excuse for returning at this late date to a topic about which I
know many people feel that after all, or that can usefully be said about race has
already been said.
The ‘Formal’ Rejection of Biological Racism
STUART HALL: What do I mean by a floating signifier? Well to put it crudely,
race is one of those major concepts, which organize the great classificatory
systems of difference, which operate in human society. And to say that race is a
discursive category recognizes that all attempts to ground this concept
scientifically, to locate differences between the races, on what one might call
scientific, biological, or genetic grounds, have been largely shown to be
untenable. We must therefore, it is said, substitute a socio-historical or cultural
definition of race, for the biological one. As the philosopher Anthony Appiah put it
succinctly in his now renowned and elegantly argued contribution in a book,
which I think many of you will know, it’s the critical inquiry book called Race,
Writing and Difference edited by Henry Louis Gates. He argues that, “…it is time,
as it were, that the biological concept of race was sunk without trace”. As we
know, human genetic variability between different populations, normally assigned
a racial category, is not significantly greater than it is within those populations.
And what WEB Du Bois, who is a great African-American thinker and writer on
these questions, a figure not necessarily known in the United Kingdom as well as
he should be, who wrote a wonderfully moving text called The Souls of Black
Folk. But what Du Bois argues in his essay called The Conservation of Races,
what he called “…the differences of color, hair, and bone”. Though, as he
observed, and I quote, “…clearly defined to the eye of the historian and the
sociologist” – it’s a good thing, because there’s a lot of things sociologists don’t
see, but he thought that racial difference was something they might just make out
– “…that such things are on the whole, poorly correlated with genetic difference
and on the other hand, impossible to correlate significantly with cultural,
intellectual, or the cognitive characteristics of people. Quite apart from being a
subject to extraordinary variation within any one family, let alone within any one
so-called family of races.”
The Survival of Biological Thinking
STUART HALL: I want to note four things at once about this general position.
First, it represents the by now common and conventional wisdom among leading
scientists in the field. Second, that fact has never prevented intense scholarly
activity being devoted by a minority of committed academics to attempting to
prove a correlation between racially defined genetic characteristics and cultural
performance. In other words, we are not dealing with a field, in which, as it were,
the scientifically and rationally established fact prevents scientists from
continuing to try to prove the opposite.
Thirdly, I observe that though the radicalized implication of this continuing
scientific work into for example, race and intelligence, are vociferously refused
and condemned by large numbers of people, certainly by most liberal
professionals and especially by Black groups of all kinds. In fact, a great deal of
what is said by such groups, amongst themselves, is predicated precisely on
some such assumption, i.e. that some social, political or cultural phenomenon,
like the rightness of a political line or the merits of a literary and musical
production or the correctness of an attitude or belief, can be traced to and
explained by and especially fixed and guaranteed in its truth by the racial
character of the person involved. I deduce from this intense scholarly activity that
the awkward lesson that diametrically opposed political positions can often be
derived from the same philosophical argument. And that though the genetic
explanation of social and cultural behavior is often denounced as racist, the
genetic, biological, and physiological definitions of race are alive and well in the
common sense, discourse is of us all. The fact that the biological, physiological,
or genetic definition, having been shown out the front door, tends to sidle around
the veranda and climb back in through the window.
This is the paradoxical finding, which I want to explore and address in what
follows. Why should this be so?
The Badge of Race
STUART HALL: In an article in Crisis of August 1911, we find DuBois moving
decisively towards writing and I quote “of civilizations where we can now speak of
races,” adding that “even the physical characteristics including skin color are to
no small extent the direct result of a physical and social environment. In addition
to being too indefinite and too elusive,” he says, “to serve the basis for any origin,
classification, or division of human groups.” Now on the basis of this recognition
in Dusk of Dawn, DuBois abandons the scientific definition of race in favor of the
fact that he’s writing about Africans, that Africans and people of African descent
have what he calls a common racial ancestry, because – its important to note this
– “they have a common history, have suffered a common disaster, and have one
long memory of disaster”. Because color, though of little meaning in itself, is
really important, DuBois argues, “as a badge for the social heritage of slavery,
the dissemination and the insult of that experience”.
A badge, a token, a sign, here indeed is the idea, hinted at in the title of my talk,
that race is a signifier, and that racialized behavior and difference needs to be
understood as a discursive, not necessarily as a genetic or biological fact.
