Thank you very much for inviting me to again. It's a great pleasure to be here in surroundings which are very familiar. I want to say some things by way of introduction. First of all, to the subjects that I'm going to try to deal with over the next two weeks in the course, but also about how I hope these sessions will run, how they will go. I don't want to do formal lectures. I want to treat them as a seminar because what I'm going to say has only the authority of the fact that I'm saying it, not much more than that. And I want to engage in a discussion with you on two questions at the same time. First of all, what is English culture and how does it come to be the peculiar thing that it is? That's the subject. And at the same time, how do we analyze it? How do we talk about it? How do we theorize it? So the course will run these two lines of inquiry at the same time about certain central features of English culture and cultural identity, and at the same time, the questions of theory and method about how the analysis of a culture is best done. Now, my apologies for speaking in English, but what that means is that I don't mind at all if you don't understand what I'm saying. If you just say, I don't understand that, say it again, then I will say it again. And then if you don't understand that, Nando will translate. Or somebody will translate. Interruptions don't bother me at all. I really mean that. So you must feel free. What I want you to do is to understand what I'm saying. Then I want to know whether you agree with what I'm saying or if you don't agree, why you don't agree. But I don't mind at all if you stop me in the middle of the sentence because you must understand what I'm saying in order to disagree. Okay, so that by way of how I hope the seminars will run. Yes. Yes, who want to come in? I hope there's a chair here. And in order to encourage you to intervene, I haven't organized lectures which are very tight in their construction. I've left it open. So I want to make a number of points which are connected in an argument, but the argument isn't very closely integrated so that you feel there's some space for you to interpose your thoughts in the middle of mine. Okay, next I want to explain what the course is about. Do you have those sheets which have the titles? There are one or two people who don't have. Are there some spares? I'm coming down. Well, I've given titles for 10 sessions, and I want to just explain what they are, because the titles may be a bit of a mystery to you as to what they really are about, and I want to say something about how they're organized together. Today's lecture will be by way of introduction. I want to say something about cultural studies and its history. I want to say something particularly about the use of texts and examples, textual examples in the study of culture. And I want to set that against the background of the way in which our thinking about culture has changed over the last 20 years. Today is a bit dry. It's a bit formal. You'll find it a bit difficult to get into today. Never mind that. Tomorrow I'll be much more concrete, much more concrete. And you will find that the ideas that I throw out today will come back tomorrow and the day after. And they will make more sense when I talk about them in relation to an example or a particular period or a particular topic. So today is really to familiarize you with my vocabulary, with the inventory of my ideas, even if they don't make much sense to you. But if you look at the sheet, beginning from Lecture 2, which is called The Long March of Liberalism, I just want to go through that list and tell you, A, what the topics are about, and secondly, to show you what historical period they refer to, because each refers to a particular historical period. And thirdly, each has a particular theoretical argument in it. So just let me expound the set of lectures. The Long March of Liberalism is really asking the question about the liberal roots of English culture. How the notion of an Englishman's liberties, I say Englishmans, it's not an English person, because English liberties are gendered. They are men's liberties first and women's liberties later. So an English man's liberties. How the idea of English liberty and of the English individual, the strong roots of English individualism, how that comes about historically in English culture. And that has a particular historical period. It begins with the rise of liberal ideas in the 17th century. And it comes from, I look at the changes in English liberalism from the 17th century to the present, because liberalism is one of those long, continuous histories in English culture. It's always there, always in a different form, but it's there in Mrs. Thatcher, though you might not believe it, as much as it is in Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes, Locke, everybody in England is a little piece of them is a liberal. So I want to explain what I want to call the long march of liberalism through English society. Each of the topics will come up to the present day, so none of them is purely historical. Though I start quite far back with the 17th century talking about liberalism, I'm going to bring it up to the 20th century. So the first one has a long historical sweep, 17th to the present. And I want to show you what the main phases in English liberalism are and how liberal ideas have infused the literature, culture, thought, social character of the English people. The second is the reverse side of liberalism, because if every English person is a liberal, every English person is also a traditionalist. Yes, I want to look at what I would call the other side of liberalism, the roots of English traditionalism. It has something to do with my subtitle, which is called Living in an Old Country. England is a country that has been old from the very beginning. It began old. It's always its traditions are lost in the midst of time. And I want to look at this idea that there have always been the English, and they have always been older than anybody else in certain deeply conventional structures. So I want to look at the idea of English respectability, and of English, the English heritage, and the idea of tradition, of the symbols of English tradition, traditionalism. I want to look at English patriarchalism, of the highly patriarchal character of English society. Because unless you understand those deep structures of English life, you don't, I think, understand what the culture is about. That lecture then, and seminar, really is from the late 18th century onwards. But as well as being a liberal society and a traditional society, English culture is also an imperialist society. So in the next lecture, I want to look at race, the idea of the British as the chosen race, and the notions of monarchy and empire, of the imperial legacy in English culture. This begins much earlier on, but it comes to fruit in the late 19th century. That lecture is therefore from the 19th century into the present. I want to bring it to the present. I want to look at the present monarchy and the legacy of the empire in the 20th century and what is happening to the contested notion of the British as a race, what is happening to the defensive character of English national identity, the English as a nation, and why just now the notion of the English as a nation could destroy us all. Why it's dangerous, it's an explosive. Lecture four is about the bomb ticking away inside English society. Race, monarchy, and empire. The subtitle for that lecture might be The Return of the Repressed, or the Never Fully Properly Repressed, that which never goes away in the psyche of English culture, race, empire, and monarchy. Then lecture five is like this first one, rather dry, rather theoretical. I've talked about liberalism, and I would talk about traditionalism, and I've talked about imperialism. Well, is there such a thing as an English ideology? Is there a British ideology which is distinctive, different from an Italian ideology, or a German, or an American? Is there an English cultural identity as such? And how would one go about theorizing that? That is a more theoretical lecture. Halfway through, to pay my dues to the academy, I give a theoretical lecture on how to conceptualize an English ideology. Then I get back to the interesting question. In the sixth one, I want to talk about the state, and what has happened to the changes in the British state, and how the present state of English culture in the 1980s has its roots, I believe, in a crisis which emerges in English society around the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. Somewhere between 1880 and 1930, English society completely turns on its axis. And I want to look at that moment. It's a very important historical moment, culturally. and how that creates the conditions for some of the problems in English society which we are facing right now. The roots of the present crisis lie, I believe, in that fundamental shift which occurs in English society at the end of the 19th century. It's as important as that moment around a century before, in the 1780s, when English society also turned. In the 1780s, that's the period of Edward Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class. The emergence of English Industrial Society in the 1780s, that's the crucible period of England as an industrial society. And I think the 1880s and the 1890s are just as important as a turning point of Britain into advanced industrial society. And I want to end by saying I think the 1980s, the thing goes in cycles, 1780, 1880. Now we're in the 1980s, and I think we're at another such turning point. But we'll leave that until the last lecture. Seven is about the contemporary political scene in England. The popular, what has happened to popular culture, to popular politics, the constitution of the idea of the English people as a political entity. It's also about the shifts which are going on in English political culture just now. Eight is about the changing landscape of English society. These, you will see, seven, eight, nine, are now much more contemporary. Yes, they don't have such a long historical sweep. They're more about the 1960s, 70s, 80s, these last lectures. Cultural difference, emerging social identities is about the breakup of the landscape of English society and English culture in the 1980s, which I think is going on. What I would call the pluralization of English society. When the English become just one more ethnic group, one more ethnic group on the surface of the globe. This is the end of imperialism, this one. The emergence of the English as one of a range of different cultural groups, all occupying Britain. I don't know whether any of you have had the chance yet to go to England. I hope you will go to England. But England, London now, looks like, well, it looks like Rome, to tell you the truth. That is to say, when you look around, the Italians are beginning to be one among a number of cultural ethnic groups. They're the largest ones. And in London, the British are still the largest cultural group, but they are jockeying for space with a lot of other cultural groups, all laying claim to defining what English means in the 21st century. So Lecture 8 is about the breakup of the landscape of English culture and society. changing class formation, the emergence of new sexual identities, the emergence of new social antagonisms and struggles, very different from those that we are accustomed to read and learn about in the 18th and 19th centuries. Very different, even very different from the struggles of the 20th century. Nine, I want to introduce the notion, which I think is crucial to an analysis of this kind, the idea of unevenness of unevenness and I simply want to give you some portraits a few snapshots of why it's not possible for anybody now to say English culture is like this because as soon as you say it's like this somebody else says no it's like this I want to show you England and English culture as an uneven contradictory mixture of modern, pre-modern, and post-modern elements. You can move, if you walk down a street in London, you can move from the pre-industrial and the rural right through to the post-modern, through about five buildings. And people are living between these different epochs. They have and they write out of, they make films out of, they create novels, their discursive forms occupy these different worlds, all together, all impacted like layers on one another. I want to remind you that societies now are all societies, not just, you know, we used to talk about third world societies as the consequence of uneven development. But uneven development is right inside the post-industrial, post-modern society. They also are marked by the unevenness of social and cultural development. It's a new historic fact, the fact of unevenness, of the unevenness of development. Well, and then 10 is like 5, and like this one, it's a reprise, it's more theoretical. How do we make sense of this mess that I've tried to unfold before you in the 9 lecture? Is there any way of analytically or theoretically ordering these different things into a pattern? Can one grasp it intellectually? Or does one have to give up and retire into pure pleasure? And as to how I resolve that question, you have to come to all ten lectures to see what the answer is. That's the melodramatic structure of the lectures. unless you come to all of them and stay with the argument all the way through you won't see when I pull the rabbit out of the hat you won't know where it came from unless you have seen me building the hat as I go okay alright well those are the topics that's the line of argument that's what I'm concerned with and the different points I will try to bring out particular theoretical arguments but I don't want to spend more time of introduction. Let me get into the question of what is the object of study when one is studying a culture? What is it that one looks at? What is the evidence from which we are beginning to make interpretations and analyses? Well, just let me tell you how I'm going to structure what I want to say. First of all, I want to make some remarks about this question of culture and to suggest to you the different theoretical frameworks, the major theoretical frameworks or mappings within which the study of culture has developed in what we now call cultural studies. That's the first thing. Secondly, I'm going to give you a kind of inventory of words or terms that I'm likely to use. It's like you probably know Raymond Williams' keywords. Well, part two is some of my keywords around the question of culture. And thirdly, I want to address something which is specific to those of you who come to cultural studies through literature. That is the question of the status of the text as a privileged form of evidence in relation to the analysis of culture. So some general questions about cultural studies, a list of terms, an inventory of terms, of analysis, and then the question of the text. Okay? Anything so far? Anybody lost? If you're lost, this is the time to shout. Because I'm going to take you into the labyrinth. Into the maze. Okay, everybody understands where we're going. Don't say in five minutes' time, I don't know how you got there. Okay. There are three main phases in the development of cultural studies, which is a form of taking the question of culture as its central object of analysis. Culture, of course, doesn't come into existence for the first time in the 1960s in English intellectual academic work. Obviously not. It's a term which has been there for two, three centuries. Raymond Williams, in key words, has a very good analysis of the changing meanings of the term culture. So it's a word with a long history. But it does come into academic life and into intellectual thought in a very central place in the 1960s. And what we now call modern cultural studies begins in the 1960s. So one of the questions is, why does culture emerge as a problematic question in the 1960s? We always knew the word. We studied it. People who were educated were said to be cultured. England had a distinctive pattern of writing and modes of intellectual thought. We called it English culture. It wasn't a problem for anybody. Why does English culture become a problem for anybody in the 1960s? Why do people begin to develop specialized forms of analysis and study of English culture in the 1960s? Well, that in itself is a very complicated question. But the one thing that I want to make clear to you is that English culture does not become a problem because of an intellectual tradition only. It's not because the academy suddenly wakes up and decides to study culture. Culture becomes problematic inside the academy because it's problematic outside the academy. It is the fact that, as it were, what is happening to English culture and society in the post-war period so changes the landscape and basic relationships of English social and intellectual life that after a time, literary studies and sociological studies and anthropological studies can no longer take for granted that England is a known country. is a very important article written in the early 1960s by a well-known social anthropologist called Peter Worsley, which is called England, Unknown Country. And what the changes that have accumulated in English society from the 30s through the war into the post-war period, through the period of consumer affluence in the 1950s, all those different kinds of shifts and changes suddenly produce in the 1960s a new set of forms, a new pattern. And it's this new pattern which people can no longer take for granted. And therefore it becomes problematic. And when things become problematic, somebody, in spite of the conservatism of the academy, will decide to study it. Somebody will be bold enough to say, I must study it. Now, you see, one of the reasons for that is because literary studies, for instance, where I came from, I'm a renegade from literary studies. I did language and literature in one of the most conventional university courses in the world. A language and literature in Oxford stops at 1850. Everything after that is modern writing, is, you know, newfangled things, etc. You don't believe me, but when I wanted to do postgraduate work and I said I wanted to study American literature in the early 20th century, my supervisor said, American literature does not yet exist. It still has to be invented. And when I showed him the list of authors, he said, but half of these are still alive. You don't study things that are, you know, books by living authors, you know, out there that you might meet. How terrible. You only study authors that are properly dead and buried. Whom you can go and see in the cemetery. Go and look at the crosses. Pope, Dryden, Shakespeare, Milton. Then you know it's literary. But if you have a chance to meet him and he said, hello, I'm Papa Hemingway. Not literary. Not yet become literary. So this is the very conventional. Now why would people involved in that intellectual tradition suddenly feel that the problematic character of English life in 1960 requires study. Well, I'll tell you why. It's because literary studies, or the study of culture, the study of the arts, the study of music, always takes place like a melody against the background. Yes, there's always the harmonic structure of the culture behind the particular text. You have to think of a text as the inscription of a melody against the background of a whole range of noises which are usually taken for granted. It's just thought everybody understands about England and they know where it came from and what its history is and when we cut off the head of a king and then when we agreed to settle things. That is just taken for granted. And then you study the literature as the foreground against this taken for granted background. Now, what happens is when the background disappears, when it disintegrates, how do you write the notes? You don't know whether it's five lines or ten lines or 15 lines or an eight-tonal scale. You're lost. And so you say, you have to say, well, perhaps you better find out against what, in what setting do these new texts arise? What is writing now? What is the tradition? What has formed the ideas behind people who write or draw or paint or speak now. So they began to hear the changing background to the culture in the 1960s. Another reason why culture becomes problematic is because culture has to do with questions of power. Culture always has to do with questions of power. The academy and intellectual ideas very often imposes on culture the notion that it has floated into some autonomous realm which is free of power. The great ideas and the great thinkers in a void. But we all know, this is one of the things I'm going to go on to talk about, that every text, no matter how old, is in the world, not outside of it. It is in the world. Every text is a dirty text. There are no clean texts. we can cleanse them up we can take them and polish them so that they don't have any relations like when you take something out of the sea and all the barnacles then you have to polish it and take a knife we can do that with text we can cut them free of their dirty entanglements with the world we can pretend that the text is outside or above the world but actually it is always in the world rooted in the world comes out of the world it has worldly connections and one of the connections which culture always has is with questions of power culture is in itself a form of power so who has culture is a question of power and who has less culture is a question of power and how culture is distributed across a society is a question of power and which cultural definitions prevail and which are subordinate and which are marginal and which are silent, those are questions of power. So culture has relationships always with power. I will come on to the question of why and how we understand this relationship between culture and power. But I want to assert at this stage that culture has a relationship to power. So when cultural relations and social relations change as they changed in the 1960s, power was also in question. And I can make that very concrete. One of the things that was changing in the 1960s was the conception of what the English working class was, what the English people, what the ordinary people, the popular classes were. And those things were being transformed by what had happened in the war, by the development of modern industrial society, by the changes in the balance of relations between the forces, by new technologies, by new ideas, by the new media, those things that have broken up the traditional shapes of English popular culture and working class life. Well, when the working class breaks free of its older traditional cultural roots, questions of power are in the air. Who are they? Where are they going to? Who do they think they are? Where did they come from? What do they want now? There's always, when one comes to power, the question of what do they want now? Exactly the same thing with feminism. What do women want now? Well, in the 1960s, people are asked, what does the working class want now? And what is it? What is it? And that took people back to looking at what its culture was and how its culture had changed. What was changing? the cultures of the major classes in English society around that period. Okay, I don't want to go on with that because you know some of this. I just want to indicate it, that culture becomes a problem, something which is not self-evident, which we can't take for granted, which we have to analyze because it has relations. It shows a surface which we cannot instantly grasp. And that is something that happens in the 1960s, and cultural studies is born as a response to that change. It's one of the ways in which we tried to make sense of the enormous historical shifts that overtake English society and English historical life in the 1960s and the post-war period. That is how it becomes a problem. Now, what I want to suggest to you are the lines of the major ways in which theoretically this problem of the changing character of English culture have actually been studied. And I want to say that I think there are really three major phases. The first I would call an essentially interpretative phase, an essentially interpretative phase. It's the phase in which culture is understood mainly in its anthropological sense. Now, what do I mean by that? Well, what I'm going to try and do is very quickly to give you a sense of what culture was thought to be in this first phase and how it was analyzed, how it was theorized. People thought of culture as, in the very famous phrase of Raymond Williams, is a whole way of life. A culture was a whole way of life. English culture was what was distinctive about the pattern of English ideas and English social forms that differentiated it from somebody else, another society, another nation. A whole way of life. Now, of course, that you could describe the whole way of life of any culture from many points of view. We talk about economic organization, about its political forms, etc. So the question of culture pinpointed something that was important in what was to be studied about a whole way of life. What gave the wholeness and distinctiveness to that particular culture? What was it? Well, what was said about it is that what was central to the whole that could be studied were the meanings that it embodied, the meanings that it embodied. That each culture, that is to say, had its peculiar inventory of meaning. And that these were the meanings that organized the ways in which people related to one another in their ordinary everyday life. These were the ideas and the values that you would find at the center of the major institutions of the society. These were the things that people lived by. Their meanings and their ideas. Their meanings and their values. And that as it were, as you looked at one culture or another, you could list, you could give a sort of inventory of the central meaning and values around which that culture was organized. So one thought about whole ways of life in terms of the central meanings or values which were expressed in them and which were central in a number of different areas. This is one of Raymond Williams' very great contributions to this way of thinking about culture, is that he tried to break down the compartments within which one analyzed it. So he said, if you're looking at some central value of English life, Take the notion of respectability, which is very central to English social relations. Very high value. It's a society which places a high value on respectability. Well, there's no point looking for respectability in one area only. If it's central to the culture, you will find the ways in which people behave at work and the ways in which people behave in the family and the way in which people behave towards their friends. You will find the notion of respectability at all these institutionalized, in all these different domains of social life. So one of the consequences of this way of looking at culture was that you couldn't look at it any longer in terms of its institutional domain. Yeah, I'm a political scientist. Well, I don't know anything about that. I'm an economist. I don't know anything about that. I'm a literary critic. Because the shifts, the common values, cut across those things. They were to be found in all the domains of life. So one studied them horizontally rather than within the compartments. And that's one of the reasons why, as a form of study, cultural studies has always been interdisciplinary. Because it's always encouraged people to stray across the boundaries. Nobody could say, I'm sorry, I don't know anything about that. You had to know, even if you didn't know very much, you had to find out a little bit about that. Because unless you could say, you know, you can find respectability in political life, economic life, family life, etc. You didn't know whether it was central, core to the society in that way. So it encouraged the breaking down of a great