Race as a Language, a ‘Floating Signifier’
STUART HALL: I don’t want to deviate here with a long theoretical disposition
about the terms that I’m using, to bore you to tears, I simply want to remind you
that the model being proposed here is closer to that of how a language works
than of how our biology is or our physiologies work. That race is more like a
language, than it is like the way in which we are biologically constituted. You may
think that’s an absurd and ridiculous thing to say, you may even now be
surreptitiously glancing around the room, just to make sure that you know your
visual appearances are in full working order – I assure you they are, people do
look rather peculiar, some of them are brown, some of them are quite black,
some of you are pretty brown, some of you are really disgustingly pink in the
current light. But, there’s nothing wrong with your appearances, but I want to
insist to you that nevertheless, the argument that I want to make to you is that
race works like a language. And signifiers refer to they systems and concepts of
the classification of a culture to its making meaning practices. And those things
gain their meaning, not because of what they contain in their essence, but in the
shifting relations of difference, which they establish with other concepts and
ideas in a signifying field. Their meaning, because it is relational, and not
essential, can never be finally fixed, but is subject to the constant process of
redefinition and appropriation. To the losing of old meanings, and the
appropriation and collection on contracting new ones, to the endless process of
being constantly re-signified, made to mean something different in different
cultures, in different historical formations, at different moments of time.
The meaning of a signifier can never be finally or trans-historically fixed. That is,
it is always, or there is always, a certain sliding of meaning, always a margin not
yet encapsulated in language and meaning, always something about race left
unsaid, always someone a constitutive outside, who’s very existence the identity
of race depends on, and which is absolutely destined to return from its expelled
and objected position outside the signifying field to trouble the dreams of those
who are comfortable inside.
But What About the Reality of Racial Discrimination and Violence?
STUART HALL:
I address this point directly because I believe this is exactly where the more
skeptical amongst you may be beginning to think, “Alright, you might say perhaps
race is not after all a matter of genetic factors, of biology, of physiological
characteristics, of the morphology of the body, not a matter of color, hair, and
bone, that chilling threesome that DuBois frequently quotes.” But you may say,
“can you seriously be claiming that it is simply a signifier, an empty sign, that it is
not fixed in its inner nature, that it cannot be secured in its meaning, that it floats
in a sea of relational differences – is that the argument that you’re advancing?”
And isn’t it not only wrong, but a trivial and I hear the word being rustled in the
audience, an idealist approach to the brute facts of human history, which after all
have disfigured the lives, and crippled and constrained the potentialities of
literally millions of the world’s dispossessed? After all why don’t we use the
evidence of our eyes? If race was such a complicated thing why would it be so
manifestly obvious everywhere we look? I have to say it again because I can feel
the sense of relief that after skirting around through these various structures we
have come to know after all what we all know about race. It’s reality. You can see
its effects, you can see it in the faces of the people around you, you can see
people pulling the skirts aside as people from another racial group come into the
room. You can see the operation of racial discrimination in institutions and so on.
What is the need of this entire scholarly hullabaloo about race, when you can just
turn to its reality?
What trail through history is more literally marked by blood and violence, by the
genocide by the Middle Passage, the horrors of plantation servitude, and the
hanging tree? A signifier, a discourse, yes, that is my argument.
Two Positions: The Realist & the Textual
STUART HALL: Since we are concerned here not with abstract theoretical
critique but with an attempt to unlock the secrets of the functioning in modern
history of racial systems of classification, let me turn to this question of how
indeed one sees this functioning around the troubling question of the gross
physical differences of color, bone, and hair, which constitute the material substratum,
the absolute final common denominator of racial classifying systems.
When all the other refinements have been wiped away, there seems to be a sort
of irreducible, ineradicable minimum there, the differences, which are palpable
among people, which we call race. Where on earth do they come from, if they are
simply as I want to claim, discursive?
Broadly speaking, as I understand it there is really three options here. First, we
can hold that the differences of a physiological kind or nature really do provide
the basis for classifying human races into families, and once they can be proved
to do so, they can adequately be represented in our systems of thought and
language. That’s a kind of realist position, it really is there, and all we have to do
is reflect what is out there in the world, adequately in the systems of language
and knowledge, which we use to conduct investigations into its effects.
Well, a second possibility is to hold what is sometimes called the purely textual or
linguistic position. Race here, is autonomous of any system reference, it can only
be tested, not against the actual word of human diversity, but within the play of
the text, within the play of the differences that we construct in our own language.
A Third Position: The Discursive
STUART HALL: But there is a third position, the third position is the one to which
I subscribe, its often the third position I often subscribe to it as it turns out, (I don’t
know what you want to make of that but there it is). The third position is that there
are probably differences of all sorts in the world, that difference is a kind of
anomalous existence out there, a kind of random series of all sorts of things in
what you call the world, there’s no reason to deny this reality or this diversity. I
think its sometimes, not always, what Foucault means when he talks about the
extra discursive…I don’t want to stir up the Foucaultians there…It’s only when
these differences have been organized within language, within discourse, within
systems of meaning, that the differences can be said to acquire meaning and
become a factor in human culture and regulate conduct, that is the nature of what
I’m calling the discursive concept of race. Not that nothing exists of differences,
but that what matters are the systems we use to make sense, to make human
societies intelligible. The system we bring to those differences, how we organize
those differences into systems of meaning, with which, as it were, we could find
the world intelligible. And this has nothing to do with denying that, as I say, the
audience test – if you looked around, you’d find we did after all look somewhat
different from one another.
I think these are discursive systems because the interplay between the
representation of racial difference, the writing of power, and the production of
knowledge, is crucial to the way in which they are generated, and the way in
which they function. And I use the word discursive here to mark the transition
theoretically from the more formal understanding of difference to an
understanding of how ideas and knowledge’s of difference organize human
practices between individuals.
Religion: A First Go at Radical Classification
STUART HALL: Racially classifying systems themselves have a history and their
modern history seems to emerge where peoples of very different kinds first
encounter and have to make sense of peoples of another culture who are
significantly different from them, and that we can date when that historical
encounter occurred (I don’t want to talk about that at the moment).
When the Old World first encountered the New, peoples of the New World, they
put to them a question; it’s the famous question that Sepulveda put to Las Casas
when the subject was debated within the Catholic Church of, “what is the nature
of the peoples that we have found in the New World?” Now, they didn’t say what I
think the religious amongst you would like to hear them say, “well, these are, are
they not, men like us, and our brothers? Are they not women like us, and our
sisters?” No, they didn’t say that, that took a very, very long time to come – about
two or three hundred years before the Abolitionist movement thought of putting a
question like that. No, what they said are, “Are these true men?” That is to say,
do they belong even to the same species as we do, or are they born of another
creation? And here for centuries it was not science, but religion, religion standing
as the signifier of knowledge and truth. Where the human science is, and then
science itself was later destined to stand, which would ground the truth of human
difference and diversity in some fact which was controllable which could put them
over there, and us over here; them in the boats and us on top of the civilization
that we had conquered and so on.
Sleeping Easier: The Cultural Function of Knowledge
STUART HALL: It is that act of organizing people through their differences into
different social groups, which is the act of social human classification, that is
what is being sought – first in a religious discourse, then in an anthropological
discourse, and finally in a scientific discourse – here, each of these knowledge’s
are functioning not as the provision of the truth, but as what makes men and
women sleep well in their beds at night. They’re kind of soothers – they’re
knowledge soothers, they’re tucking in you know the soother in the mouth; first
you pop in the religious one, and you hope to find that after all, when after all is
said and done, god actually created two kinds of men, he had two goes at it –
one weekend and then another weekend, and they were over there and we were
over here and its only long afterwards that we happen to stumble across one
another. But there’s no thought that we both came from the same place. And that
soother doesn’t work, you take that out, you pop in another one: an
anthropological would say, well they’re sort of really like us, that’s because we all
really come from monkeys, but some of them are much closer to monkeys than
we are and although that may not be an absolute difference, you know this is
enough to find differences in university departments, publishing, etc. And then
finally when that anthropology itself finally gives up, along comes, you know
James Clifford, and he gives up this sort of knowledge of what anthropology can
do, sort out the sheep from the goats. Then science comes along and says, “I
can do it, and I can do it.” Higher genetics, you can’t see genetics, it’s a
wonderful, internal system, we have the clue to it, we can look at it in the
laboratory – but human beings can’t see, what they see are the effects of the
genetic code operating. So it’s a wonderfully secret code that only a small
number of people have at their disposal, which can do exactly what religion didn’t
manage to do, and anthropology didn’t quite bring off. It can tell you why these
people do not belong in the same camp, why they are very different from one
another, why they really are a different species. And wouldn’t it be good to know
that instead of, you know trying to work out whether the ones that are your
friends are so closer to you than the ones who are not, all that complicated map
of alliances, etc, which constitute human relations – wouldn’t it be good if you just
had something simple to say, I’ll just pop into the lab and I’ll tell you whether they
are or not. And that’s what it’ll do.