number of academic and intellectual fortresses. And therefore, that's one of the ways in which cultural studies became slightly subversive. Because it broke into the academy, where everybody is already institutionalized inside their compartments, and everybody is specialized and professionalized inside what they know, and the boundaries are very clear between what they know and what they're expert in and what they don't know. And cultural studies said, we are all amateurs. In cultural studies, everybody's an amateur. First of all, everybody lives the culture, so everybody's an expert. You begin with yourself. You are the first evidence comes from inside you. You know what some of the cultural central values of society are because you live them every day. You encounter them in everyday interactions with other people. So you can't be an expert on yourself in that sense. You have to begin from where you are. But also you have to, as it were, know something about the interrelationship between these different areas of life and see how they interconnect. So cultural studies is also an interconnecting discipline. It always tries to make the links between things which previously the expertise of English professionalism had tried to keep separate. Well, so meanings were central. But Raymond Williams also, I'm going to talk occasionally, I'm not going to say what Raymond Williams thinks because this is not a series of lectures on great figures. But I will try to identify the central theoretical figures when I'm talking about each paradigm, as it were. Williams and Ogart are very central to this conception of culture that I'm talking about now, the first phase, the phase in which cultural studies is first named, when the Center for Cultural Studies comes into existence, when Williams writes the Long Revolution and Culture and Society. and Richard Hoggart writes the uses of literacy. Yes, this is the end of the 50s, the 60s. 55, 56, 57, use of literacy is 56. Cultural society is 58. The long revolution is 1961. Yes, that's the period I'm talking about, the end of the 50s and the 60s. When these things break. And another thing William says is it's not only ideas and meanings in some grand sense, It's also what he calls the structure of feeling. One has to go to what are the, as it were, the common sentiments, the common emotions that bind people or groups together in the society because the networks which connect one group with another and make people feel part of a common community or part of a class or part of a particular group are not just ideas in the head and they're not simply what they do together, they're practices, they're also their feelings, their emotions. There's a kind of resultant of a common feeling, what he called the common structure of feeling. And what he said was you can, in a sense, trace particular texts and although they're very different texts, you see the pattern, yes? You could take a play, a novel, a series of poems and a popular work, But you could see worked up at different levels the same structure of feeling. The same structure of feeling. One of the brilliant examples that he gives is to look at popular writing in women's magazines. At the same time as looking at the high novel, the high domestic novel. It's from Jane Austen through Middlemarch right up to Henry James. and looking at how in each of them, marriage resolves, magically resolves, some complex set of contradictions which cannot be resolved anywhere else. You just think about the end of Pride and Prejudice. Or think about the end of Emma, where those characters are all locked together in what, if you read it one way, is the most deeply deceitful and antagonistic. It's around a very small social scale. It's not in the rest of the world, you know. It's all taking place in Box Hill, etc. But they are screwing one another around about money and status and who can marry who and who is not doing the right thing. It's an intense world of moral and social and financial antagonism. And then, guess what resolves it? They decide to get married. Ah, terrific. Have a party, you know, bring them in. Well, no, you know, this, of course, I'm not saying that Jane Austen and the, you know, the writer of the next story in Woman's Own are writing in the same way. But if you look at the structure of feeling behind them, there are ways in which problems are resolved through a particular linguistic or discursive device, which registers the point at which that resolution seems appropriate, can work for very different situations. In exactly the same way Williams talks about the appearance of the great, on the one hand, the sending of the black sheep of the family overseas. Without that, Conrad would not exist. On the other hand, the sudden appearance of the great fortune that resolves everything. Without that, Dickens would not exist. Well, now, the question is, if you look across the writings of a culture and you ignore for the moment who is said to be the great one and who is said to be the corrupt, popular one. Just look at the ways in which they construct their representations of life and you will find the same tensions, the same problems, the same worries, the same things to be sewn up and the same ways of sewing them up. And that's what Williams means by saying there are these patterns, common structures of feeling, and we need very delicate instruments for being able to identify and analyze them. But when you analyze them, you know something about the structures of a culture which you don't know by taking the text in their isolation. Okay, that is phase one. And it's kind of, you might think about it now as a kind of pre-modern cultural studies. Cultural studies in the Ford popular. in the Model T Ford era. Cultural studies with a steam train cultural studies, with the smoke coming out, etc., because it is rapidly shifted aside by the eventuality of structuralism, which has a different conception of culture, not entirely different, but which moves cultural studies on in a quite different direction. From Barthes, Roland Barthes, and Levi Strauss, and I'll just say right through to Derrida and Baudrillard, the French theorists have been the people who have principally made the running intellectually in the second and third phases of the development of cultural studies. Now, what's important about this break? Well, I can tell you in the easiest way what's important about the second phase if I just say something about the first, which I had not yet said, but which shows you what it is that the theorists of the second phase were reacting against. You see, the notion of culture in the earlier period was that if you had a social group, it constituted a kind of whole, a kind of totality. and its culture, its cultural forms, were corresponded in some way to the group. The culture was the expression of the ideas and feelings of the group. So what you did when you tried to relate, for instance, a text to a group would be to look at the correspondence between these two totalities. You would treat a class as a group and its texts as a body of work. And then you would look at the correspondence in the ideas, the values, the meanings, and the structure of the feeling between the two. Now, what the structuralist phase breaks is it breaks with the notion of totality. It breaks with the notion of a correspondence, of culture being an expression of the forms of social life of the group. And it breaks with the notion of culture as merely expressive. Merely expressive. You look puzzled by that. What I mean by that is that the idea that I've just been describing would say that the structure of feeling of a culture is the expression of the ideas which are common in the group. So culture is the arena of the expression. You see, if I can use a rather bad metaphor, the older idea of culture was a culture like a kind of body smell. You were there and you kind of gave off the odor of who you are, and that was your culture. What the cultural critic had to do was be good at smelling, Sniff the air. Be sensitive to the different smells which culture had. And indeed in those old days, one used to talk about cultural analysis in terms of the sensibility of the critic. The critic had the most refined sensitivity. The most refined nose for the little differences. That's like Chanel No. 5. That's the touch of the Italian in the air there, you know, etc. You know writing about culture, which is like that. Well, now, structuralism broke with the notion that there was a group already constituted and then its culture, which corresponded to it. It says, in a sense, almost the reverse. The group doesn't come into existence until it produces its culture. Culture is a production. Culture is a practice. Culture is an activity, not a kind of emanation, not a spirit, not a glow, not a gloss, not an ether in the air. It's a thing. You have to think of it more like something concrete. You can see how it is produced. It doesn't just kind of grow out of people. They do particular things in order to, and that comes about because, of course, the notion of meaning becomes problematic. in structuralism. The world itself does not mean in structuralism. There is no meaning in the world. Things can mean a variety of different things in the structuralist universe. It can only mean this rather than that as a result of the cultural practice which uses the means or modes of expression in a particular way. So the notion of culture as a production, of cultural activity as a practice, of culture itself as an activity, and of the notion not of giving expression to meanings, but of the production of meaning, of the construction of meaning, of meaning as a historical and social fact, a facticity which is made in the world, yet of language itself as a making, as the making of meaning, and the notion that as it were no group can understand its conditions of life, the conditions in which it exists, until it produces a meaning of that existence for itself. That notion of culture is, it has a relationship to what I was saying before. And I'll say a warning word about this in a moment. But nevertheless, this is a very radical break in the way in which culture is being conceptualized. It takes much more centrally the notion of language, language used in its broadest sense. My language here, the structuralists, did not, of course, just mean written language or even spoken language. What they understood was the whole symbolic dimension, that culture occurs in the domain of the symbolic and requires the effect of symbolization. That's to say you have to use sign. The very notion of a practice, What is the practice that produces culture? It is the practice of using signs and symbols. That is what distinguishes the cultural domain in the structure of conception. The symbolic and linguistic or signifying character of culture. The notion of the sign as that which symbolizes or is the means of expression, the mode through which can be expressed in the world and be constructed in the world, the meanings which it's particular in society and it chooses to give or is drawn to give of how it occupies the world. Now, what is, of course, going on here, I think you can see, is a change in the way in which a text and its culture is understood. Now, texts are not the second-order productions of a society. as they were, I think, even in the best of cultural studies in the earlier stages. Culture now is given a much more central role in its own terms. It's not subordinate to something else. There's no kind of primacy in the social and economic things which constitute groups, and then there's the culture up above. In short, this second notion radically breaks with the whole idea of a base and a superstructure, of an economic or material basis and the text as part of the superstructure. The first phase of cultural studies is, of course, already chipping away at that whole idea because it's giving much more centrality to the cultural domain than the old idea of base superstructure used to give. But still, cultural studies is still, in the first phase, is still retaining the shadow of a notion of something more primary and culture which is more secondary or dependent on other things. Structuralism lays those two things side by side. Yes, it says there is the practice of economy, there is the practice of political life, and there is the practice of cultural life. You can't have economic life without cultural things, and you can't have culture without economy. There's no priority between these different structures. The one doesn't give rise to another. They are, as it were, intersecting domains. And one has to understand them in a much more autonomous or relatively autonomous way. One has to understand them each as their own sphere of social productivity. Productivity of the text and of culture as a production. The second way in which this structuralist phase breaks with the first is clearly with the notion of who is the subject of a culture. Who is the subject of a culture? In the first phase, the subject of a culture was clearly major social groups. There was the group, and then there was the culture which was expressive of its life. So the nation and the national culture. or people and its popular culture, or the major classes and the class cultures, or subgroups and subcultures. You see, there was the notion of a hierarchy of groups to which corresponded their appropriate cultures. Though the subject of cultures, culture was always understood as collective. No one person has a culture. Culture is always a result of shared activities, a shared social situation. But in the first phase, the subject of culture was clearly, as it were, the collective social subjects. A class, a group, a nation, a people, a society. One of the things that structuralism does is to break with the notion of the unified subject of culture. Structuralism says there is no unified subject there. no whole homologous subject that speaks its culture. It recognizes the enormously contradictory, the broken up, the fragmented character of the subjects of culture. Indeed, as you know, Levi Strauss tries paradoxically to turn the whole paradigm upside down. Instead of people speaking their culture, producing their culture, Levi-Strauss says the culture produces them. It's the other way around. The languages pre-exist us. The language we speak already exists. Indeed, we as subjects already exist. We are spoken for in the language through which we speak. When we say we produce the culture by the use of a discursive and signifying element, well, we didn't make them up. You can't make up a language. No one person can make up a language. You can use it in your own particular way, but you have to put yourself inside a language which exists before you in order to use it. You have to be in the symbolic formation in order to use the symbols. You have to be in the tradition to modify the tradition. Therefore, these things preexist us. So the structuralist view is that culture constitutes the subject rather than the subject creating the culture. That's a huge shift. That's what is called the anti-humanism of the second position. Because the first position, of course, placed man at the center. Man, the group, human groups, the human, and then his great creations, human culture. But structuralism places culture at the center and has the individuals kind of bobbing around up there, trying to find their place, very often losing their place. But it's completely the other way around. You can understand why, to many of the people in the first phase in cultural studies, the second phase is totally scandalous. It's absolutely scandalous. I mean, it cuts to the very quick of everything that they've struggled to believe. There are no human beings. There is no grand production. There is no, you know, the infinite dialogue of human creativity, endlessly producing new structures and new forms and new meanings this thing says people are simply the points along which culture steps culture has to march and it chooses to kind of march through our brains every now and again it steps on you and you and you and you but it's going on and we sort of feel deeply individual when it passes our way you know it graces it we feel the wind against it we are cultural subjects if we have been recognized, but then it's gone. It goes on, and we just happen to be there to give it a sort of help it's on its way. Culture constitutes the subject. It's the destruction or de-centering of a universe which understands culture as the great production of human society. Well, I want to say just a word about the third phase, Because the third phase is an extension, a deepening of some of the breaks or ruptures which occurred in the second phase. This is the phase of post-structuralism. Because the phase of structuralism, you know, still had the idea, in spite of all the, in fact, in spite of the ways in which it was breaking up the intellectual landscape in cultural studies, it still had the will, the hope, the nostalgia that there was still a scientific method which could grasp these complex totalities that were not continuous with one another. Though they weren't corresponding to one another, though they were, as it were, only articulated with one another, structuralism nevertheless had the notion that if you stepped away from that rich experiential surface of culture. You could find the laws of culture or the rules of culture or the codes of culture which would explain the infinite variety. You see what that method is. That is the method of structural linguistics. Of course, you could think of every cultural production like a new sentence. Now, there's no law for sentences. We talk sentences all the time. You could never have a law that would cover every sentence. What you can have a law of is a law which governs how sentences are constructed. The rules, the deep structure of the grammar can tell you how it is. People can say whatever they like. You see the beauty of the structuralist paradigm that the surface of a culture is infinitely expanding. It will always be new. There will always be new things. But there will always be a deep structure which remains the same. The laws of the language don't change, though the sentences change every day, every hour, every minute. So what you study is no longer those different forms, which in the first phase I was trying to suggest you cut across and try to look at what is there. You no longer study that. You move away from that surface into the deep structure. That is where still a science of culture, as Levi Strauss called it, A science of culture is still possible. The analysis of the codes and the rules of combination and variation which generated the rich variety of surface forms of a culture. But post-structuralism says not even that. Not even that. Not even down, deep down there, you know, is the last hope of a science of culture. Not even down there. And why? Why is there no hope that one can grasp the totality, this much more complex totality, intellectually, by getting some form of analysis which gives us the whole? Where has that gone to? Well, in post-structuralism, it's gone in two directions. First of all, by recognizing that it is impossible to stop meaning. It is simply impossible to stop the infinite proliferation of meanings. It's just not possible. It's not possible to give it any limit. I'll come back to that question in a minute. But provisionally, there is no limit to culture. Of course, each culture has its own repertoire, its own range. But to say that we know what the culture would be in the 21st century, no hope. Don't try to make your intellectual reputation by telling you what the culture is going to be like in the 21st century. The one fixed thing is that you're going to be wrong. We don't know. Why is that? Because that is the nature of language. That is the nature of civilization. That you can always put it another way. Culture is always able to put it another way. To put it another way. What it said yesterday, it can put another way this time. And each time it puts it in another way, it says something slightly different. so there are no rules which as it were fix and limit which say that is what culture can say and the rest is unsayable because the next time culture will say that as well and you have to extend there is always what the traditions call the infinite slippage of the sign the sign is always just out of reach that's what criticism is criticism is the hunt for the sign which stops. If only it would stop. When you look around, you say to yourself, well, all the books on Shakespeare must now be written. There's no point writing another one. Just go next door. The entire shelf is full of books written about Shakespeare. The last thing about Shakespeare must already have been said. Not true. Not true. Next year, somebody will see Shakespeare in a slightly new way write yet another book. There's an infinite progression of possible things to say about Shakespeare. They're going to go on reconstructing Shakespeare, reproducing Shakespeare, ad infinitum. And so long as that is so, well, it doesn't mean that you don't know something about Shakespeare, but every analytical, theoretical structure is provisional. It has to have an open piece, because it has to have an opening to where culture is going next, to the next interpretation, and the next meaning. So the infinite meaningfulness of culture means that theoretically one has to be satisfied with, how can I put it, with provisional raids, theoretical raids. There's no point at which you can tie it up. You can't close the door and say, nothing will get out. I'm going to tell you about English culture because now we have it all. It's not true because, of course, I'm going to tell you about my, the way in which I understand English culture. And that will add another level of me. The proliferation of discourses and of signs goes on in culture. And it's not possible to freeze it in some way at which it can be seen in a scientific way. That dream that Levi-Strauss had, which is that he would understand the rules of transformational grammar, of the myths. And after that, you couldn't tell him a myth that he couldn't place. That was his dream. His dream was to have, you know, a computer. That's where he thought, that's where he found the idea in the beginning. But he called it a model, a combinatory. Yeah, combinatory. A kind of pocket calculator. And you tell Levi-Strauss a new story, and he would bring it out. That's not a new one. Look. And he would produce it for you. He would say, you did that by doing that, and that, and that, and that. And the Indians used to put it that way, and you put it that way. But I know it. I know it, basically. I never heard the story of what I know it. And post-structuralism has to say, I don't know it. That's new. That's new. Something has escaped. So it's not that people have given up the notion of analysis. Post-structuralism hasn't given up the notion of analysis. But it lives with the continuous recognition of the limitlessness of culture. It lives with the recognition of the infinite open-endedness of historical change and transformation, of the constant deferring, deferring, putting off to the next day, putting off to the next text of meaning, the meanings which go away from you even as you try and grasp it. You think of writing whatever essays it is that you're writing on your current topic, and you know that you will get as far as you can humanly get, But there will always be something which evades. Read somebody else's essay. They started from somewhere else. They got to another point. They cross yours at a certain place. They're crossed in their intersections. And there are places where a lot of lines cross at a particular period. But to get them all into one totality, the production of a culture in the singular, which is the production of one group, which stops at a certain point, is not fair. That's the one way in which post-structuralism has reconceptualized culture. And the second way is about the subjects of culture. The subjects of culture. For what post-structuralism has done is to recognize the collapse of those great social totalities, class, nation, people, when conceived as integrated groups. a class conceived as having what we used to call, you know, an ideology. We used to speak of the bourgeois class. One, the bourgeois class with bourgeois ideology. We didn't even call it a or the, just bourgeois ideology. As if there was a correspondence between the class and its ideas. Well, those great totalities have broken up. And in the second phase, as I tried to say, it was seen that ideology and culture helped to construct the subject. So the subjects were displaced from the center of the universe of cultural studies. In the third phase, I mean, the subject of cultural production and of cultural consumption comes back into the picture, but not in the old integrated way. not in the old integrated way. There is a new conception of subjectivity as itself a construction, of subjectivity as itself contradictory, of subjectivity as itself open-ended, fragmentary, of subjectivity in its unconscious as well as its conscious dimension. The new conception of what the subjects and subjectivities of a human culture are. I'll say more about that as I go on but I want to give way to this mapping, these three great problematics the last time I was in Naples I talked about two problematics and if at that point I had been in the illusion of the second phase that I'd wrapped it up, I would have said and that's it, I don't need to go back to that question because I know it now, there are two problematics that's not true, there are three problematics and probably four or five, or six, could I live that long. But there are now three, certainly three. Since last I was there, another whole problematic is coming to existence. Now, I want to say just one thing more about these great mappings, because analytically, I've been trying to show you what is distinct as you move from one phase to another. But I want to remind you that when you get breaks in thought of that kind, you don't ditch the whole of the first baggage. I mean, you don't dump the whole of the first and move on as if you've never thought anything else in the world. You take over certain ideas which seem too inadequate in the earlier phase, but come back in a new way. Yes, these are transformations. You're working on the ground of a theory which is no longer adequate, but which had something to say. It wasn't entirely stupid. So you shouldn't see these three mappings as if, you know, there is a river of blood between one and the other. If you began as one, you cannot be the other. And if you signed up as the second, you know, they will ask you for your passport before you can pass into the third. Some of us have had many. Some of us are the subjects of culture I've just been describing to you, yes, constantly evolving. And so we are not one person, Stuart Hall, who was in at the founding of the Center for Cultural Studies. We are that person, sometimes called Stuart Hall, who has been in all three problematics and who has inside his head a bit of the problems posed by all those three ideas, those three theories. So you want to keep the notions distinct because, of course, the texts and the theories and theories form a, you know, they're arguing with one another. They form what I want to call a formation. There are formations, but formations are not closed. They're not self-sufficient. They're not autonomous. Yes, but they're kind of groupings. They're like the nucleus. Lines come into them. For a time, the argument is around Williams and Holland. For a time, the argument is around Barthes and Althusser. For a time, the argument is around Lacan, Foucault, and Derrida. Yes, those are the nodal points. But people have ideas, et cetera, have moved from one to another. So there's a long displacement through the different paradigm. Paradigms are not, I would just say it was, I think, wrong in the notion of a kind of break, final break between one paradigm and another. Actually, Marx was much more adept than I would just say at describing what happened when Marx talks about what he owes to classical political economy of Adam Smith. And he said, Anne Switz is clearly a great thinker. He's a profound, he's the originator of political economy. Of course, I don't agree with him. In some respect, I think he's ideological, but I learn from him. I learn from him every day. You know, Mark sat in the library and wrote pages and pages and pages of notes on some of the most boring political economists in the world. I mean, people who have fortunately long since gone out of existence because he learned from them. He learned from them. So structuralism has learned from culturalism, and post-structuralism has learned from both culturalism, and indeed there are some very funny connections underneath. When culturalism first came into existence, it was very much opposed to that high philosophical tradition, which didn't regard popular culture as a very serious enterprise at all, which had been commenced in the Frankfurt School. And for a long time, nobody could refer to the Frankfurt School without a kind of grimace on their face. These days, everybody has rediscovered Adorno. Everybody is reading the dialectic of the Enlightenment as if it's a fresh text. So, yes, there are all kinds of underground connections where books that don't figure too well in the first phase become books that everybody reads in the second. And people are constantly revalued. Reputations go up. So you mustn't think of theory as in boxes. But you must see that they have different formations. And that there's a kind of history to the way in which thought changes. It shifts its axis. And I've been trying to depict to you how the thinking about culture over the last 30 years has shifted its axis in about three major mappings. Okay, I want to talk about the text. I'm going to stop here and see whether I've entirely lost you. If we're in China, I'd get to do calisthenics at this stage. You would get up and... Is there anything... This is one of the words at the center of the shift from one mapping to another. I think the difference is this I think culturalism regards experience as the most primary evidence because it's how people actually live a situation. So if you said, you know, what we want to do is we don't take the Industrial Revolution, major upheaval in English society. Well, now you can study, you know, what the new technologies were and how they were financed and the changing class relations, etc. But what does it feel like, you know, to be somebody who began as a peasant and ends up inside a factory? What does it feel like to be uprooted in that way? Well, if we could get a record of that experience, people, I think, feel you're coming closest to the structure of feeling, what it really feels like. Now, obviously, that is a privileged form of evidence. And one of the problems about working with very formal texts, like literary texts, et cetera, is that they are very often, you know, their formal elaboration is very high. They're generic. Their genre properties are very elaborate. They're operating in a tradition, and all of that tends to filter out experience. Experience gets reworked, rephrased. So it's very difficult to get to the primary experience of a historical change. And I think culturalism, therefore, regards experience, the actual lived ways in which people go through a historical period as in a sense the most authentic but the most difficult kind of evidence to get, but the most authentic. Now, structuralism must say that experience only takes place within certain cultural categories. Those categories are given in the culture itself. So two people from different cultures would have different ways of saying to you how they experience the same actual historical transition. So that structuralism says experience is not innocent. Indeed, some structuralists would say that because experience seems to be so authentic, that's the reason why it's the most ideological of all. you see if you had a written text you can see the ideology at work in it but if somebody comes to you and says I'm not a very elaborate person I'm not very well educated I just tell you from the heart how it feels it's very difficult to see the ideological and cultural structures which are operating there, very difficult so the structuralist would say you have to be most very valuable evidence but you have to be most beware of it because it seems to be non-cultural. It seems to be natural. And when a discourse presents itself as natural, that is, of course, the moment of its greatest idealization. It's what is called the naturalization effect. So structuralism is very deeply suspicious of the so-called authenticity of experiencing. And that's a good way of seeing why in the first, with the notion of human practice, culture as human practice, culture as the lived experience is very highly valued. And why structuralism, which displaces or breaks with that idea of culture as expression, culture as the lived, why it will be very sensitive to the notion of experiencing. And there's an argument about that very question between myself and Edward Thompson. Yes, it occurs at a very heated occasion and is reprinted in a volume called Popular History, People's History and Socialist Theory. People's History and Socialist Theory, in which Thompson attacks the notion of Althusserianism, theoreticism, cultural studies, and as it were, grounds much of what he's saying against theory, yes, in the primacy of experience. And my piece, which is called In Defense of Theory, tries to say that we can't, you know, experience is just another piece of evidence. Experience is a text like among other texts. How is experience given? Somebody has to tell you something. And when they tell you something, their way of telling you is informed by the forms of storytelling. They tell you it with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And those things are not usually experienced like that. Things are usually experienced, the end, and then the middle, which goes on, you know, with no beginning. That's how we live life, but you tell it the other way around. So the experience is structured by the forms of narrative in the culture, for example. Yes, it's formulated. It has rules of how to experience. Also, of course, experience is deeply influenced by unconscious emotions, by fantasy. Yes, you see what I mean? Yes, so the notion of experience as the naturally real doesn't take into account these other things which are there as well, other dimensions which one has to interpret. One of the things, even if you don't go take the full structuralist critique of experience, one of the things you would have to take from structuralism is that experience itself has to be read. Yes, it's not just, it doesn't present its own meaning on the surface. You have to read it like you read anything else. Experience is just another text alongside other texts. Other questions? and then I'll stop. I'm not going to talk too much about the text in the first phase or in the second. I now don't want to take it in that historical mapping. But I want to say something about what has happened to our notion of the text as a result of this development in cultural studies. And I'm addressing this question of the text because, well, for two reasons. One, because you work with texts, still, as it were, literary students, heavily in quotation marks, three quotation marks, literary students. You work with texts. But also because of the way in which I answered you, which is that all the evidence is a text. All kinds of things have to be read. The economy is a text. It also has to be interpreted. Now, naturally, if you try to look at capitalism and see how it works, you wouldn't understand it for a moment. Not for a moment. Because, of course, it looks like it's working completely differently from how it actually works. So it has to be read as well. So I'm using text in that broad sense. So texts are very important, but they aren't any longer in the place where the text was in traditional literary studies, which regards the text as the expression of a great man great thought, great ideas, part of a literary tradition, autonomous from other social and historical things, standing free, an ideal up there, to which criticism was a kind of low-flying honor. The critic bowed when he came into the presence of Milton. He'd say, I'm very pleased to be in this hallowed and religious atmosphere. I'm glad you allowed me once again to approach Paradise Lost, you know, and here are a few humble thoughts. The text was there. And you, as it were, made what most critics did, an essay. You made an essay at it. The word essay means to try. Yes, you tried, but you could never, of course, reach to the full plenitude of the text. You could never encompass it all. Who could? but you would make a little gesture, the humble critical gesture of recognition, etc. Why that text was there and not the other 15 that were around it at the time it was produced was a question which was only softly whispered. You could make a minor critical reputation by looking at the minor works, but that critic was very humble indeed. I mean, he had to kind of come into the field of literature practically bent over double. because he did not approach Paradise Lost. He was much humbler than that. He approached the minor Milton study or the lesser known dramatists around Shakespeare's period. He was practically non-existent. He was like the snake in Paradise Lost. He came in only on his stomach. So the text had an imposing veracity. It's a full positivity. And anything else was, what else was there was hardly, very difficult indeed to recognize. Well, what has happened to the notion of the text in that fully plenitudinous way, in a text which embodies within itself everything? Because I think implied in that critical attitude was the notion that if you submitted yourself to the internal structures of the text, you could, as it were, read out from that, not only about the text, but about everything else. You could read the whole culture from the text. And a great deal of how one understood English culture in the period before cultural studies was an assumption that these texts in the literary tradition were not only the only but the best kind of evidence about what English culture was like. Now, I mean, just think for a moment what that claim means. Just think for a moment about how many women could contribute to the production of culture in the 19th century. Okay? Now then think about the existing great texts and great authors shaped by the fact of the relative absence of women from cultural production. Then think about now taking this highly selective bunch of texts as the real evidence for what the whole of English culture is like in a historical period. It's a ludicrous and analytic procedure. I mean, it wouldn't stand up to historical evidence. It's how it survived for so long. It's a mystery. But that is really people would, critics who had read nothing but step from one text to another, would pronounce about the great ideas of English culture and about the great forms of English cultural life from within the text. Well, that notion of the hierarchy, the given hierarchy, plenitude, and autonomy of the text has, of course, been broken down as a result of the succession of paradigms that I've been trying to sketch before, the culturalist, structuralist, and post-structuralist approaches, have destructured, detotalized that conception of the text. Now, it doesn't mean that the text is not still there, because, as I tried to say in response to the question about experience, actually, the term text has a much wider reference than it had before. What is implied in the word text is that everything has a symbolic form. Everything in culture has a symbolic form. And therefore, everything in culture has some aspect of the textual about it. You can read a building. You can read architecture. You can read the way in which a factory is laid out. You can read the way in which a household operates. So the text has ceased to be restricted to books on a shelf or the particular forms of literary production in which a culture operates, novels, poetry, etc. It has a much wider meaning. It connotes this idea of reading, of the fact that a thing is produced, a text is produced, language has to be produced, culture is produced. So culture is like a text, And the analysis has to respect the textual quality of culture. And this is a very important new way of understanding why text and texture has such a central meaning. But I'm not really talking at this stage about that wider meaning of text. I'm still talking about what does now one do with the particular text that one still has to study? And how does one begin to move to the culture from this thing? What is it now if it is not this, His Majesty, the text, in that older sense, with all its patriarchal overtones? What is it? Well, first of all, it's incomplete. No text is complete. Every text has a false ending. A false ending. The ending may appear to be natural, but that naturalness is, as we've been saying, it is part of its construction. Part of the construction is to make the end, make the life in the text come to an end, whereas the life outside does not, does not come to an end. So it gives you the sense of an ending. It gives you the pleasure of the appropriateness of an ending. But it must not be mistaken for the end of the text Because as we've tried to say, as I've tried to say, about culture in generally, that text will go on. The next person who reads it will partly reinvent that text. The next essay you write about it will reconceptualize the text. You will start from a different position from other critics and see something which has not been seen before. That will be another version of the text. In that sense, textuality is open-ended. And therefore, one has to treat each text as having its imposed finality. The finality, the closure of the text is itself, first of all, a fantasy. It's the fantasy of the good end, of the appropriate end. It's the fantasy of dying well. The dream that we all have in our bed, surrounded by friends, students saying, what a wonderful teacher you were. You know, you shaped my whole mind. What a good life. Yes, the family is saying, what a good life you have had. Yes, and everyone else is saying, and the inheritance is so large, etc. Yes, that sense, that sense of an ending is what the text is. Yes, it is bringing life to a proper conclusion, bringing the structure of the text to a proper conclusion. But one has, at the same time, is recognizing that ending as a construction, something produced not there naturally something produced middlemarch does not have to end there you know she could have gone away and said to the man she was living with how can I write the next bit and he might have said put another little bit in and it would have been open another you could write another chapter so to treat the text as incomplete in itself as a complete incompleteness or an incomplete completeness second to see the text as always crossed by different discourses the notion of the unified text of the text which has one voice in it which is written in one register is extremely rare to discover in any literature there's hardly any text of any substance, however you rank it in the scale, great literature, minor literature, which has only one voice in it. Texts are layered by different discourses. You could see the text almost as the point at which the different discourses intersect. In that sense, a text is also interrogatory. It has a question mark over it. It asks, how can these different voices fit together? It asks, what is the whole which these different voices construct together? It has a question mark over it. I say that because we always think of it as having a full stop. Yeah, full stop. As final, as certain about itself. The greater the text, the surer it is about itself. And I think we have to see the text as unsure about itself. unsure where it came from and unsure where it is going to. Certainly unsure about the different voices that are within it. If we still respect the cultural practice of writing, the cultural practice of writing has to be thought of now as a form of domination. You'll think of Shakespeare as standing on top of these unruly voices that need to be spoken that keep saying to him, I won't have a word. The text is like Hamlet with the ghost below. Yes, and Shakespeare is up above wanting to control the scene. But somebody keeps knocking from down there saying, I want a voice in this text. I want to appear here. Yes, the unseen, the unconscious of the text is constantly breaking through. And the achievement of form is not something natural. The writers have the great gift of form. The form is an imposition. The form is the imposition of limit when the language is limitless. You remember what I said before, that what has happened in structuralism is a recognition that language goes on, the infinite possibility of discourse. But then you can't say everything or you would have only one text. Only one person tried to write that, and that's James Joyce, and he got lost. He did think that Finnegan's Wake would be the one text. If he could really get to the end Billingham's Wake, you wouldn't need all the others because it would have everything from Homer, Shakespeare, Swift, everybody would be in it. It would be only one text, but he couldn't make it. There's never only one text in that sense. Discourse, that they emphasize that without also recognizing the limit, the stop, the closure, the finitude. That has to be imposed, but one has to see it as something which is as it were imposed on the discursive structure of texts. Next, one has to see texts as a family, as an extended family. There is never one text that doesn't have an aunt or a cousin or a second cousin or three nephews further down the line. They are not so distinguished. They are not the grand paterfamilias, you know. They're the minor branches of the family. It's not the one that inherited, they're the one that got left behind or that went overseas or that nobody recognized or the bastard children etc. But the text always has these other relations. Some people that came before it from which it is learned and some people will interrupt it and some people who will pick it up later on. So one has to see the connection between texts. Texts are not closed in on themselves But most texts partly refer to other texts like themselves. They occupy a kind of family. The intertextuality of the text. The fact that one can map or locate any text in its internal relations with other texts like it, including the text which it is not like. Some texts are ironic about other texts, but you have to know the ones that they are ironic about before you understand them. Early Jane Austen is exactly like that. Unless you know the earlier Romantic novels from which it is a break, you don't understand what is going on. Because partly it is a text against another text. And all the way through to modern writing, modern writing is full of internal references, echoes, refusals, but that is the intertextuality of the text itself. So the notion of plucking this one poem, you know, what Leavis used to call those words in that order, those words in that order, it's a wonderful illusion which only generated in Cambridge. Those words in that order, it's only in the Cambridge garden that you could think that you could get those words in that order and that it would stand still like that. You know, that is how Pope wrote it. That is how Levis and Queen Levis read it. And his students and other people would go on reading it like that. Of course, it's a wonderful, important idea there, which one has picked up. The idea of submitting oneself to the strategies, the textual strategies, the materiality of the language of the text. Leavis wasn't wrong about that. Very important. Before that, a lot of critics used not to write about the text at all, but about Shakespeare's world and the great ideas, etc. Leavis at least said, look at the text. Look at it has a structure. It has a shape. Submit yourself to that. But he did think you could isolate and freeze it in a way which would hold the traditions of interpretation forever. And I'm talking about the opposite of that. the intertextuality, the interconnectedness of the literary text. And the fact, of course, that that interconnectedness goes right across the existing traditional boundaries. The relations of the text are probably in popular literature, in writing that was not famous, that has never been preserved, etc. That's why I use the analogy of the family with the poor relations. One has to see the poor relations of the text. Next, one has to recognize what has come to be called the pleasures of the text. The pleasures of the text. And I mean the pleasures of the text in two different ways. First of all, one has to recognize the unconscious of the text. It's those feelings and emotions, attitudes and beliefs, etc., which are not part of the dominant structure of the text, which are not, as it were, in the consciously worked structuring of the text by the author, but which nevertheless form a part of what is being said, often outside of the author's awareness altogether. But of course, by the pleasures of the text, I mean also what it says, what it says, that nobody would read all those texts for nothing. Nobody would read it, you know, for the sheer Puritan duty of driving yourself through another text. That would take you through about three, and then after that you would really stop. I know the Puritan drive is deeply embedded in Western character, but it's not as deeply embedded as all that. No, one reads the text because of the pleasures that it gives you. One reads the text because one gets something out of the play of the text. And in addition to the beetle-browed seriousness of criticism, and I quote Levis, he's a very great critic, English critic, but he was the most beetle-browed critic that there ever was. There was nobody I've ever met or encountered more serious than Levis. I mean, there were serious people, and then there was Levy's. He was really serious. And the notion, you know, if you'd said to Levy's, FR, does, you know, women in love give you any pleasure? It's an unthinkable question. When Levy's used to lecture, you know, he used actually, A, he used to wear, you know, the equivalent of a hair shirt. I mean, a thick wool shirt in the height of summer. And he always, in the middle of the lecture, buttoned it down to hair, said you could, and you expect a flagellation. and expected him to be slightly flicked with the text, as it were. Because, now, of course, that seriousness was historically very important. Very important. Because when I went to university, my tutor said to me, nobody takes literature seriously. Literature is the business of civilization. You shouldn't study it at the university at all. You should imbibe it like fine wine. You know, it's the accompaniment of fine civilization, of the finely attuned and developed personality. Well, next to that, thank God for Levis, because he took something seriously. He knew something was at stake. My old two didn't know anything was at stake except how to open the next sherry bottle. Levis knew that something was at issue. He was very serious. But in addition to the seriousness of culture, one also has to recognize the pleasure of culture. And the problem about pleasure, as you know, is that you can't put it into bottles. so the text will give you all kinds of pleasures you are not supposed to have there are certain appropriate pleasures to the Shakespeare play but you will find yourself in what Barthes calls the jouissance of the text that unexpected surge that picks you up and gives you that feeling of slight orgasmic over the topness which occurs in the oddest places in text yes it just picks you by the throat Isn't that wonderful? Those bits, those pages which you read again and you can't communicate to anybody as why you read them. They just do something for you. They connect, they resonate somehow. They let loose something. They move the feelings in an unexpected way. That surge of the text, the pleasures of the text. And what one has learned to do is to take seriously the pleasures of the text. If you take the pleasures of the text seriously, you cannot any longer take seriously the way in which texts are divided up and attributed to their proper place in the tradition of literature. Because the oddest texts give you that surge of pleasure. I mean, take melodrama. Take the whole range of 40s films. Or take television serials, which one is supposed to be extremely serious about. Leavis hite about. I don't know whether you know that Leavis was an absolute devotee of the cinema and loved especially westerns. He hated so-called serious films but he wouldn't be caught dead going to them. He and his wife used to cycle to them in Cambridge at two o'clock in the afternoon but only the well-structured really popular cinema. That is what I call the pleasure of the text. Yes whatever else Levy thought he was doing, he could respond to the pleasure of seeing the marines come over the hilltop or the Indians bite the dust. Yes, there was something there which moved him, which connected with his fantasies, whatever it was. And we have learned to take those, not as incidental to the text, you know, the kind of music off stage, which you don't need to listen to. We've learned we have to listen to the pleasures of the text. Next, we have to learn to see the text in its institutional setting. Texts come out of particular institutions. They come out of particular apparatuses. They're part of the cultural production. Indeed, modern texts are the part of the cultural industries of a society. There's no point thinking about writing as if it's done in the garret, with the single bulb coming down and the perspiration and just the barrow. Modern cultural production especially doesn't produce any text that way any longer. So one has to understand the institutional setting of the text, that the text comes out of a formation, it comes out of an institution, that literature itself is the product of an institutionalization, that there have to be academies and there have to be professors and there have to be lectures and students and universities and the state and the Ministry of Education before there can be any text to be studied at all and the press and television. You need those institutions. Marx had a funny remark, you know, where he said, without crime there would be no judges. Crime produces the judges. And you might think, as it were, that one needs those institutions for the production of the text. so the idea that one can take the texts out of their institutional setting and as it were see them autonomously gives us a thin notion of what the text is about next one has to see the text in its relations of power now I said I would come back to this question I'm nearly finished I said I would come back to this question and I want just to say a word about this the text is always in a set of relations of power. And the reason for that is because each text is... each text has a positive and negative side. In order to construct its meaning, the text must establish its own positivities. It must say, the word is like this. There is a prince in Denmark who feels like this, who is in this situation. It has to give its positive face. And each time it chooses to give its positive face, there are a thousand unwritten stories which it does not give. Now the positivity of the text, the fact that it structures meaning and understanding of the word in this way rather than that, is itself an act of power. Because it is the beginning of a definition. and to have the power to define is to have real cultural power the power to define to define what the world is what it means what events in the world mean what we are about what the signification of things are that