Fixing Difference: The Cultural Function of Science
STUART HALL: Science has a function, a cultural function in our society. Let me
pause before I get carried away. I’m not suggesting that there’s nothing to
science; that’s not my business today, and talking about the function which
science performs within human cultural system, I’m talking about the cultural
function of science, and I’m saying that the cultural function of science, in the
languages and discourses of racism, have been to provide precisely that
guarantee and certainty of absolute difference which no other systems of
knowledge up until that point have been able to provide. And that is why the
scientific trace remains such a remarkably powerful instrument in human thinking,
not only in the Academy but everywhere in people’s ordinary common sense
discourse. For centuries, the struggle was to establish a binary distinction
between two kinds of people. But once you get to the Enlightenment, which says
or recognizes everybody is one species, then you have to begin to find a way
which marks the difference inside the species; not two species, but how, why,
one bit of the species is different – more barbarous, more backwards, more
civilized – than another part. And you get into a different marking of difference,
the difference that is marked inside the system. You know, I mean, listen to the
way in which Edmund Burke once wrote to wrote to Robertson in 1877, “we need
no longer go to history,” he said, “to trace the knowledge of human nature in all
its stages and periods. Why? Because now the great map of mankind is on a
road all at once and there’s no state or gradation of barbarism and no mode of
refinement which we do not have at the same instant under our view.” That is the
panoptic glance of the Enlightenment – everything, all of human creation, is now,
as it were, under the eye of science. And within that, can be marked, the
differences that very much matter. And what are they? “The very different civility
of Europe and of China. The barbarism of Tartary and of Arabia; and the savage
state of North America and New Zealand.”
The point I’m making is it is not science as such, but whatever is in the discourse
of a culture, which grounds the truth about human diversity, which unlocks the
secret of the relations between nature and culture. Which unties the puzzling fact
of human difference, which matters. And what matters is not that they contain the
scientific truth about difference, but that they function foundationally in the
discourse of racial difference. They fix and secure what else otherwise cannot be
fixed or secured. They warrant and guarantee the truth of differences, which they
discursively construct.
Nature = Culture
STUART HALL: The relationship here then, is that culture is made to follow on
from nature, to lean on it for its justification exactly nature and culture here
operate as metaphors for one another. They operate metonymically. It is the
function of the discourse and the race as a signifier, to make these two systems –
nature and culture – correspond with one another, in such a way that it is
possible to read off the one against the other. So that once you know where the
person fits in the classification of natural human races, you can infer from that
what they’re likely to think, what they’re likely to feel, what they’re likely to
produce, the aesthetic quality of their productions, and so on. It is constituting a
system of equivalencies between nature and culture, which is the function of race
as a signifier.
The biological trace in my view as a discursive system is required so long as this
essentializing, naturalizing function, this way of as it were, taking racial difference
out of history, out of culture, and locating it as it were beyond the reach of
change, so long as that function is part of what racial systems are about.
Seeing is Believing
STUART HALL: However this is not the only reason in my view why biological
reasoning, wild functioning as it were, as if its largely untrue but still somehow
hangs around in the conversation which we conduct around race. That’s not the
only reason why that is so. What DuBois started with was precisely the grosser
physical differences of color, hair, and bone.
Which despite the fact of there remain anomalous fractural populations that they
transcend scientific definition. They are, what finally, when we come down to it,
providing the foundation for the languages of race that we speak everyday. The
stubborn gross physical facts, of color, hair, or bone. Now, the central fact about
these gross physical differences is not that they are based on genetic
differences, but they are clearly visible to the eye. They are what palpably to the
untutored, unscientific eye, which makes race thing, which we continue to talk
about. They are in a sense beyond dispute. They are brute, physical biological
facts about human vision that appear in the field of vision. Where seeing is
believing.
When Franz Fonul in ‘ Black skin White Masks’, who has you know was
transfixed by this inscription of racial difference on the surface of the black body
itself. What he called the dark and unarguably evidence of his own blackness. “I
am a slave,” he said, “not of an idea that others have of me, but of my own
appearance, I am fixed by it.” For what indeed, of course, what can people be
transfixed by others by that which is so powerfully and evidently concretely
undeniable there. A racial difference which writes itself indelibly on the script of
the body.
Genetics: Making Sense of Difference
STUART HALL: What gives rise to these evident and visible signs of racial
difference? Fuzzy hair, big noses, thick lips, large behinds. And as the French
writer, Michelle Curnow, once delicately put it, “ penis’s as big cathedrals.” What
gives rise to all that is of course the genetic code. I mean its not just that those
things are there because nobody ever conducted the experiment and tried to
actually sort out a part of a group of people who contain some these differences,
you know, carefully and discreetly into two opposing groups. It just simply cannot
be done. Just simply can’t be done. You get some people of there and a few
people over there, and then they are all those wishy-washy things in the middle
that keeps slipping and sliding from inside to outside. It’s just not quite possible to
actually fix it. So, actually, though races are something that you can plainly see.
What fixes it, is because we all know, we scientific folk, what is behind these is
the genetic code, which regrettable you can’t see. But which you can infer from
the fact that some have large behinds and some people have fuzzy hair and
some people have big noses and some people for all I know have penis’s as big
as a cathedral. But you can’t set about organizing the population, you know if I
say drop your pants and if I tell you whether you are this or that, because the
thing is just to anomalous for that. But you can be sure, that genetically some
code has actually given at the level of the surface of appearances these
differences. And we poor mortals have to work with this confusing surface of
appearances because we can’t get access to the genetic code.
Reading the Body
STUART HALL: Well, this is quite true, but what I am afraid that your saying,
what your telling me is that actually, these things, which you can see, are also
signifiers! You are reading them as signs of a code of which you can’t see. You
assume that it is the genetic code creating these gross differences of color, hair,
and bone. And only because of that can you use that as a way of distinguishing
between one group of people or another. If I were to say. ‘ It happened by
chance’, that is not the answer we are looking for we are looking for the fact that
you can read the body as a text. It is a text. Now my friends you know, I know
you will say. “ If you hit me, cut me, I’ll bleed. You run over me in the street, as is
a frequent of a case in front of, you know, the new cross. You know, I will be
flattened. It may be, but in so far as what we are talking about is the system of
classifying difference. The body is a text. And we are all readers of it. And we go
around, looking at this text, inspecting it like literary critics. Closer and closer for
those very fine differences, such small these differences are, and then when that
does work we start to run like a true structuralist, we start to run the
combinations. Well if I perm, you know, not so big nose, with rather fuzzy hair,
and a sort of largish behind and goodness knows what, I might sort of come out.
We are readers of race, that what we are doing, we are readers of social
difference. And the body hair, which you know is sighted as if, this is what
terminates the argument. When you say race is a signifier. No it is not! See the
folks out there they are different! You can tell they are different. Well, that very
obviousness, the very obviousness of the visibility of race is what persuades me
that it functions because it is signifying something; it is a text, which we can read.
Why We Have to Move Beyond ‘Reality’
STUART HALL: Now this notion that even the genetic code then, is only
imprinted on us as it were through the body rather than on the body. That you
can’t stop at the surface of the black body itself, as if that, well, I was going to
say, as if that, brought the argument to a close. But that is exactly why the body
is invoked in the discourse in that way. In the hope that it will bring the argument
to a close, that if you invoke reality itself, if you say “the blackest person in the
room step this way” Somehow pointing to him or her will destroy all my argument.
Just look there. That is exactly what the function of invoking the body as if it is the
ultimate transcendental signifier. As if this is the marker beyond which all
arguments will stop, all language will cease, all discourse will fall away before this
reality. I think we can’t turn to the reality of race because the reality of race itself
is what is standing in the way of our understanding, in a profound way. What the
meaning is of saying that race is cultural system.