power is real cultural power it's cultural and ideological power and each text takes its position in that field in the disposition of power each text speaks to some people and not to others each text speaks about a certain life and not about another certain life each text mediates between people in certain positions of power to other people in positions of power it speaks from the dominated to the dominant or from the dominant to the dominated but it is one of the mediating points in the relationships of power so partly because there is always a link between knowledge and power since texts give knowledge, even fictional knowledge, fantasy knowledge that is knowledge too the knowledge which the text produces is a knowledge which is inscribed by power but the relations which a text contracts with its producers, its receivers its relationships with the rest of the world are relationships of power there is in that sense no innocent text no innocent text the text is always beyond innocence next the text is in the world the text is in the world what I mean by that is certainly not that the text can be read off from the world that you need to study the world and then as it were you will understand what the texts are The text has its own materiality, its own relationships. But one must always, as it were, look for the connections which that text opens up with other relationships which are not necessarily of a literary or indeed specifically a textual kind. One of the ways to remind oneself of that aspect of the text is to read a text for what it does not say. Every text can be read for what it does not say. The real text from its absences, from its silences, from its gaps. This is not, you know, this doesn't mean that we are privileged about texts. It doesn't mean that we know better than the author. But it does mean that we can see what I would call the underside of the text, the dark side of the text. To produce a text is to produce the lit side. It's to produce the stage. Here is the play. Well, to see the underside of the text is to look behind the scenes. To see the wires that go up and down, the scene shifts, the people scurrying around. Each text is double-faced, is Janus-faced, Bart said. And the other side, the other side of the text is one of the ways of seeing, of understanding what constructs the text as an object but which leaves it as a set of relations. Text is always a set of relations. Text is a set of forces. Forces often in conflict with one another. No text expresses one whole ideology. There's always more than one ideology crisscrossing a text. Texts are always contradictory because they, as it were, seek to form the resolutions in the argument between conflicting ideas or conflicting possibilities or conflicting relationships. That is what gives the drama, the dramatic element to the text, why the text is a kind of textual or discursive enactment, why each text is a kind of performative. It's a performative statement, not a reflective statement. It's not a mirror on the wall to the world. It is a reproduction or representation of the world. Now, this doesn't mean that work on text is unimportant, that one can't see the articulation between text and culture, text and history. All of those relationships are, I think, opened up by this new conception of the text. What is, I think, closed off is the kind of self-satisfaction that used to accompany literary and cultural criticism. yes the kind of certainty of one definitive reading which would be absolute and which would be uncontestable the uncontestable reading that is to say the text perfectly covered by its criticism a criticism which explained everything about it which left nothing unsaid and now the recognition of the incompleteness the fragmentary character of the text and of the open textuality of the world and of culture makes us as critics and analysts obliged to accept the text and its differences the text and what it is not the text in relation to other things it pluralizes the text it opens it out it lets light in it's like throwing up the window one lets the world in the world will not destroy the text the new ideas will not level the importance of what has been said. The great figures of the past will not stop speaking to us because we have new and unorthodox things to say in response to the words that they say to us. Yes, that is not, culture in that sense is not locked up in bottles, you know, like good wine, and as soon as you open the cork, pay a lot, you have to pay a lot of money for it, You can only get it in certain places, mostly on the ground, but when you bring it up, take the bottle off, the good is gone. Culture is not like that. It's not like that. It's like working in a vineyard, and like producing another strain. It's endless transformations on meaning. So one has to accept the limit of the provisional closures which enable us to study text and the textuality of the world, but one has to see also the worldliness of texts. Yes, texts as helping to constitute the world, not a product of the world, but part of the production of the world. And in that way, I think it is possible to read the culture within the text, not to see the culture through the text, but to read the culture in the text. It's in the structures of the textuality of texts, as well as in a lot of other kind of evidence, that we can see what culture really is. Now I'm finished. Yes? I agree with I agree with part of what Benjamin said and not with another part. Because I think that there was a period, and it's partly in Benjamin, but it's even more in some of the linguistic critics of the period. The notion that one could find a formal and linguistic way of analyzing what is literary about the text. that as it were, the literary language was a particular idiom within the broad set of languages of a society. There were certain features that estranged the language from the normal usage of language. And that very strangeness of the language was what constituted its literariness. Now, there were some very great attempts, mainly by Russian and the Prague Linguistic School, to try to identify and pin down the rules for creating the literary specialness of a text. And though they are full of insight, I don't think that they work as an analytic system. So if what Benjamin meant was to refer to that, I think that that is a hope which has not been fulfilled by theory or by criticism. But what I think Benjamin meant, and this part is the part that I agree with, I think he meant more that there is in the idea of the literary a certain, what he called, aura. It's a kind of magic. And the magic came from the notion that each text was autonomous in itself and different, special from any other. The notion of the pure originality, the unrepeatability of the text. And Benjamin is one of the great theorists of the modern era because he understands that every text has repetitions in it. The greatest text has bits which have been said before. There's no text which is autonomous in that sense. And what he saw was the end of this magical spirit that surrounds the text, that makes it a kind of religious object. And the beginning of what I've been trying to call the worldliness of the text. of texts that we would tear up. We would make new texts by tearing up old ones. Or like Benjamin did, by borrowing from them, by quoting from them. You would make a text by quoting everybody else's text. That quotation was a form of textuality, of literariness. And that particularly with the development of the modern media of communication, that precisely the rearrangement of existing elements would be what was new, not, you know, something that has never, Do you remember the phrase? That which has never been thought or said before. The most special text was that which has been never thought or said before. And there is no such text. Because those thoughts have always been thought in some form before. They've been transformed, but the transformations don't disconnect them from their past and their futures. In that sense, I think Benjamin is a very profound insight. The end of the text as a religious object. And the end of the artist, you know, as kind of special with a kind of mana, you know, a special sign on the forehead, you know. I am the chosen person because I can manipulate language. You know, modern kids of 17 manipulate language. They manipulate it like that. And they don't have anything on their forehead. And they haven't been taught it. They just manipulate it because signs are there to be played with, to be moved around. though Benjamin saw that there was a very profound change coming in cultural and cultural criticism and he gave us one of the finest metaphors for it where he said that criticism would have to practice on the text like a surgeon you'd have to cut into the text not preserve it whole and worship it like an object you'd have to take it apart like a machinist see how it ticks like a child with a toy how does it work this is King Lear how does it work let me have a bit of that I'll have this scene and I just want to look at this bit take it apart and in that sense it's a very Benjamin foresees it's a very modern modernist indeed post-modernist attitude towards the unified nature of text but I think it's very profound Thank you. including economical territories and idolatry. And here we reside in the second field, etc. Look for Pirobe Shishi. Inside the surface of agriculture is when varieties of subtests and the roles that are inside of real disorder. And at the end, we may say that in the last year, the third days, the fourth sector has restricted its attention to the self-sets and to relationships that occur to the for the beneath-binger culture. First of all, about the three phases. Yes, I think I would accept the way in which you describe the three phases. The first looks at the relationship between a human group and the culture which arises from it. to regard the culture as expressive of the ideas, emotions, etc., attitudes, beliefs of the group. It works through totalities, and it works through an idea of a correspondence between the two. In that sense, even the structuralism of Goldman, which calls itself structuralism, and has learned a great deal from structuralism, is still, in my terms, working within the problematic of the first phase. Yes, because it treats a homology between the artistic production of a particular group in French society and that group's position historically. Yes, and it says that the kind of correspondence between the structure of thought and the structure of the group. The second is, therefore, as you say, more internal. It's less interested in the relationship between culture and non-culture, as it were. And instead of therefore having base superstructure, economic, political, culture, it looks at the relationships within culture. It does have a bottom and a top, but that is now no longer outside of culture. The bottom is now the rules and codes which generate the surface. So there's a surface, deep structure, but all of it within culture. And it's much, it has less to say, relatively, about the relationship between that whole operation inside culture and its internal relations as a society outside. Now, I think that what post-structuralism has done is, of course, to abandon that notion of deep structure and surface. So the surfaces are on the same plane. There is nothing behind. There is nothing behind or deeper than. But I don't know that it would be true to say that it has lost the connection with non-cultural practices because the idea of discourse or the discursive doesn't make any distinction between whether the practice is a practice of producing literature or the practice of producing a family. They're all. Because all social... What the third phase would recognize is that meaning is implicit in any social practice. You can't give an account of any social practice which is without its culture. So culture is in the base. Therefore, as it were, it can study the surface interrelationships Take a very good case. Take Foucault. If you look at Foucault's discipline and punish, there's no distinction made between when people are talking about how to punish and how they punish. Each is a discourse. If people hang them by the neck, that is a discourse. And he says they're operating on the body. And then at another time, they put them in certain kind of rows in cells, and that is a text. And the fact that they also write down things about it, that is neither less nor more textual than the way that they are put in prison. So the collapse between the thing and how one writes about it, between reality and its representation, has been fractured. They've gone like that. Now, the problem then seems to me to be this, and I agree with your fears, which I thought you were expressing, but I think the problem is that in this melange where the things are flattened so there's no depth to it there's no deeper structure it gives the meaning you have to look at it and then in the relationships where very few distinctions are made where everything is discourse or discursive and there is no difference between the real and its representations the problem is to as it were decide what the, where one finds the significant patterns how one identifies the significant patterns and how one explains them can everything as it were combine with everything else does everything coexist with everything else what does explanation mean when one has simply the multifarious surface of social or cultural life now that I mean I think that's a problem which is unsolved I think post-structuralism would say the very demand for such an explanatory form which holds everything together in the head is itself an outmoded description. That's not good enough though, because that account is itself an account. The account that there is no account is an epistemology. either you can say nothing at all or if you can say something you bring it to a limit you have a limit the limit is imposed it's arbitrary it may not be as fixed as it were before the explanations are not now the grand explanations of progress or historical uniformity or repetition or Vico's laws or Marx's laws none of those grand systems but post-structuralism has its system its system is the absence of system its law is the law of perpetual difference and that is as great an epistemology as the epistemology of correspondence so though post-structuralism speaks as if it could get out of this question of explanation and of dominance and subordination of the relationships of power which inscribe this surface because you know the surface ain't just like that there are parts in the center of the surface and parts on the periphery of the surface, the relationships of power. So there are still things to explain and things to analyze. But I think post-structuralism has not yet either faced up to that, the need for explanation, which lies as a kind of unfulfilled requirement at the center of its own project. The answer is no answer. But I think your description of how, you know, the phases have gone is quite correct. And you can see certain things which have been left behind as one doesn't any longer think, as it were, that if you just see, you know, that you can go to the base and read off the text. You don't any longer think even that there are some laws which generate the text, which, you know, if you know the laws, then you have a kind of positivistic or scientific grasp of the laws of the culture. Nobody. You might have some provisional ways of how it works, but nothing, not more than that. So the effect of post-structuralism has been very dramatic, but it doesn't deliver a fully worked out paradigm of its own, in my view. Yes. Maybe it's some more super... I mean, why did you say the book is something that it keeps on course only? Why don't you say that Noreen is such a strong, close relationship? Should be or have no. No, it turns out meaning as born and promised me. Why do I say that? Well, I say it because of the argument I've just made. Yes, because if you insist, quite rightly, on the open textuality of culture, and of its possibility to go on making new meanings, and therefore of the perpetual slippage of signification, meaning is never held, it's impossible to tell how communication takes place at all, how any expression takes place. So I think one nevertheless has to see the limit, but not as an arbitrary limit. One brings the sentence to an end, not because it's the end of what one has to say, but because if you don't bring it to an end, you will never have said anything. In order to say something, one performs the fiction that one has just said all what one is going to say. So I want to emphasize the arbitrariness of that very move that gives it a form. I want to break with the notion that the form is organic and natural. Middlemarch takes that form, takes that shape. I want you to see it as, you know, kind of set down on top of it, as the limit is made. What ideology does, in my view, is to interrupt discourse and set the limit. That's why I make a distinction between language and ideology. In language you can say anything, in ideology you can't. An ideology, an ideological formation is what it is, because although it's not one thing, it sets its limits. There are some things you can say in an ideology, some things that are more difficult to say, and some things you can't say. Not because it's not possible to say them. The language is there. You could say them. But because within that framework, it must have a limit to make sense. I hope to show you that about liberalism. Yes, tomorrow when I talk about liberalism, I'm going to show you that liberalism has changed and changed and changed. It's now a different thing from what it was two centuries ago. But that there is something called the liberal ideological formation, which has always made it possible to say some things and not others, and which says some things more naturally than it says others. Not because the language isn't there. Locke could have said a thousand things. So why does his thought take that liberal form? It takes it because there are invisible boundaries or limits around what can be set inside that formation. That's why my notion of formation is not a notion of a closed thing, but it is the notion of a field and its limits. There is some structure still to my notion of formation. There is a kind of nucleus. Then there are those things which cluster around it. And then there are those things which are more loosely connected. And then there's the margins which are connected to it but are probably part of something else. So I'm looking almost like, I don't know whether you know, a field diagram. It's a diagram. It's as if you're probably more ascientific than I am. But do you know what iron filings are? Have you ever done that experiment in physics where you put a magnet underneath a paper with iron filings and it produces those clusters. It's like the galaxies. There are clusters and there are open spaces. An idea of a formation is of that kind, an ideology of that kind. It's not literally impossible to break the form. Indeed, the form is always negotiated at the boundaries. But there are boundaries. So I emphasize the arbitrariness and the imposition of form-limit-closure. Because I think without them, meaning is impossible. And we still go on, even in our so-called meaningless world, producing proliferations of meanings. Each one requires its own imposed limit. But I don't treat it as if that limit is given naturally, as if there could not have been another form for it. I think there could always have been another form for it. I think just to add what I should say it imposition of the closure and where despite imposition was she right as he being built by the post-pastar also sort of self-consciousness critical self-conscious of the imposition of the but the also you know happy put it which was what the park called fiction so that's the There's also the weak sense of it. So, I mean, I just like to add something to what he said before. Autological structures copy. I think that, of course, meaning is of course to be reduced, and it's always the meaning of the future, even though many could expect the same way. But it does, I do be your skill next to wider question, that is but she's called a relationship, but you know, Yes, I... Yes. Do you want to... Is it the same kind of question? No, they didn't hear. Oh, they didn't hear. They didn't hear. Yes. Well, I can't repeat the question, but if I respond to the question, I think you'll understand what he was saying. Because, I mean, I haven't pulled it together in that way, but much of what I've been saying is pointing in that direction. What he says is that if you recognize the perpetual slippage of meaning, that meaning is never formalized, finalized, that texts are open-ended, then the authority of the critic is also displaced, somewhat displaced. The boundaries are weaker always. One has to recognize the relativism of interpretations. You may be a very, very great critic, but there'll always be some little thing that somebody else sees that you haven't seen. So you can't write with that same scholarly and intellectual authority of the past, you know. I am the great, this is the last word on whatever it is. One has to write with a recognition of the weakness of the boundaries. And I think the same thing is in the description I just gave you of the galaxies, of the galactic structure. but they're not sharp boundaries which separate one formation from another. Yes, they're much looser. So, of course, the movement from the earlier paradigms of cultural studies to the later ones is a movement away from a certain kind of theoreticism. The earlier paradigms did believe that it was still possible. Structuralism believed this preeminently, that it was possible by a supreme act of theoretical intervention to master and grasp by a kind of scientific understanding the whole that had to be said about any of those events or conjunctures or texts. And certainly post-structuralism has problematized that finality of theory. One does not speak about theory with a capital T quite so confidently before anymore. Althusser, if you ever read any Althusser, Althusser had a whole practice that was called theoretical practice. Capital T, capital P. And very few people, about seven people in France, did it. I mean, the rest of us were incapable of doing it. You had to be a high theorist really to get on top of everything, of the laws of all the laws. Now, that sense of theory and the theorist has given way to what I would call theorizing. What I've been doing all afternoon is theorizing. It's called thinking on your feet. It means going on thinking, not being a dope, not being an idiot, using the ideas you have to figure out the world. That's theory. That's theorizing. You try to do it in a systematic, as clear way as possible. That is theory. But there isn't some grand temple called theory, you know, into which you enter and then you break with everything else. You know, I had to say, I said you break with common sense. You're in the realm of pure science. The post-structural position, the critic in the post-structural position is no longer in the position of the absolute expert, of the final scholar. He has to accept the relative weakness of thought. That's why I said, that's why I used the Benjamin analogy. He's like a surgeon who makes a cut. The good surgeon makes a good cut. Other people make a rather blundering cut. But somehow you have to decide to cut. And when you cut as a critic, you always give up everything else. You say, I cut hair. Well, I don't know, you've probably never been in an operating theater in your life, but you can't say, oh, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to cut hair. Sew it up, I'm going to cut hair. It's a risk. Criticism is now a kind of risk, like a wager. My guess is that if I cut it hair, I will see something that I've never seen before. It's a kind of bet you take against yourself. And what it produces is an insight but not the truth. Capital T, that's another thing. All these words in the old theory began with a capital. The text, the theory, theoretical practice, the theorist, the intellectual, the critic. And all of them have gone down to small letters. All of it is lowercase. Criticism, critical inquiry, local knowledge. They're all, they've diminished in their pretensions in the world. That's why when I started out and I said, I hope that you won't treat this as if, you know, I'm descended to tell you the final word about English culture. You will treat it as an interrogation. I had that in mind, that no one can occupy any longer the status of the absolute authority. That is, in Benjamin's days, that idea of the critic is dead along with the text. When the text loses its aura, the critic is no longer a priest. The theorist is no longer in charge of the temple. The doors are open. Anybody can go in. Anybody can go in. You can walk in, run in, run through, lie down, sit down, take off your shoes. There are many ways of being in the temple of culture. Many ways, many routes in and out. And one should, of course, it unnerves one. You feel a kind of quibble. What's this thing that I'm getting into? particularly the students, apprenticing myself to this thing that these folks up there are telling me no longer. Yes, what you're saying is absolutely right. I mean, I do think that one doesn't use the word the truth in the singular any longer. For one thing, because one recognizes is that the truth is always itself a product of power. Yes, in part, it is that which has the power to call itself true, which is true. In the social world, the historical world, that is certainly the case. Yes, and indeed, increasingly, we have to recognize, even in the so-called scientific world, yes, one sees the paradigms of science shift as the relations of truth shift. So it doesn't mean that one is in an infinite plurality. Because of what I call the limit, the necessity for the limit, if there is to be meaning at all, one is not in an infinite plurality of meanings. But at any moment, one is in more than one set of meanings. And one is in the relations which give one set of meanings a greater truth, validity in the world, effectiveness in the world. Part of what one means by truth is, does it become historically effective? So in that sense, I think one has to move away from the absolutism. And the question is, how far one moves? That is the question that you were asking. I think it's the question that you were asking also. It's the question that is bound to concern one in this third phase. once you recognize the relativism of truths and the comparative and plural natures of cultures and the fact that cultures are in the world and part of the relationships of power is one simply, you know, in a meaningless universe in the universe without meaning I don't think it follows that you are I don't think that it follows that we are in the universe without meaning I think what it means is that we have to understand more the fact that meaning is made and can be unmade and is constantly transformed. So one lives with that. One lives with a process. One lives in process. Yes, rather than living with a finality or with nothing. I think there is, you may think that I'm the last of the pre-moderns in this respect. And I think some post-structuralists do think that. but I think there is a way between the infinite meaninglessness of the universe and the fact that it has only one meaning and I don't think that that's just simply a kind of middle way it's the process of holding the tension between those two things it's the recognition of the plurality of truths at the very moment when one truth affirms its dominance. So let me say this to you within another metaphor. Raymond Williams talks once about the notion of dominance. And he says the dominant is a kind of system which tries as far as possible to draw everything into its form. It tries to, if not explained, to cover everything, including those things that are not part of it. what we would call establishes on hegemony. But there is no dominant system which ever can cover both the residues of what is archaic, what has been inherited from the past, and the emergent forces which are about to transform that attempt to hold the dominance. So every dominant is part of the process of transformation by which the dominance is constructed and contested and negotiated, yes, and changed. And that's what I mean by conducting one's analysis and experiment and criticism in the play of the tension between the limit and limitlessness. Yes, as kind of two poles or points of reference. And whenever one speaks about form and limit, one acknowledges, yes, it's that even as one tries to close it up, it's likely to be more open to things we can't see. And as you insist on the openness of the text, you have to recognize that if it didn't come to its limit, it wouldn't be capable of saying anything at all. So one is constantly held in the tension between that meaninglessness and meaning with a capital M. But it's a very difficult tension to hold. And it's not one which generates clear methodologies, for example. It's quite difficult to see what the methodology of criticism as a process in the way in which I've been trying to describe it is actually like.

You can't hear me properly, or if you need a moving image to follow, then tell me and I'll stand up. In fact, I might stand up halfway through, just to keep you awake. Today is the talk on the long march of liberalism, and it turns out to be a longer march than I thought it was going to be. although I will try and keep it as brief as I can so that we'll have more time for discussion. I spoke too long yesterday, my apologies. And I want to try to stimulate as much discussion as we can. Let me try to set the scene about what it is I want to talk about. I want to talk about liberalism as one of the long traditions of English thought and English culture. A long tradition of English thought and English culture, which is why I call it the long march of liberalism. Of course, the term liberalism is a misnomer. It's a misstatement. We should talk about liberalisms, not liberalism. There is no one liberalism. Yes, liberalisms. By liberalism, I mean a number of different discourses, different discourses which nevertheless hang together in a formation, which for convenience sake we call liberalism. And I want to talk about liberalism as one of the main constitutive forces, one of the forces that helped to make English common sense and English cultural identity. It's not the only force. Tomorrow I want to talk about another force, another element, the discourses of English traditionalism. But today I'm concentrating on English liberalism. And I want to say that liberalisms helped to form and shape English common sense and English cultural identity. I'm going to look at the long march of liberalism historically. This is in a way the most historical of the talks that I want to give. I deal here mainly with the 16th, 17th, 18th centuries just up to the beginning of the 19th. I talk more about the 19th century tomorrow. So I'm looking at the early historical roots of one of the main sources of English culture. Okay, that's the content of what I'm going to talk about. But now let me say something about the theoretical themes which you should look out for as I go along. Theoretically, this talk is part of what I want to call the archaeology of English common sense. English common sense is the rootedness of English culture is a complex structure or formation and I want to look at the different layers and levels in that formation so the archaeology of English common sense secondly as a theme I'm interested in pursuing the question of the nature of ideology what ideology is, how it works, how we can speak of an ideology historically, the ideologies of liberalism. Thirdly, in this particular lecture, theoretically, I'm going to be concerned with the historical roots of an ideology or the way in which history interplays with an ideology. The question of what are the historical conditions in which an ideology is formed and developed and changes. Fourthly, I'm concerned with the question of the relationship between liberalism in English culture and changes in the class formation of English social life, the relationship between ideologies and classes. And just to explain to you simply what I mean by that, liberalism has often been called an English bourgeois ideology, or the bourgeois ideology. So I want to address directly in what sense can we call English liberalism a bourgeois ideology. Lastly, I want to address the question is liberalism a unified field? What is the unity or the coherence of liberalism as a set of ideological discourses? Is it tight? Is it loose? Is it many things? Is it fragmentary? Does it have anything that we can call a unity or a coherence? Now, these themes that I just listed are not particular to this lecture. They're things that I'm going to talk about tomorrow when I talk about traditionalism and when I talk in the following one about imperialism. I'm working theoretically, as if we're on the side, on these questions of ideology, history, class, the unity of ideology, and so on. But each time I relate that to a different concrete topic. You see how the lecture works. The concrete topic today is the long march of liberalism, but it throws some light on how we are to think about the cultural roots of an English ideology, if there's any such thing. I have a question mark about that. Lecture 5 asks the question, is there in fact an English ideology? But for the moment, provisionally, let us say that there is something distinctive, which we can call the broad contours of English social life and social thought. And liberalism is one of the formative elements in the construction of English common sense. Now, OK, the next thing that I want to do is to say a little bit more about my theoretical framework in approaching this question of English liberalism. You see, one of the traditional approaches in the history of ideas is to take philosophy as the essence of an ideology and therefore to go first to the great figures of an ideology. Here, therefore, one would look at Hobbes and at Locke and at Payne and at Bentham and at Mill. One would trace the ideology principally through its philosophical essence. Now, for convenience sake, I am going to deal with some of the great statements of these great English liberal thinkers like Hobbes and Locke and Adam Smith. So I don't neglect what I would call the philosophical aspects of an ideology. But that is not what I mean by ideology. I don't only mean a philosophical system, because ideology is the term, in my usage, which not only covers the philosophical system, well-integrated, logically elaborated, well-constructed, tightly fitting, that's one aspect of ideology. But the other crucial aspect of ideology, and what I regard as the more important aspect of ideology, is ordinary common sense. It is the fragmentary, episodic, contradictory character of everyday thought, the thoughts which are in ordinary people, not in the heads of philosophers at all. And I want to look at liberalism, not therefore only in terms of the great philosophers which have shaped liberal thought, but in terms of the way in which liberalism has become what Gramsci calls organic, an organic ideology. And an organic ideology is not sustained in the great philosophers at all. The quality of an organic ideology is that ideas have entered into the broad contours of historical and cultural development. It's only when an ideology has left the sitting room of the great philosophers and come into the broad concourse of everyday life and influenced the thought, the conceptions of ordinary people who have no philosophical pretensions at all, who are not in the typical sense intellectual, this broader influence of ideological ideas in shaping the conceptions of the world of ordinary people in their everyday life, That is the sign of an organic ideology. An ideology does not become organic until it has informed the taken-for-granted structures of an ordinary society. Until, that is to say, people are so liberal that they don't recognize that they're liberals at all. That is when it is organic. So that if you go to people and say, you're a liberal, and they think you mean you're a member of the liberal party, And they say, oh, no, I'm not a liberal at all. No, in their order, what they take as common sense, as ordinary, just what you know, what you know is impregnated with liberal conceptions and ideas. And that is the sign of how liberalism has become organic to English cultural life. That is the point at which it has developed, at which it has helped to shape what I want to call the spontaneous conception of the world, of ordinary people, helped to inform the chaotic, contradictory, what Gramsci called episodic forms of common sense. It is the imprinting of liberalism into English common sense, the way in which it has provided some of the bases or foundations of everyday calculation, of popular thought. That is when liberalism has become what Gramsci calls a current of ideas, a cultural movement, a religion, a faith. That is when liberalism becomes cultural. Before that, it might be said to be a philosophical system. It only becomes cultural when it becomes organic to the whole shape of social thought of an epoch or a society. so when I talk about liberalism I'm talking about liberalism located in the field between philosophy and common sense I'm interested in the interrelationship between philosophy and common sense and as I go through the different aspects of liberalism which I want to take up I'm going constantly to remind you of this interplay between high thought and low calculation between the thought of the academy, the philosopher, the system, systematized ideas, and the fragmentary, episodic, ordinary, everyday calculations of the common conceptions of the people. Right. Well, in fact, what I want to do, first of all, is to address this question, which so far I've asked you to take for granted. That is to say that liberalism has helped to form even contemporary English common sense. That today, if you walk around in England and talk to English people, or read English newspapers, or listen to people talking about political life in England, or overhear everyday conversations about society, or listen to people even talking about their families or their relations, that you will hear the echoes, the imprint of liberal ideas. Let me just try to indicate some of the places in modern contemporary thought where you will find the imprint of liberalism. And that's before I deal with it historically. You will find it in the profound individualism of English life and thought. Profound individualism. I mean, there are many sorts of individualism, but English individualism is one of the deepest currents of English culture. by that I mean the notion of the absolute sovereignty of the individual indeed in English ideas the difficulty which English people have in conceptualizing the social at all the English find it you don't believe me but the English find it very difficult to conceptualize the social because they always begin with the idea that the social is reducible to the individual. Raymond Williams is very important in identifying one of the main structures of English thought, which when he talks about the individual and society, that is how the English think about the social. It's in the relationship between the individual and society. Those things belong to the individual. Those things belong to society. Individuals, of course, give something to society, but they're never wholly taken up The French idea that you could begin with society and then, as it were, find individuals as the bearers of society, of social relations, or Marx's idea, finds it difficult to penetrate English heads at all, because already in English heads is the structure, individual and society. If you say anything to the English, the thought falls naturally into these two great continents. Oh, is it the individual or is it society? Individual and society. And countless numbers of English philosophers, historians, writers, poets have occupied this world which is structured for them between the individual and society. Now this English individual, the individual of English individualism, is a very particular, peculiar subject. Because for one thing, it isn't one person at all. It is one person plus his family. When the English say the individual, they don't think about one person. They think about a man in his family, wife and children dependent on him. when somebody says the privacy of the individual, they don't mean one person walking down the street, they mean one person accompanied by his family. So when the English say individualism, you have always to think about individualism in the setting of the domestic. The Englishman's home is his castle. That's what it means. The Englishman's home is his castle. A second place, therefore, where you will find the notion of English individualism is in the idea of the domestic. The Englishman is most at home, sitting in front of the fire, feet up, slippers provided by the wife, surrounded by the young children. That's the notion of the home, of the privacy of the home as a kind of sanctuary of the English person. As the most inviolate sphere, You can do whatever you like to him or her in the public sphere. That is a limited sphere. But in the home, the Englishman in his domestic environment is sovereign. The notion of the sovereignty of the individual subject conceptualized in this way is a peculiarly liberal conception. And next, in the very notion of the phrase. So, I mean, the point, just to answer that, perhaps I haven't made the point clear enough, the English conception of individualism is always gendered. It's always gendered. It means him plus her and them. Don't read it as I. Read it as him plus her and them. When the Englishman says, I believe, he means I. And my wife, of course, votes with me and my children who can't vote yet, but will vote like I do when they come to vote. That's what he means when he says I. He doesn't mean just I. He doesn't mean I can't speak for my wife. He doesn't mean that at all. He means I can speak for her. Yes, I know because she is really just a simulacrum of myself. So the I is a very complex figure. It's a whole figure in English liberal ideology. It's not a person at all. It doesn't refer to the actual social bodily individual. It's a conception. It's a conception of a whole little grouping that is called I. Next, the notion of the Englishman's home. The notion of home is not only domestic, but of something that belongs to him. Inside English individualism is the conception of property. The English liberal individual is always a property individual. Without property, the individual would not know he existed. The property is a reflection of himself. It's an idea which is first in Hobbes and then in Locke. Yes, that the property is an expression of the natural powers of the individual. It is, as it were, a reflection of his powers. He sees himself reflected in the powers of his own property. So property, home, family, individual form part of a network. Now, you see, liberalism isn't any one idea. It's a network of ideas, of little ideas. We're beginning to form what I want to call the ideological set or the inventory of English liberal ideas. I'm going to add to it in a moment. Well, another contemporary feature of the English structure, the structure of English common sense is what we might call empiricism the everyday what in a wonderful phrase of a former colleague of mine who was taught married an Italian, lived in Italy for a very long time Liz Emirzi Glass, she has a wonderful phrase in an essay of hers on gardening which is called low key practicality low-key practicality I don't know whether it's translated in Italian what that phrase is, it's a wonderful phrase and it describes the English beautifully a kind of practical common sense knowing how to grow the flowers that kind of a feel for the empirical the English person doesn't really believe anything if it comes along in the disguise of the great idea the English are the opposite of Hegelia the opposite of the if you said to them the English produce the grand idea that doesn't persuade them at all but that the English produce a few practical ideas which you can sell abroad which you can organize that low key practicality is a function of the empiricism which is born in English thought out of the seat which helps to construct English liberalism the two things are deeply connected the practicality of English you know Marx's terminology for comparing the Germans with the English where he talks about the English being the nation that knows how to make hats knows how to make hats that is that idea of a greater idea towards which history is moving that doesn't move them But the idea of grounding in practical life, the common sense nature of English society. If you, I want to just conjure this up for you in the 20th century. If you read a letter to the press in the popular press, or if you were to write a letter to the press in English society, there would be no point saying, I am a professor of the orientale, so I have studied these questions greatly. That would be no legitimation at all. What you have to begin by saying is, I'm not a great thinker. I'm just an ordinary person. I just know what life is about. And my idea is, ah, now that is the authentic feel. That is the real empirical voice. Just an ordinary common sense view. whip them. Just an ordinary common sense view, keep hanging. I mean, it's always attached to some particular policy, but the legitimation of the view, of the viewpoint, is in the empirical nature of the evidence. Show me the evidence, the English will say, and then we believe you. And English philosophy has exactly that empirical quality to it. One finds the residues or sedimentations of liberalism inside the notion of the natural rights of English persons and inside the very conception of England itself as the cradle of modern liberties. You know, there is a myth, I'll talk about this tomorrow and I talk about the invention of tradition, but there is a myth of the tradition of English society which is that representative government was actually not only found, created in England but has existed in England since the beginning of time since the beginning of time and there have been many schools of English historiography whose purpose it is to trace that history back and show you that it has always been like that The English have always been the only free race. Yes, the Anglo-Saxon, Witton, then early forms of parliamentary government, then Magna Carta, then the Bill of Rights, then Parliament. Yes, an unending procession which simply recognizes the long, forever, essential relationship between England and the cradle of liberties. And this notion, this traditionalizing of Britain as the source of English liberties, of the conception of England itself as the repository of the liberties and rights of individuals is a very key, is one of the ways in which liberalism helps to construct the very notion of England itself. It helps to build the idea of Englishness and of what it is, the cultural identity of the English themselves. Next, you will find liberalism concealed within the English conception of human nature. Again, if you look at letters to the press or listen to people talking among themselves, you will find a very deep-rooted notion that underneath everything, you can strip away the social, the conventional, and down at the root, you will find ordinary human nature. And that that is the ground of everything else. Human nature is the ground of everything else. Now that notion of human nature, with its natural appetites and its natural interests, driven by its own sense of itself, its natural egoism, yes, as it were, man is naturally brutish and short. His life is naturally brutish and short. It's governed by the natural appetites. Now, where does this conception of human nature come from? Well, I'm going to try to suggest to you that without what we call the philosophical idea of natural rights, you would not have that conception of English human nature functioning in English culture and in English society. The very conception of what it is like to be a natural man and what natural man wants and what will satisfy natural man, natural man's appetites and interests and satisfactions, etc. The idea in utilitarianism of a whole philosophy which is governed by nothing but the calculus of human interest. Nothing but that is a deeply English ideology. It's impregnated everything, including English socialism. And yet its roots are inside this notion of what is at the roots human nature. And I want to show you historically how it comes about that this conception of human nature is formed. Finally, you will find the sedimentations of liberalism in what would now appear to be the instinctive feelings of the English. For a certain combination of values, combination of values, not one thing, but a combination of values. the combination of liberty, property, patriarchy, and good order. An Englishman is free but orderly. He has rights, there are rights in property, and the freedom does not damage the idea of order. If you can protect the rights of the individual, that will itself create what the English in the 18th century called good government. And one of the reasons why that kind of stability comes out of English liberalism has to do with the notion of the household and the family as the centerpiece of order. Nowhere is there so developed, as in English thought, The idea that if everything goes well with the family, then the whole of society is okay. That if only the relationships, including, I mean, the relationships of men and women, the relationships which constitute the patriarchal family, those institutions and ideologies which establish the rights of the father and the preeminence of the father within the household, but also I mean the domestic core of the household itself as the cell form of social order. Yes, what is right in the family is right for social order itself. That you can find a microcosm of the world in the family itself and you can protect the larger order by protecting the little one. Yes, this relationship of the family as the society, as the world, The family has the world with the free man, the free sovereign individual at the center of that world. That is a deep form of the domestic, the domestic and gendered character of English liberal thought. Liberalism does not everywhere have that deeply domestic flavor, the flavor of the domestic. Consequently, the notions of gender and patriarchy and of familialism and domestic ideology are not marginal. You know, they're not bits which we can think about if we'd like to. You cannot understand the formation of English common sense and of the impact of liberal ideas on English culture without understanding its patriarchal and domestic-aided character. It is central to it. The household is at the heart of the image of good order, of the well-ordered society. Okay, what I've done so far is to try to, at any rate, substantiate, underline my argument that not only historically has liberalism, the discourses of liberalism, helped to form and shape English common sense, I've tried to suggest to you that if you go into 20th century England today, you will be able to see in the ordinary ways in which people behave, in which they respond to one another, in the everyday conceptions of the world, which are in English social thought, the crucial shaping impact of the ideas in liberalism. Right, now I want to go back to the, in a sense, to the beginning. I will qualify that in a minute. I want to talk now about where have these formative ideas and principles of organization in English culture come from? How did they arise? Where have they come from? Now, I've called this an archaeology. And I want to say that I'm not talking about the origins of English liberalism. For really, in culture and ideology, there is never such an originating moment. Whenever you look at the origins, whenever you try to find the absolute origins of an idea, you always find an idea just before that that was rather like it. So there is no beginning in ideology. No beginning. There is no originating point. Just as I would want to say there is no single social subject that suddenly unfolds these ideas that have never been harried before. Nevertheless, nevertheless, in particular ideological discourses like liberalism, there are formative moments. There are moments when what things, strands that have been there in the past, begin to cohere together or to crystallize, to form a kind of internally related, more cohesive structure, to form what yesterday I called a nucleus in the galaxies, in the field of ideology. And liberalism is open. The history of liberalism shows the moment of its crystallization in this way. So I'm looking not at the origins of the originating moment of English liberalism, but I am looking at the moment of its moment of its crystallization. But I want just to underpin that by showing you what that this very coming together of the formation that we call liberalism itself had very deep historical conditions of existence. and that therefore we cannot possibly try to analyze the influence of the discourse of liberalism on English culture and thought without understanding their profoundly historical nature. Profoundly historical nature. And here, I don't want to develop this point, but I just want to signal to you that there is a difference between a historical awareness of the development of culture and a search for the historical origin. Histories do not have to be historicists. Historicism is a philosophical theory which says history is evolutionary and there is a starting point. The historical recognizes that thought and culture, social relations are influenced, are shaped throughout their entire existence. by historical conditions and circumstances. But it doesn't confuse a historical sense with the discovery of a historical origin. Is that distinction clear? Because if it's not clear, I want to try and make it clear. A difference between the historical and trying to locate a point where liberalism begins, before which there was nothing like it. Okay, well, let me try to say then, Out of what is liberalism itself formed? Out of what does it come into to begin to form the kind of constellation that we can name as the beginnings or the early crystallization of liberal ideas? Well, we would have to locate that in a number of different histories, different histories with different temporalities and durations. We'd have to locate it in that long arc somewhere between the 15th and the 17th centuries, in which the older conceptions of a traditional social order, feudal order, disintegrate, where those older conceptions begin at last to lose their hold on English common sense. And a profoundly new conception of the world begins to emerge. It takes 200 years at least. for the conditions to be in existence which give rise to liberalism at all. You would have to find it in the Reformation. That is to say, in that movement in English religious life which establishes the challenge to papal authority and introduces the skeptical nature of English social thought. The questioning of authority which begins for English society in the Reformation Without that, what is a profound kind of skepticism to English ideas, skepticism about authority. Tomorrow I want to talk about the ways in which English thought are not at all skeptical about authority. But at this point, the first strand is the strand of English skepticism, of English pragmatism, what I referred to earlier on as the show me element. Show me. Show me. Now, you'll forgive me, I'm in a Catholic country, I know, but so long as you remain in a culture in which there is a final authority and the authority comes from outside the world, you can't say with the same force, show