Analyzing the Stories of the Body
STUART HALL: You know, in Fanon’s book Black Skin White Masks whereas I
said he’s entranced and he’s obsessed by the trauma of his own appearance and
what it means he is driven wild by the fact that he is caught, caught and locked in
this body which the other the white other knows just by looking at him that the
other can see through him just by reading the text of the black body. He’s
obsessed by that fact. And yet, as I am sure you know, when it came to it, the
power and importance of Black Skin White Masks is that Fanon understood that
beneath what he called the bodily and corporeal schema is another schema. A
schema composed of the stories and the anecdotes and the metaphors and the
images, which is really, really he says, what constructs the relationship between
the body and its social and cultural space. These stories, not the fact itself. The
fact itself is just exactly that trap of the surface, which allows us to rest with what
is obvious. It’s so manifestly there. The trap in racism is precisely to allow what is
manifestly there what offers it to us as a symptom of appearance to stand in the
place of what is in fact one of the most profound and deeply complex of the
cultural systems which allow us to make a distinction between inside and outside
between us and them between who belongs and who doesn’t belong. That
apparently simple, obvious and banal fact requires the invocation of territories of
knowledge in order to produce it as a simple, obvious, visible fact. In this way
race is more like sexual difference, racial difference is more like sexual difference
than it is like the other systems of difference precisely because anatomy,
physiology appears to wind the question up and what we know about and have
learned gradually about sexual difference that is to say the profundity of the
depth that lies behind the making of that distinction is what we need now to begin
to learn about the languages of race which we speak.
Why Does it Matter? Battling Racism
STUART HALL: Though race cannot perform the function it was asked to do by
providing the truth and fixing that truth beyond the shy of a doubt. It is difficult to
get rid of because it is so difficult in the languages of race to do without some
kind of foundation or guarantee. And the point I am making there, about the
necessity of a foundation or guarantee, is not a theoretical argument, or not a
theoretical argument only, it is a political argument; because so much of the
politics both of race and anti-race are founded on the notion that somehow,
somewhere, by the biology or genetics or physiology or color or something other
then human history and culture, will guarantee the truth and authenticity of the
things we believe and want to do. It is the search for that guarantee, as much in
the politics of anti-racism, as in the politics of racism, which makes us, which
addicts us, to the preservation of a biological trait. It is hard to give up because in
the end, we don’t know what it is like to try to conduct a politics, especially a
politics of anti-racism without a guarantee, we don’t know what it is like to
conduct the politics without a guarantee. We want somehow to be told something
which tells us that the contingent open ended usually wrong politically choices we
make, can in the end read off against some other more scientific theoretical
template which if we only had hold of the beginning would have told us what was
right and what was not. We need the guarantee, we need to have in the sleep of
reason, that which says, “Yes do it” because it not only feels like and looks like
and is the right thing as far as your calculations can take it, but in the end it will
be right, there is something which will make it right. That is because the people
holding it, after all, these are the people you know, these are good people, how in
the name of people come together around this common form of identification,
how could they be wrong? But the truth is that like all ordinary human beings they
could. We could all be wrong. And often are. Quite usually are in fact and in our
politics almost always are you might say. The one thing we are not is guaranteed
in the truth of what we do. Indeed, I believe that without that kind of guarantee we
would need to begin again, begin again in another space, begin again from a
different set of presuppositions to try to ask ourselves what might it be in human
identification, in human practice, in the building of human alliances, which without
the guarantee, without the certainty of religion or science or anthropology or
genetics or biology or the appearance of your eyes, without any guarantees at all,
might enable us to conduct an ethically responsible human discourse and
practice about race in our society. What might it be like to conduct that, without
having at our backs just a touch of a certainty that even if we look as if we were
wrong if we only had access to the code something would have told us in the
beginning what we should do.
And this is an uncomfortable truth. It’s an uncomfortable truth, of course, for
those who would have liked to invoke the biological or genetic traits as a way of
stopping the argument. But it is also a very difficult truth to come to terms with
amongst those people who feel as it were the reality of race gives a kind of
guarantee or under pinning to their political argument and their aesthetic
judgments and their social and cultural beliefs. Once you enter the politics of the
end of the biological definition of race you are plunged headlong into the only
world we have. The maelstrom of a continuously contingent guaranteed political
argument, debate, and practice. A critical politics against racism, which is always
a policy of criticism.
[END]