me. Because the answer to show me is, look, up there. It comes from up there. It doesn't come from us at all. So you have to reground the world in just right here before you can say, well, show me. Now, show me. It must be here somewhere in the room. Not outside, not in the spirit, not in the skies, you know, not in the great beyond. Just right here. Show me. Well, you have to have the breach with religious authority which comes in the English Reformation before people say, well, if God is not just up there, there but down here in the world right around here he has to be here or he's not here at all well then you must have explanations of the world which are right here which can be shown to be real in the world so the reformation is a crucial break another is in the very constitution of the notion of the nation state which is of course part of the reformation Reformation was not only a break with papal authority, it was a break with the whole structure of the Catholic Imperium. It was the constitution of first England and parts of France, and then the long march right through to Italian nationalism and on into the post-independence period of the 20th century, the long march of the nation-state. The nation-state is born in this period, And it's born, first of all, in the break with religious authority, which is established in the Reformation. When England becomes its own center, the King of England is also the head of the English Church. It is grounded for the first time in the nation state. And consequently, the ideas which cohere around, what then is England if it is not part of the greater Catholic empire, which is the empire of God? What is England if it is just that nation, this place where the life has to be made, That is crucial in the formation of the very conception of an English identity, of an English nationalism. Wouldn't happen without that break. Another formative element is then something that happens in the same period. That is to say the total shift in the attitude towards nature and to the rise of science itself. Nature itself ceases to be an order which men contemplate, which they look on and admire, and begins to be a reality with which they experiment, which they investigate, which they try to explain, which they are to transform and to master. It's the new conception of what nature is like, and without it, the notions of modern science would not exist. The idea that the notion of science is essential to the idea of the modern. We wouldn't have a conception of what it is like to be in the modern world without the notion of science at all. And science, liberalism, and the notion of the open society cohere together. They form part of a related set. So the shift in the whole cosmology, which begins to happen in the 15th and 16th centuries, towards science, which is not, you know, just science in the head. It's not just in Bacon's writings or in Moore's utopia. It is in the empirical world, because the next element that I want to identify is the growth of English materialism. That is part of what happens in this period. The notion, especially in the 16th century, of life as a kind of feverish activity, of the zest for exploration and innovation. This is the period of massive scientific innovation. The microscope, the telescope, advances in astronomy, in mathematics, in magnetism, in electricity, in medicine, in botany. This is long before the modern scientific revolution. These ideas and the material elements of them in the so-called new science are constitutive parts of the breakthrough out of which liberalism emerges. Without it, it wouldn't have happened. So, without the political revolution which creates the nation-state, and without the reformation which creates, as it were, the sovereign individual and materializes God and questions papal authority, and without the revolution in cosmology which creates the new science, it would not be possible to think liberalism at all. So when I identify the moment of the formation of classical liberalism, which I think happens in England in the 17th century, without these previous conditions, liberalism wouldn't exist at all. So do you see why it's impossible to talk about the origins, as if there's any one point that liberalism begins from? It spans out, threads out, in terms of its past condition, its anterior condition, in a whole range of different histories, which constitute, nevertheless, what is crucial for liberalism, the break with the old world. The break with the old world. If one had to sum up in one way what the emergence of liberalism in English culture and English social thought means, it is the first time that the English are able to think the modern. They cannot think the modern without the birth of liberalism. Liberalism is the ideology of the modern world. The ideology of the modern world, the idea, the very idea of the modern world is born with this breakup of the older feudal structures and of older conceptions of God and older conceptions of the nation and older conceptions of political authority and older conceptions of sacred authority. These great cultural structures are what held in place a traditional conception of the world. And it is only when that begins to disintegrate and to fragment and to break up that one gets the conditions in which liberalism can be formed. And without the categories of liberalism, you cannot think the modern world. So liberalism occurs, it constitutes, it forms the moment in which English society enters the modern world. It is the gateway through which English society enters the modern world. Well, I don't think I need to underline the argument that an understanding of the roots of English common sense in liberalism has to be a profoundly historical enterprise. But what might be more surprising to you is that I want to insist that the crystallization of liberalism in English thought is a profoundly revolutionary moment. A profoundly revolutionary moment. It's as revolutionary as anything that ever happened in English life. It may not be your revolution, but it is revolutionary in its own time. it broke up a whole series of older epistemes. It represented the collapse of an entire cosmology of the world and it created or constituted the elements out of which a modern conception and the thought which goes along with modernity could be formed. So in that sense what we're looking at in the early stages is certainly a form of thought deeply historical, shaped by historical conditions, which is revolutionary in its impact. Okay, without that precondition, no liberalism. I want to talk about the moment when classical liberalism is formed, crystallizes as a formation in English culture. And we can give that formation a date. It occurs somewhere between the English Revolution of 1644, or, if you like, the publication of Hobbes' Leviathan in 1651, and the publication of Tom Paine's Common Sense and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in 1776. Between 1644 and 1776, English liberalism of a classical kind crystallized. Hobbes-Lewiathan is one of the founding texts of English liberalism. It deals with a problem which English liberal thought has had to try to come to terms with ever since. What is the nature of sovereign authority in a competitive society? How do you get a center, a sovereign, if the king and God are no longer in place? What is the sovereignty which holds society together when it is beginning to be organized on the principle of competition, when individuals are loosed into a competitive struggle for existence? That is a deep, a profound question which the English have been meditating on ever since. ever since. What is the center of authority in a competitive society? Well, Obse's Leviathan is one of the most classical forms of address to that question. What is the nature that founds political authority if it is not formed from God, from the divine source? If the king doesn't get it from God and impose it on the society, what is the source of political obligation? What makes anybody want to stay in society at all recognize the law begin to cohere into form and the answer is given it is the consent of the individual it is the consent of the individual or the contract between the individual and the state which is the founding cornerstone of political obligation that is another question that the English have meditated on ever since through the long reform act through the suffering struggles for women to modern conceptions of the struggles for rights of different social groups. So we have gone on throughout our history, English history, working over the question of what is the nature of political obligation and consent in a society which is competitive, which is increasingly competitive. That is the question behind Locke's two treatises. and that again is something which is a cornerstone of the whole evolution of English historical tradition and finally the notion of the theory of a competitive society of a dynamic society you know when I talk about the old conceptions of the world have gone. I don't know whether you can feel imaginatively on your pulses what it is like in the 17th century to begin to think about society as dynamic. Nobody ever thought about feudal society as dynamic. In feudal society, you are wealthy or poor. You know, you piled up your wealth. In feudalism, when the king or queen, especially the queen, set out on the tour around her country, her nation, she took everything with her, because that was a sign of her wealth. She loaded up the carriages with all the wealth. Wealth was something in one place. You piled it up, the more of it you had in the coffers. That was what wealth was. This is the birth of the new conception of wealth, which is that you have to plow it back, the notion of capital, of profit, of the society which expands of an economy as an expanding dynamic thing. This is a totally revolutionary idea. And of course, it is not codified in the literature until Adam Smith and the early political economy, the Scottish political economy. They give the laws of the new society which is born sometime between the 15th and the 17th century, the new society of capitalism. They name it for the first time and declare its laws. Order is not imposed by God. It is given by the great impersonal rhythms of the laws of supply and demand. That is what organizes society. That is what gives you the specialization of different skills. That is what brings production and consumption into harmony with one another. That is what gives the notion of the great society, of the common good, Not love or the love of God or feeling nice or anything. Production and consumption will organize life. You can think of what over two centuries happens inside the heads of English persons when they have to take on the notion that society is a dynamic thing. It goes on building. It's going to grow larger and larger. It can only exist if it expands. Well, that is a dynamic idea. It's a totally different conception of life. of what society is like, the notion of a dynamic economy which is codified in the wealth of nations. So somewhere between Hobbes and Locke and Cain and Adam Smith at the end of the 18th century is born, crystallizes classical English liberalism. However, there is a narrow historical moment, a narrow historical moment, without which we wouldn't have really seen English liberalism in its peculiar English way. And that, of course, is the period of the English Revolution, of the Civil War. The Civil War is the crucible of English liberalism. the crucible of English liberalism, as it is the birthplace of modern English society and as it is the beginnings of English bourgeois civilization. I want to therefore say a few words about the Civil War. You may not know, but there is a very elaborate historical revisionism going on about the English Civil War, and it's very important. Because we used to tell ourselves stories about the English Civil War, as if in this wonderful short period, somewhere between 1644 and 1688, the English aristocracy and the English bourgeoisie lined up in two blocks and fought one another to a standstill. The bourgeoisie won, and after that, they made the world. This is the classic reading I'm simplifying, of course, but nevertheless, there is a kind of story about the English Civil War as the origin of modern English society, which goes rather like that. It's not true. It's not true. Some shift of that kind does, of course, happen in that period. But the more we know about it, the more we know about the complex nature, the complex nature of the English Civil War. It has no single class character. No single class character. Historians have tried in their deepest way to locate the real bourgeoisie making the English Revolution, and they cannot be found. They can't be found. If you look at the parliamentary forces that line up in the English Civil War, they are themselves an extremely complex formation, very complex formation indeed. There's no one class there in any simple sense. Think of it. There's Cromwell, and Cromwell speaks on behalf of the substantial men of property. Cromwell is not, you know, from the lower depths. He's not talking about the working man and the laboring poor. Cromwell is talking about the new men of power and property who don't have any political power in the old system. The old system is tied up by the aristocracy and the crown. And Cromwell speaks for the new, the rising class, who say the future belongs to us, because the future is with property and with commerce and with trade. And we are the people who know about it. Move aside, move aside those old ideas of divine right and the blood of the aristocracy. A man must rise or fall depending on what he makes of himself. That is the new conception of natural rights and the sovereignty of the individual. And a man who has those rights has the rights of political representation. You can't have a parliament which doesn't represent the rights of the men who are making the world. Don't look astonished because I call them men, because Cromwell did not think the women were making the word. When he said man with a capital M, he meant propertied men. The Whigs for a century and a half spoke of man, and they meant men. They meant men. They didn't mean everybody. They meant men. And not all men. They didn't mean domestic servants. They didn't mean the laboring poor. They didn't mean criminals and lunatics. They didn't mean vagabonds. They didn't mean agricultural workers. Didn't mean any of those people. They meant a tiny group of property substantial men. That's Cromwell. If you go from Cromwell to Lilburn, who is another prominent figure in the... Lilburn is the closest that one can find to the voice of the small men of the city. He's interested in commerce, not in property. And if you listen to those voices and listen also to the voice of the English levelers, They're talking about a quite different conception of political change. They're talking about social inequality. They're talking about the excluded. They're talking about the landless. They're talking about the laboring poor. They have a program of radical democratic egalitarianism. Cromwell did not believe in democratic egalitarianism. You believe me. Cromwell believed in the iron. He's the man of power. He's a man of iron. But he wasn't about to give power over to poor vagabonds. One mustn't confuse that And if you then go to Winstanley Who is talking about a form of agrarian communism The voice of agrarian communism Now all these things are the parliamentary forces Different classes, different voices Different historical projects Different contradictions So there is no one class ideology If you say liberalism emerges from this moment it is in no simple sense the ideology of the emerging ruling class. It's just that formulation does not in any adequate sense identify the complex social and intellectual formation which give rise to modern English liberalism. So the story that, as it were, it's formed in the period of the Civil War may be true. The Civil War is what we call a conjuncture, and a conjuncture is like a crucible. It's like when you put a number of different chemicals in one beaker and hold it over the flame, it coagulates and crystallizes into a new formation. That is the Civil War. But what it is are a number of different elements, different formations, different interests, different classes. Out of that period comes the language of the rights of man. by which it's only meant a few men. Only a few men are the man to which the rights of man refers in that period. So one can't go to the Civil War as the beginnings of English liberalism with a sense that liberalism is the ideology, one set of ideas, which comes out of the mouths of this new one class in this one moment. That way of conceptualizing the birth or formation of liberalism simply is totally inadequate. Now, I'm going to elaborate on that, push it even further. There's not one English revolution. There are at least two. At least two. There's a successful one and an unsuccessful one. There's the one that comes off and the one that doesn't come off. Every revolution is like that. Every revolution we have known about has a successful bit and an unsuccessful bit. The French Revolution has exactly the same. Something happens profound and something doesn't happen. There is a successful revolution which creates the civil, political, economic rights of the men of the state, not to rule everything, but to look after and protect the rights and liberties of property men. That revolution and the revolution to which those languages pointed, those discourses tried to create, is of course unsuccessful. Unsuccessful. The world is not made as English Puritan feminism tried to suggest in the image of the equality of the sexes. It's not made like that for another 200 years. it's not made in the language of the English sects which cannot conceive democracy or equality at all in practical terms has only to conceive it in the terms of of Chileism of utopias, of dreams, of fantasies you read the language of the prophecies and of the strange prophecies of the equal life which are preached by the Puritan sects that. That is the dream of equality. That does not come off. The revolution of the landless, of the landless people, of those who are unequal in English society, of who are at the bottom of the laboring poor, who were caught up in the English revolution. They are debated out of existence in the Puritan debates. So, there is inside the very revolution that creates liberalism, the successful and the unsuccessful revolution. I'm not just making a historical point. I want to say to you that certainly from this period onward, there is never one liberalism. There is one liberalism that goes towards the more radical end. And there is one liberalism which begins to become part of the established orders of English thought, which is a conservative liberalism. And from there onwards, liberalism is always fractured. It's never unified. it's never unified it's always more than one thing it's always a complex and unstable formation between its more radical and its more conservative elements so we can neither speak of liberalism as the pure emanation of the bourgeois class it is not as Pulantz has said you know the number plate on the back of the bourgeoisie if you could have found the bourgeoisie in the 17th century which would have been difficult and turned them round it would not have said I believe in liberalism on the back nor is it the emanation of one unified thing, liberalism which then, like a tank, goes marching ever through history the same, whatever happens what happens is the beginning of a set of discourses which of course have at their centre some of the central core liberal ideas individualism, contract, nature, rights, property, the family. Those ideas are, of course, at the center of whatever the discourse is. So the discourses do have a formation. They're not just scattered about. They have a formation. They crystallize around certain core conceptions. But those ideas can be linked together in a wide variety of discourses. Very wide variety of discourses. And in English thought, liberalism fractures in this way, fans out in this way. So you can't study the impact of English liberalism on English culture and thought by tracing one line through. You have to look at the fanning out of liberal ideas and of different inflections of the liberal discourse throughout a variety of different formations in English social life, a fractured tradition. One can find, therefore, an establishment or deeply conservative kind of liberalism in the way in which Locke brings together the ideas of liberalism. You know, Locke's treaties were regarded when they were first published as a subversive book, as a revolutionary book. Locke was very reluctant indeed even to acknowledge that he had written them. It was like carrying around the Communist Manifesto or the Little Red Book to have the two treatises. It was a revolutionary idea because what Locke said in the treatise was in the end, if the king is treasonable to the contract he has made with the people, you have a right to rebel. You have a right to rebel. That's what Locke said. That was a dangerous notion in the 17th century that the ordinary folks had a right to rebel. So it was a subversive book. And yet the Lockean tradition comes to be solidified, to constitute in the over 200 years, one of the central cornerstones of English established ideas. So it moves, liberalism in that area moves right through, moves 360 degrees from the revolutionary ideology, which helps to break up the old world, into one of the things that underpins the arch of a new establishment, the new order, modern English life. It moves from a subversive to a consolidating ideology. Okay, that's bad enough because heiress liberalism, as it were, now fractured, a set of discourses, and changing its political location. Sometimes at one period it's revolutionary, at another period it's consolidating. but that's bad enough because I haven't talked about the other tradition the radical tradition the underground tradition of liberalism that isn't consolidated in English established ideas at all that remains to feed English radical ideas so English radicalism also begins in English liberalism it's inherited from the Puritan sects it's inherited from the lower end of the Puritan revolution from the English revolution it's there in the Putney debates It's there in the arguments about the poor About what Lilburn calls the poorest of us The little people It's there in the argument about extending the rights of free-born English men To all English persons Which was a very revolutionary idea And then not only to all English persons But even to English women Totally I mean that was so scandalous That liberalism said Oh no, no, no We are after all for a change The new men of power and property must have the rights to elect and to represent in enter political society. But not everybody. Not everybody. We are also for good order, for an orderly. We want the glorious revolution to bring back good orders. We want the conditions for the expansion of our property. We want the conditions for trade. We want to enlarge ourselves, not constantly how the upheavals of people cutting off everybody else's head every day. No, we are for free men, but propertied and established. That is the slide, the slide along which liberalism moves from a revolutionary doctrine to deep respectability. By the middle of the 19th century, liberals are the most upstanding bourgeois respectable men. Gladstone is a deeply, deeply respectable liberal man, liberal Englishman. Deeply respectable. His roots are in the thing which created the successful part of the English Revolution. Okay, just think about what I've been trying to say for a moment. I'm talking about this ideology which is not one thing, which crystallizes in a certain period, but which has huge antecedents, which wouldn't have existed if other histories hadn't been in place. The Reformation, the new science, the new cosmology, the new commerce. Those things hadn't been in place. It wouldn't exist. So I'm talking about an ideology which has a crystallization, but no origin, no real point of origin. I'm talking about a tradition which is not a tradition, because there are several traditions in it, several voices within it. I'm talking about an ideology which has no single class character. It can articulate the interests of property men, of the people of commerce, and indeed by extension of women who are excluded from political society and of the landless poor. So the same set of ideas can be reconstituted as the discourse through which different social classes create their aspirations for life within modern English society. I draw those things together because what I want to say, obviously, theoretically, is that I'm not talking about an ideology in, I think, the way in which it has been normally or classically understood. And that should be clear from the way in which I've talked about liberalism so far. Well, I want to just look at one other aspect of liberalism, and then I will say something about these theoretical questions to close. Because I've dealt mainly so far with the social and the political aspects of English individualism, but you wouldn't have completed the arch or the archaeology of English liberalism without the other dimension that doesn't come into the literature until somewhat later. That is the economic. For the associations of liberalism with the political revolution of the 1640s to the 1680s is only part of the history. Without the profound revolution which takes place in economic and property relations over the 18th century, which finally get the high point of their expression and are codified and pulled together in a theory in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations and the writings of the political economists, we could not find the roots of English liberal common sense. It's in this period that the world comes to revolve around the notion of egoistic interests, that human beings are conceived as those who wish to maximize their advantage, that their wealth, their substantial character in the world depends on how much property they have. It's a wonderful phrase in E.P. Thompson's essay in response to Perry Anderson, where he says, At last, men could be weighed. The status of a man depended on, when you put him in the social scale, he brought the scale down because of the country house and the property and the extent of his goods. Yes, his capital is reaching to the world. Then you knew he was a man of substance. You know, the man of substance, there was a lot of ideologists, like all the way through, who tried to write about how to create a proper civilized gentleman out of this person, this property individual. But at the bottom, and this was a very common English liberal middle class term, whether you had bottom or not, it's a metaphor. The broad bottom of the English property gentleman is accustomed to sitting as it were astride. Those of you who have read Tom Jones will know what the English gentleman looks. He is broad-bottomed. Yes, broad-bottomed. It means that he is sat on his terrain. It's a place where he owns. That is where he is at home. He is resting. He is resting and supported with a crutch and his wife. And there is the portrait. The home around, the garden, everything orderly, radiating out from where he is. Every portrait, every landscape portrait of the 18th century has the English gentleman seated and at home with his dogs, the familial, the familiar, the domestic. Not in the world out there. First of all, he created the power inside the world, his own domestic world. Now, the broad-bottomed Englishman has the notion, is centered in the notion of property. The notion of the propertied man is at the center of that universe. And the propertied man can only emerge if you can destroy the notion of the moral economy. The idea, if you have the idea at the back of your head that the economy is a moral thing, a moral order, and that at some point you can say, well, you can't tax the price of bread of poor people like that. You can't do that. You must have the king or the father or the magistrate or somebody who says, well, stop, the poor must be fed too, that paternalist notion. Well, he, that figure, that paternalist figure has to be got rid of. He has to be put in the back room or in the attic. He has to be locked away somewhere because there has to be a man who says, unless you work, no wages. Unless you stay where you should work, no wages. If the jobs are in another part of the country, go. or as Mr. Tebbit currently says in English pointing, get on your bike. If there is any bikes, the English gentleman will have said, get on your bike, look for work. Don't come to the state. Don't come knocking on my door asking for arms or the welfare state or any of those ideas. The state doesn't look after you. We move, we grow, we expand, we rise, we are inflated or we decline according to the great impersonal rhythms of the market. The great impersonal rhythms of the market, demand and supply, pushes those who can survive up, and those who can't will go to the wall and decline as they deserve to do. The economy is not a moral thing. It is a natural thing. It moves like the sea. The price of corn should be allowed, Adam Smith said, to find its level like water. Water has no moral. You can't say the water don't flow there. That's the way it goes. If the incline is like that, it goes there. Tough luck, you're in the way. Rough luck. Rough luck. The economy is like water. It will find its level. The price of corn finds its level. Get the state out of the way telling you whether you can import corn or not. If the corn is freer in France, get it. And if you can get a higher price for it by shutting it up in your barn for two months and allowing people to starve a little bit, well that increases the amount they're prepared to pay and that's how the thing works the clockwork of the market and it's dynamic dynamic creating rise and fall of society not as a stable plateau you know where generations go on and you inherit from them and they inherit from you and so on but a moving thing where you have to carve out your property and be sure that it's transferred to the right people your children, not somebody else, and that your wife brings property along with her and takes property with her, that property is transferred largely through the patterns of English inheritance and marriage. That is what creates the stability. The account which Marx gives of primary accumulation, you know, is only one part of the story. The other part of primary accumulation is in the bourgeois family. That is where the money is hoarded up. That's where the property is accumulated. You marry the daughter to the right person who brings in the property and you increase your property in that way. Marriage is clearly a contractual state which is itself also subject to the rhythm of laws of supply and demand. You have five daughters, you have a much better chance at increasing your property in one generation. So unless one also sees the way in which that new propertied, that notion of the market as the model of the system and of human nature as according to that drive, driven by the appetite to expand, that you have to understand every question comes down to the question, what is his interest? When the English gentleman comes to you and says, I would like to enclose these nice trees down here. Anybody who used to poach in that area would know. There's only one question to ask. What is he really after? He wants another piece of property which used to be our land. So the key question to ask is the interest of the egoistic individual. The individual is a kind of dynamo which is driven by interest. Interest, interest, interest. and the individual driven by interest only creates a relationship with another individual if the interest can be served you don't make just friends but you make friends with the right people you make friends with the people who can patronize you you make friends with the people who will write you good references you make friends with the magistrates who will protect your property when it comes into the courts you make the right kinds of friends That is the consolidation of the whole, that whole, what is in fact English bourgeois society. And the notion that this is driven by interest. And therefore, because you only relate to other people, if the interest is right, the relationship must be contractual. Relationship with other people is always contractual in this world. You aren't linked with them permanently for good or ill. Yes, it has to be a relationship which you can break If he won't work for you for the right wage You break the contract So now you begin to understand Why the English can't conceptualize the social properly Because the social is always subject to the contract And it's always due to the sovereign individual to say I don't want it, take it away I'm not in that contract anymore, I broke it He didn't satisfy the terms, I broke it. The king didn't satisfy the terms, he didn't give me what I want, good government, I broke the contract with him. You can always make or break the contract with society. So society for English thought is always much more problematic than it is for many other societies. European thought has a different conception of the social, not so tied with the contractual interest of the individual. Well, these are the ways in which English liberalism penetrates and transforms English economic ideas. So political, social, and economic ideas are all reworked in the period between the 17th and the 18th centuries by the profound revolutions of the English liberalisms. Okay, I want to pull this to a close. And I want to consider two questions which I've signaled as I've gone through. In what sense, then, is there one thing called liberalism? And in what sense can the shift which occurred in English culture and English thought be identified as the ideology of the bourgeois revolution? Let me deal with the second question first, because it relates to the whole profound question, which will be a continuing thread of thought in what I want to say in all these sessions about the relationship between liberal ideas or liberal discourses and class formations. see I've tried to suggest to you that the different discourses of liberalism have at different periods helped to articulate and to form and to announce in the world to enunciate the historical projects of very different social groups different classes not of all classes it's quite true It would have been very difficult for the well-established and entrenched higher echelons of aristocratic life in the early 17th century to have been pulled very closely to liberal ideas. So there are some difficulties in the articulation between the deep aristocracy and liberal ideas. But outside of that, in that whole range of people and groups and classes who were excluded from the hegemonic formation of English feudalism, all those other groupings found some area of expression within the framework of liberal ideas and liberal thought. indeed one of the things one would want to say about the 17th century is that it is only by giving liberal ideas the cast of a universal ideology of saying all men think like this all men feel like this the language of natural rights yes of all men the language of universal rights only by universalizing itself does liberalism come to be able to appeal or to provide the framework within which different classes can articulate their project. So, if one is looking for the relationship between this ideological formation and the formations of social classes, it cannot be that a class comes into history fully formed doing things, transforming the world and then gives rise to liberal ideas that is just simply an unacceptable description of what I've just given you because it doesn't tell you the different classes that are reflected in liberalism it doesn't tell you about the internal arguments and debates that go on in liberalism it doesn't tell you about the preconditions of liberalism in the reformation, in the new cosmology, in the new science So it's just a collapsed, a reductive way of trying to frame the relationship between these cultural shifts and classes. Okay, well, if you're not saying that, a class formed in history, giving rise to an ideology, well, then perhaps we ought to neglect the question of classes altogether. Well, you've seen from the description that I gave you that it's impossible to think liberalism without seeing how central, how constitutive it is to the formation of classes. The new classes of agrarian capitalism could not, they didn't know they were a class. They couldn't be unified around certain common projects, for instance, to find political representation without the ideas of liberalism. So they needed the atmosphere of liberalism in which to speak. They needed the language of liberalism in which to, as it were, frame their projects from the world. So there is the most intimate, deep historical connection between shifting class arrangements and alliances and formation and the discourses of the ideology. The one thing that there isn't is a class which gives rise to an ideology. But there are complex and changing, historically specific relations of linkage and break, linkage and break and transformation between social formations, the shifting character of English class structure as it comes into the bourgeois era, and the changing composition of that field of ideologies, which I'm calling the liberalisms. so the class question the social question to ideology cannot in any sense be neglected it is absolutely crucial to understand the historical effectivity of liberalism as an ideology but it cannot be thought in the old terms of a unified class which gives rise to a single set of ideas in that order that is simply an inadequate way of conceptualizing it well what about the second question then is liberalism nevertheless one thing a unified coherent uh one discourse which one can put one hand on and say ah there is the current of liberal ideas and again i've tried to suggest to you why that is not so there is a conservative liberalism and a radical liberalism that fracturing goes on and on and on throughout the history of liberal right into the 20th century. In 20th century English politics, in 1986, liberalism survives in English politics in at least three different places. A bit of it is in what still remains of the English Liberal Party, but it's a very relatively small and minor party in English political life, which has to link up with another group even to become at all relevant. So the Liberal Party has no monopoly over liberalism. Half of liberalism's inheritance is of course deeply inside the conservative party. The ideas of Adam Smith and of the market and of individualism and egoism and possessive individualism and the laws of supply and demand, that is in a Thatcherite conservatism. That is the neoliberal elements inside Thatcherite conservatism. And yet Edward Thompson was perfectly correct when he said the radical liberalism of Tom Paine constituted the Bible of working class radicalism. So liberalism is also in the socialist tradition, in the language of rights, in the language of women's suffrage, in the language of the freedom of the labor movement, in the language of liberalism. It is inside. English radicalism is unthinkable without one of the inheritances from the discourses and inventories of English liberalism. The language which has extended political rights from that of the propertied to adult men and women, and therefore which fought in the end of the 19th, the beginning of the 20th century for female suffrage, which created over 200 years a political society that included all adult men and women up to 21, is one of the continual transformations of the legacy of liberalism inside English radical thought. So, what is this one thing, liberalism, which is partly in the Liberal Party, partly inside English reformism, partly a deep structure in English conservatism, and partly one of the founding arches of English radical thought and English socialism. Liberalism is everywhere, everywhere. In part, it's been picked up inside every different political formation in English social life. Well, so the one thing we can say is that it is not one thing. If you want to speak about liberalism, you cannot be speaking about a coherent, unified ideology. You must be speaking about a highly complex and fractured set of ideological discourses. And you must be talking about the ways in which those different discourses can be articulated in different historical periods within quite different traditions in which liberalism fans out across English society. Now, that second notion I'm going to leave there, because that's where I want to start tomorrow, when I start talking about the traditionalism of English social thought. I want to pick up on liberalism and also on conservatism as the two twin pillars of English thought. But I want to suggest to you that it's not an easy thing to make this line of distinction between the two because English conservatism is as profoundly rooted in Lockean, Whigian tradition as anything else. English conservatism is deeply, in that sense, out of the English liberal establishment tradition. Not the radical end, but it borrows from the inventory of English traditional ideas. So this crisscrossing of ideologies in the field of English thought and culture presents us, of course, with a much more complicated picture. Now it's not so simple to say, well, the bourgeois revolution happened in the 17th century around the English Civil War, then the gentry arose and they thought liberal ideas and since then we were liberals. That is not the story. The story does not go like that. and the methodologies of analyzing culture and the transformation of ideology cannot be done in that way. Well, does that mean then that there's no connection between the rise of the English liberalisms and the making of English bourgeois society? And my answer to that is, no, I think there is a connection. I think there is a connection. For though the bourgeoisie does not produce liberalism, it could not have become the bourgeoisie without liberalism. It could not have thought itself in the world in a new way, in a new material and social way without those ideas. So those ideas are not the product of the bourgeois revolution. They are one of the conditions of the bourgeois revolution. They are what helps to make the bourgeois revolution or the bourgeois revolution. They are constitutive. Ideology is constitutive, not the product of history. It is one of the elements that makes history. Whenever you stop the historical process, you have to look at the roots through and in ideology and culture which make it possible for new social formations to take shape. In tracing, therefore, the histories of liberalism through English thought and culture, One is, I believe, sketching out the great complex arch of English bourgeois culture, which is never one thing, never in one place, never in one book. There is no one single philosopher or one novel that has the whole of it in it. It cannot be distilled in an essence. It is a dispersed field. The field of English liberalism is a field of dispersal, but it is not without structure and shape not without structure and shape it has the shape of a formation which has no absolute boundaries around it and which does not require to be thought as one single idea or one set of thoughts or one discourse it is a field of discourses yet it is a formation a formation it has its moments its conjunctures its fractures its breaks its points where it slips into another stream. That is how one has to begin to think about the constant fracturing and dispersal of English liberalism into and through English social thought. I think, let me leave the question about today, yes, for a bit, because I think that question comes back, it's better for me to answer that when I've dealt a little bit more with the contemporary period. After all, I'm stopping here before with Tom Paine. Yes, I haven't even got to the 19th century yet. So I'm not trying to avoid the question. But the question that you ask is very important. It's because I don't want to think of ideology as, you know, of liberal ideology as a kind of false consciousness, yes, preventing people from thinking revolutionary ideas. But if you've followed my argument, do you see how English thought, which is so interlaced around the same set of conceptions, does in the end come to constitute a field in which it's very difficult to think outside of it, very difficult to conceptualize, to get outside of it. This thing has been evolving and transforming and changing itself since the 16th century. And of course, the break, the fracturing does come with the English Revolution, but very early, much earlier, 100 years before it happens in France, 200 years before it happens in the Soviet Union. So it's very early on. So I think you are right in saying that something of the peculiarity, of the stability of English thought, its immense presence, its great empiricism has to do not just with the fact that it's a pragmatic form of thought, but with just what it's been there from ever since. Those ideas are there and there and there and there. Do you know, I'll tell you a story which signifies this. When Sir Keith Joseph, yes, the architect of modern Thatcherism and the new writing, went into the ministry which is in charge of modern industry, the minister of modern industry he made every senior civil servant read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations why? because he said the truth is all there of course Adam Smith had never seen a factory the Wealth of Nations I don't know whether you realize it or not the Wealth of Nations is not about the industrial capitalism it's about agrarian capitalism It's about corn and about the market. It's not about factories. No factories that occurred. It's published in 1776. There isn't an independent United States yet. It's still fighting for its independence. When Adam Smith had already codified the laws of capitalism. So he's writing about agrarian capitalism. Well, now, you just conceive of somebody whose aim it is to revolutionize English economic and industrial life, who's going to pick the whole state apparatus and its bureaucracy up by the throat, you know, and shake them out into the 21st century. And the instrument of this revolution is Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, published 1771. He made them all read it. Now, if, you know, if the most modern ideas have this long antecedents go back to the 15th century, and the long tradition of parliamentary democracy goes back to the Anglo-Saxons and then is lost in the midst of time and English rights and liberties is in the Bill of Rights and the Magna Carta back there is time big time, the myths you can't see it out of it comes liberties England is already free already free born Englishmen already the English constitution it is extremely hard to think about an idea which is really revolutionary how do you break the bloody thing every idea they say I've seen that before that's a bit subversive but it's not too subversive we've dealt with that we've built that back into the system so without going to the vulgar notion of false consciousness ideologies do some ideologies are so expansive and so fill the field that of course they provide in the end, a weight against thinking entirely different ideas. Yes, absolutely. In that sense, yes. Yes. That is what you have learned, because it isn't one of your imagination. But anyway, the first thing, how is that as a dog nurse can, the pioneer law that deeper says, never except we get a lawyer? Does it depend on its special idea? I am going to talk about that tomorrow. Yes, so I mean, that is, but I've already signaled that. Yes, when I talk about liberalism, yes, moving from a subversive doctrine, yes, to becoming the centerpiece of established ideas and being linked with the notion of respectability and English property. You can see how, yes, it's woven into the fabric of, as it were, traditionalism. or it becomes itself a special kind of English traditionalism. And that's, I think, one of the reasons why it becomes, at a later period, a break on modernism. It is in the beginning that which creates the possibilities of modernism, and in the end it is what helps to limit the extent to which Britain ever becomes a modern society. So the same ideology plays in the different historical periods an absolutely opposite historical role. Yes, it breaks up one world and then it prevents the other one from fully realising itself. English reason, yes, the capital reason which is taken in the French Revolution to its extreme, so frightens and terrifies the English middle classes that they recoil into English respectability. Yes, and that is the moment when liberalism turns on itself and stops being a doctrine is creating the modern world and starts to be a doctrine which is conserving the modern world. You have to think about English liberalism historically as formed in the period between the break of the English Revolution and the historic compromise of the Glorious Revolution. What Locke talks about is not, I mean, you had to cut off the head of the king just to make a point. But Locke did not conceive of government going on cutting off kings' heads. What he favored was that consolidation around the Glorious Revolution, 1688. Constitutional monarchy, parliamentary government, representative government, property, liberty, the family, capital. Now that's the world. You don't want to remake that world any longer. It's remade quite enough. Now you want to stabilize that world. You want to create that world into a good government. You want to build English society around that. That is going to stay. Locke was not a representative of the permanent revolution. He made one revolution. That was quite enough for him. He didn't want to go on making the revolution. He wanted that revolution consolidated. So English liberals, if you want to talk about the political character of English liberalism, you have to say, when? When? When? In 1644, it is a very subversive document. a document that Locke will not sign because he might be put in jail. In the middle of the 19th century, liberalism is not a doctrine that is about to smash the world up. Liberalism is consolidating English society. The workshop of the world is built around the principles of liberalism. So the very ideology changes its political character historically. In that sense, also, I suppose one of the themes I could have taken out, not only is an ideology not something that emanates out of the head of a single class, and not only is it not uniform, one thing, but it also has no single given political character. It doesn't have a political character inside. You can't say because liberalism broke up the old world and created the modern world, therefore it goes on being a revolutionary and subversive fool. Not necessarily so. Not necessarily so. it can play in a different historical role, a quite different historical political, have a quite different political connotation. But I am going to talk about the changing political connotations of liberalism as one of the formative elements in traditional English thought. Yeah. Here, how liberalism is relating to the circle position play-rangers were at the beginning of the 13th century. I'm thinking of it works well you will see from what I've said that it is quite hard to know exactly when liberalism comes into being, it's very hard because you can always find some of those ideas anticipated beforehand and I think they help to form the language of liberalism in the sense that well I think particularly Johnson I think Johnson is very sensitive indeed to the shifts which are taking place in that period he recognizes as it were the new world it's not yet the fully bourgeois world in any sense like that I don't think that is so but he recognizes the importance of wealth the importance of property he recognizes marketing and trade He recognizes the breakup of the great feudal landscapes. And in that sense, he is a major contributor. Those are the languages of dramatists. Dramatists, in that sense, you know, L.C. Knight's book is a very important book. It is on the period of the age of Shakespeare, drama in the age of Shakespeare, because it's very sensitive in its own way. There are lots of problems with it, but it's very sensitive to the way in which the changes in the cosmology and the conception of the world, which is happening in the 16th century, is resonated in the new kind of language, a new kind of realism even, an acceptance of a certain new kind of conventionalism in the writing, which is quite novel, quite new. Shakespeare is also about that transition. But Shakespeare always sets it up in relation to a much more powerful statement of what the arena of authority is. The arena of authority in the Machiavelli is the dynamic of the central Shakespearean tragedies. Ben Jonson is past that point. It's past that point. He doesn't need that figure of stable authority which is in crisis that Shakespeare had. He is much more in the era of the new man. Now, they are not yet liberals in any sense that we would recognize. But without the new men of that period, like without the new science of the 16th century, without Bacon and without Thomas More, without the Copernican revolution that happens, occurs in the thought and the science of that period, liberalism could not have emerged. So I would call those what I've tried to call the preconditions of liberalism. Yes, they're one of the histories, one of the languages that feed into the kind of crystallization that happens to liberal thought in the 17th century. That's how I try to look at these important antecedents which are the conditions of existence of an ideology. Which, um, which is, which might make the point that I've been trying to make in a very elaborate way, in a much more common sense way. You might think, what I've been trying to account for or explain is something which perplexes people about the English. And it has to do with the questions that I've been asked, really. So I just want to emphasize it in case you've missed it. You see, I think people who are not English find a difficulty in trying to understand how the English, how you can say at one and the same time that they're profoundly liberal and profoundly conservative. How is it possible to feel about the English that, you know, some of the things, the very English language is organized around conceptions that we would think of as liberal, individual, rights, contract. consent the market property these are the founding terms of English thought English culture now how did these things how do they cohere with that deep traditionalism conservatism different historical periods you can't explain that but the moment you recognize that liberalism changes its character and it changes its connotation in different historical periods that's to say once you historicize and relativize and pluralize your conception of liberalism then you can explain how the notions of liberty and freedom become an essentially conservative language. So what I've been trying to do may have taken a long set of divergent paths, but I'm trying to explain something quite immediate, something which I think if you've ever been to England or read English things, you will feel right away that this language is part of the natural constitution of the English character. And it was one of the things that makes them proudest. It's the land of liberty. And yet it does not carry any libertarian charge. Liberty does not carry a libertarian charge in England. That's a very difficult thing to understand. how it is that liberty has been excluded from libertarian because everywhere else, libertarian. And once you say, if I said English culture is libertarian, well, that would be a quite different thing. You know, libertarianism knows no bounds. It throws things over. It's iconoclastic. It's subversive. It's radical. And you don't feel that about English. It's not libertarian like that. and yet they're so centered on liberty, liberty, liberty. Well, until you see how liberty contracted relations with property and with patriarchy and with family and with stability and respectability and order, until you see that that is the network in which you have to understand liberty. You can't understand how the English use liberty as a term on its own, you see. You have to put the linkage, it's a network. Ideology is always a network. So you have to say, with what other ideas is this idea linked? So English liberty with individualism, property, family, respectability, order and consent. Ah, that shows you how liberty is held to a more conservative connotation, is robbed of its subversive and libertarian connotations, and is given a respectable and orderly kind of establishment caste. I want to expand on that when I talk about is there an English ideology but this notion of an ideology as a network of concepts each of which modifies the other but I just wanted to suggest to you that I'm not talking about deep structures only of English life I'm talking about the most immediate impressions that people have of English culture which is of the rootedness of the conceptions of liberty and property and the degree to which they form a stabilizing rather than a libertarian element in English culture and language. Yeah. You mean as to whether that too is a form of liberalism? You mean whether the rise of the independence of young people in England is an aspect? Well, there is of course a libertarian tradition. There is a libertarian tradition. There are subversive ideas. But they come out of the linkage between liberalism and something else. A kind of radicalism, which I haven't talked about yet. Which I'm going to talk a little bit about later on. And that is the end of the English radical libertarians. It goes into English socialism. But it's better thought about as English radicalism. And that, of course, borrows from liberal ideas. But it's not what I would call establishment liberalism. It's not consolidated in that way. But it's very individualistic. Yes, very individualistic. The liberties of young people who are breaking free of the traditional constraints of society are played out in terms of a radical individualism. Yes, it's more space. Well, if not necessarily family, Yes, that would be too much. But it is thought in terms of their own space, not of creating another whole social order, but much more in terms of opening the space for themselves. In that sense, it's a direct inheritance of liberalism, because that's what the men of property wanted to create, a space for themselves and their families. So it's a continuation of that tradition, but linked much more with radical ideas than with kind of conservative or traditionalist ideas. Yes. Yes. For a question, Yes. about your issues, one of my first questions was the feeling that some way they are individually, not just with their ceiling, being great caution, great people. Could you say that? Can you explain in some way a nominal era kicking about for liberalism and the conservative thing? Oh, yes, yes. I'll talk tomorrow about nationalism. There's much more, and especially in the one after that, the lecture is called Race, Empire, and Monarchy. is very much about nationalism. What I want to do, so I want to leave the question of the English nation aside for a minute, because liberalism is only one of the founding elements, one discourse. Then you need traditionalism and radicalism and imperialism before you can constitute the nation. So not until lecture five, which is, is there an English ideology? Will I talk about how the notion of the English nation is finally formed out of these different discourses. But since you asked the question, and I dropped the hint myself, yes, I think it's true that this notion of liberty, but projected back in the past, that is to say, traditionalized. Yes, the notion of liberty traditionalized. Look, I wonder if I should do it now. I think it's too late. I should do it at the beginning tomorrow. I want to say, for instance, take a concern. Let me do it now. Why not? Let me take a conservative thinker like Edmund Burke. Now, Edmund Burke is the father, the founder of English conservative thought. An organic conservative. He believes in custom, tradition, the hallowed institutions. He does not believe in reason. He says, you know, you feel part of the nation not because it's a reason or a contract, but because you have been always in it. It is part of you. It's deeply conservative. As you know, Burke is driven into conservatism, recoiling against jacobinism. So he is in the reverse, he is in the very stream of reversal of liberalism. Liberalism in recoil against its most extreme form. This is the moment, Burke is the moment, when liberalism becomes conservative, in my view. That's why I want to start tomorrow. I'm going to say what I've said today a little bit longer tomorrow, but I'm trying to sum it up quickly. Now, you take Burke. Burke says, we are not interested in making new things, a new nation. He's against the American Revolution. Not new things, the old thing. The old thing, the continuity and tradition of custom. What is it that is traditional for Burke? What is traditional for Burke is the Glorious Revolution. 1688 is the tradition. Now, look at what is happening here. Here's a conservative thinker who goes back to the moment of the liberal revolution and says it is traditional. It's always been there, and that is part of the Magna Carta. It's just one of the many stepping stones that have created the English nation back in the midst of time. Now, this invention of tradition. Yes, the ideological operation of traditionalizing revolution tames it. The revolution is now the birth of the nation. Yes, it has become a consolidating idea, not an idea of change. Burke speaks about, Locke speaks about 1688 as if the whole world changed in that period. And Burke speaks about it as if the whole world was continuous with it. So, you see, English conservatism has built liberalism into itself. It is part of its own tradition. So it has become one with the idea of the nation. And therefore, the notions of individualism, far from being at the opposite pole to the notion of the nation, is what the nation is. The nation is the sum of all the individuals. The sovereign individuals constitute what is peculiar about the English nation. So, yes, you're quite right. When you look at the English individual, you do find a kind of oneness with the notion of the nation. It's a kind of equivalence which is forged. Very curious one. Because as where the notion of the nation is a social concept. You have to give up your individuality to the nation. There's a very peculiar form where the nation depends on your being an individual. You have to be the most sovereign individual to have the nation. That's what the nation is. So it's a quite different conception of the nation. So this is another warning to you that when you use the word nation, unless you understand how the concept is constructed in ideology and culture, you don't know what it means. It means a different thing in English culture from that which it means in French culture, which also tries to traditionalize the revolution. You know, every Frenchman ever since then, deeply conservative as he is, is a follower of Napoleon Bonaparte in the revolutionary tradition. De Gaulle is the, you know, France C'est Moi, including especially, especially the revolution. So revolutions can become deeply conserving and conservative traditions once they're traditionalized. Yes, they can give rise to the birth of the nation. They can become the stable forms, not the upsetting forms of social history. So in that way, there is, I think, a peculiar relationship between English individualism national identity. And I think you find that in just the assumption, you know, the assumption of infinite superiority, which you get with the English. They don't have a moment's hesitation in speaking about what the British are, what the English are. You know, the Americans have all the trouble in the world. I mean, they speak about America all the time. But you know, in the 20th century, the Americans have had what the British would regard as this most astonishing idea, The project to create an American literature. To write the great American novel. What? The English don't understand what that means. How can you write? Of course, any novel that you write will be an English novel. What else would it be? If you write a great novel, that would be the great English. But you can't, you know, set out to write it as if it doesn't yet exist. Americanism has to be invented. Englishness is just there. It's like the weather. It's always been there. The mist, you know, the fog, in it rolls. It's always been there. You can't see it because back there are the, you know, the woad and the... But they were English too. Pretty free men. They had a kind of parliament and a sort of constitutional monarchy. A bit of a constitution, unwritten of course. I mean, take the notion of English common law. Yeah? It's English common law, you know. Written down nowhere. Doesn't exist. it only exists in what the person before you has said now they can have a conception of law which doesn't have a single thing written down the only authority is that the person before you said it now where does that law begin? nowhere because somebody before him said it and somebody before him said it and back there you don't know who said it began the anglo-saxons and the danes and the gales and whoever occupied they sort of first started it up but you can't get to that it's so far back And since then, one person after another has made it by saying precedent. He said it, so that's what it means. Now, I mean, that conception of legality is quite different from the European tradition, as you know. Where law is a positive tradition. You have to write it down. That's what's good about it in the European tradition, that it's written down. That somebody frames it. That it has the power and legitimacy of political authority. You have a parliament, it passes laws. Those are the laws. In England, the judges have the law because they know it. They know it. And where do they get it? Because somebody said they read it in a book of what he said before me. So it's like the priesthood. The law is like the priesthood. The religion is what has been said in the law. It's a very, it's a deeply naturalized tradition. A naturalized tradition of English legality. It is a massive conception, one of the most profound conceptions ever since. And even today, English statute law, the one that is written down by Parliament, is regarded as just a new intervention. It's rather a nuisance, really. Some modern 19th century fangled idea that the law is written down, codified. The law is known. The law is known. It's known because it's always been known. So, as part of the capacity of the English to construct everything into a tradition, to traditionalize everything retrospectively. Not really so, but to give it a tradition once it has happened, to build it into a tradition. That is the construction of ideology. That's tomorrow's lecture. You better stop me or I'll do it now. Very recent times. I don't want to, I won't answer the question fully because I am coming to that. But just let me underline it because, yes, I think you should have it in mind. The first question is about the limit. Remember what I said about the limit yesterday. Now, I've talked about liberalism as not one thing. Yes, there are several discourses. And I've talked about it as changing its character from one historical epoch to another. And I've talked about the fact that it can articulate with the interests and outlook of different social classes. So the question is, isn't it just... a series of proliferation is there any limit beyond which you would say well we have passed from liberalism to something else how can you have a limit when the field is not a unified field if the field is unified then you see what the limits are those ideas and when you lose those ideas you pass into something else but when you talk about ideology as a field of concepts and ideas which can be differently articulated and structured how do you know where the limit is well I want to hold to the notion that nevertheless there is a limit and tomorrow I'll try to give you an example of where the limit is but I would also say that there is what I would call ideas which are core or central to liberalism as a formation you will find those ideas somewhere else but what you won't find is the interconnection or set of ideas with which are connected take the word of liberty or freedom. Well, you find freedom all over the place. You find freedom in liberty, in libertarian discourse, in socialist discourse, as well as in liberal discourse of different varieties. But I think that what you don't find outside of liberalism is the network which links liberty, property, individualism, family and household. So I think there are certain, there's a network and once you get that network going, whether you think that in a radical, subversive or conservative way, you are still within what I want to call now, here's the metaphor, and it's not too tight to one, but the metaphor is the field of force of liberal ideas. The metaphor is a metaphor from magnetism or electricity. Not the one current of liberalism, but the field of force of liberal ideas. But they only occur when you link one idea with another. You can't get the field from one idea only. So if you say, liberalism is the idea of liberty. No, no, no. I can construct libertarian discourse from the idea of liberty. And I can construct the socialist idea of liberty, which is very different. It doesn't relate to those particularities. But when you link liberty, rights, consent, individualism, property, the household, patriarchy, then you get into a particular constellation, which is, I would call, It's not liberalism, because I don't want to call it one thing like that, but it is what I would call the liberal repertoire. It's the inventory which constitutes the broad constellation of liberal ideas. And I think there's a kind of limit to that, which I will talk about tomorrow. I hope you don't think I'm evading things if I say I'm coming to that late. but what is hiding under lecture 7 which is called the Populism is all about the new right it's about Thatcherism so I will deal with it more fully later on that latter part of your question but I don't want to avoid the earlier part of your question I don't see the strands as having total boundaries between them but I do want to identify different formations. I think they kind of cohere into different currents. So I think you can find liberalism across the field but now you need to wait until I talk about conservatism and radicalism because I then want to introduce the idea, which I've not talked about yet, of the articulation between different discourses. So what I want to say about, for instance, Mrs. Thatcher One part of liberalism, the neoliberal, laissez-faire, market-oriented part of liberalism, is articulated with some other discourses, with a particular discourse of nation, and a particular discourse of imperialism, and a particular discourse of English conservatism, to form modern, new-right English conservatism, which is different from, say, the conservatism of the old paternalist conservatism, what Mrs. Thatcher would call the wets. So I want to see not only this fracturing can be, I think, studied in terms of the linkages which are made. Those linkages are not permanent, so sometimes they dissolve and reform. Liberalism, which I want to say fractures in a very profound way in the crisis of the British state between 1880 and 1920, what Dangerfield calls the strange death of English liberalism. Well, at that moment, liberalism goes in two different directions. And one is articulated with English socialism, and the other is articulated with English conservatism. And liberalism becomes a weak political tradition in one sense, and in another sense, part of everything. It's both quite thin in its own terms, so the Liberal Party, at any rate, is not where you would go to define liberal ideas any longer. It bulks much larger. It's gone under disguise, because it's been articulated with something else. but I want to elaborate the question of articulation a little bit later on when I begin to bring the other elements that found English culture into line alongside liberalism so I've established liberalism tomorrow I want to establish the traditionalizing of liberalism and conservatism and then I want to establish race and imperialism and then I think we can talk about what is the resultant of these three great arches I would say English cultural identity can be understood as the articulation of those three kind of formations.

But really, the formation of a traditionalist worldview is really what I'm going to, is a theme which connects the next three talks, not just this one. Yesterday I was looking at English liberalism or the discourses of English liberalism. trying to suggest the way in which that formation played a central role in the construction of English cultural and national identity. Today I'm going to talk about the reverse side of liberalism, conservatism, with a small C and a big C, both as a political doctrine and as an attitude towards the world. the conservative view of life. And I think I want to suggest that that too helps, is one of the factors or forces which helps to construct the traditionalist character of English national culture. And tomorrow I'm going to talk about empire and imperialism and race and the monarchy. And I want to suggest that if you connect those elements together, if you consider that as the network of imperialism, that also is a vital element in the construction of the nation, the notion of English national identity. And that it's not in a sense until you have the liberalisms, the conservatisms, and the imperialisms together that one can see the elements out of which English cultural identity is forged. So that's why the three talks are really aspects of the same general theme. You notice that I don't have a separate section on English radicalism, on subversive English thought. And that's not because it's not important in the formation of judicialism. I would be talking about that within each of the sections. Within each of the sections. Yes, I want to talk how the working class, how ordinary people, how radicals, etc. get absorbed within the liberal consensus, within a certain kind of conservatism, and indeed inside an imperial conception of the nation. So radicalism is there in its many forms and it's extremely important, but I'm not going to treat it as a separate theme. I'm going to treat it in relation to what I would call the dominant formation of English thought. And I want to define sometime, at some point this afternoon, this question of dominance. Now, let me pick up the story, though, where I left it yesterday. And yesterday, what I was trying to suggest to you was, on the one hand, the revolutionary origins of English liberalism. The fact that it emerges out of the breakup of the old world and is, in fact, one of the forces which breaks up the old world. And that it's one of the forces that helps to form or shape or constitute. Do you have that word in Italian? You know what I mean by constitute. It's a very important word. It's one of the formative elements of the modern. And at the same time, it provides the categories in which people think what Britain as a modern democratic industrial capitalist society is really like. So it plays this double role. I never want to insert ideological discourses at the end of the chain. They're at the beginning and the end of the chain. They're in the first instance and the last. They help to form and shape as well as providing the categories within which people think and act. Well, I wanted to remind you of those revolutionary origins of liberalism. And in the traditions of English social, cultural, and political thought, those radical elements in liberalism have never disappeared. They've never disappeared. So don't, when I put the stress on the containment of liberalism, don't imagine that the whole of liberalism was neatly wrapped up and parceled up and put away. Yes, there are elements. The more radical aspects of liberalism remain. Take, for instance, the notion of rights. Yes, of right. Now, when the Whigs spoke of an Englishman's rights, as I tried to tell you yesterday, they didn't mean all Englishmen, and they certainly didn't mean any Englishwomen. They meant just a narrow group. What they meant were the new, emerging men of property. Not the old aristocracy, because they already had political rights. and certainly not the laboring masses, and not domestic servants, and not the poor. They meant the new people of property, the rights of those people of property. So the original conception of rights, though Locke says it's natural rights, natural rights, you don't have to get it from anywhere else, you're just born with it. Well, in England, in the 18th century, a lot of people were born without it. They just didn't have the gene which said, we have rights. So though the rights were natural, 80% of the society weren't apparently born fully formed. They were kind of without one arm or something. They weren't properly natural beings. So natural man, there were a tiny number of them, a small number of them. So the idea of rights, although it's written in huge letters, natural rights belong to everybody because we are all in nature. In fact, it was a very restricted concept. The concept of rights, extremely restricted. And one of the real points about classical liberalism is that it speaks of itself in a universal language, but it only refers to things which are really limited. a small number of rights, but it calls it the rights of man. And I reminded you, let me remind you again, that that is specifically an ideological operation. When a particular interest represents itself in discourse as the interest of everybody, that is one of the most crucial ideological operations. It's one of the ones which is identified most directly, explicitly, by Marx and the German ideology and in capital. When a particular interest, in order to win the consent of everybody, represents its particular interest as the interest of everyone. Where it says, it is in the interest of the nation that men of property should have the vote. That is representing a particular interest as a general one. And do you see what that representation does? It identifies the interest of everyone with the interest of a particular class or group. That is why it's ideological. Because at the same time, it masks or mystifies or hides the fact that not everybody has rights. That there are lots of people who don't have rights. Okay, that is what classical liberalism meant by rights. But let me remind you that ever since that word, that concept, came into the vocabulary of English political and social thought, different groups who were excluded have used the concept of rights to win rights for themselves. So the people who weren't originally conceived by the liberals as having natural rights, then said, but we are human beings too. That is how the first feminism is constructed. Women said, if rights are natural, and we are natural, since after all, we are the mothers of nature, we produce and reproduce the race naturally, how come we don't have any rights? Why don't you give us some? That is the language in which the first feminism is constructed. First feminism is constructed within the language of radical liberalism. Radical liberalism, the first language. And in the same way, when poor people appeared in front of the law and said, well, we are now in a society which is governed by law, but it doesn't seem to apply to me. How come I don't have any rights? And they struggled for to extend the rights which a narrow group of class had won as a result of the English Revolution to themselves. So they worked. You see, the notion of rights is now no longer fixed when it first emerges. It is an idea which is then picked up by other groups. It's extended to their situation. They use that concept to apply to themselves. In applying it to their own situation, they change it. It used only to refer to men. Now it refers to women. So it's expanded. It refers to a different group, yes, to the one which it originally did. So we can't think of a discourse like this as frozen in the moment of its formation. The moment of its formation simply looses into the world the idea of right. And after that, new groups try to expropriate the idea of right. and to take the idea of rights out of the way in which it has been fixed in liberal discourse, to apply to just a small group, and put it in their own discourse and to claim it for themselves. So that what happens all the time in culture is the expropriation and transformation of the central concept so that they can articulate with the interest of new groups, new social interests, new conceptions of the world. So the notion of ideology as a kind of static field, yes, it was born in this moment, then it stays there, and it's a kind of prisoner which doesn't change. Nobody else can think within it, etc., is quite wrong. And the inheritance from the liberal tradition of the language of rights stretches right into the 20th century. 20th century feminism is interested in extending not just political but social rights. The language of the welfare state in advanced industrial democratic class societies has always been constructed around the rights of the poor or the rights of the less well-off or the rights of the powerless. And at the end of the 20th century, whole ranges of new groups, groups that previously laid no claim to rights, groups that are involved in sexual politics, for instance, have picked up the language of rights and seek to expand and extend its meaning in order to claim something for themselves. Indeed, the language of rights enters into the language of English socialism, not just English radicalism, the fact that in the 19th century, the English working class is organized around the right to combine, the right to form trade unions, the right to demonstrate, the right to meet in Trafalgar Square, the right to their own opinion, the right to express themselves, the right to publish, etc. The language of rights is the language of radicalism. So don't imagine, remember the point that I was making yesterday, that liberalism is a set of complex discourses. It's not one thing. And it moves into the society. It's articulated with different groups and with different ideological formations. Okay, that's the good part of the story, because let me go back to the bad one. That is something that goes on in the radical tradition. but the dominant appropriation of liberalism is the other way, not into the radical, but into the conservative. And what I was trying to talk about yesterday was the way in which liberalism begins as a revolutionary break with the past and is one of the agents for breaking up the old order. It's one of the ways in which men oppose absolutism and break up the traditions of feudal society, And yet it becomes, as it were, one of the pillars of the conserving traditions of English social thought. Okay, the question then is, how is the main political thrust of liberalism reversed in this way? Well, how is liberalism traditionalized? What is this operation of traditionalizing revolutionary doctrine? First of all, let me establish its periods. This traditionalizing of liberalism takes place over quite a long historical period, and there are certain major turning points. One I gave yesterday, 1688, the settlement, the glorious settlement, and the period after that, the period of relative stability of English agrarian capitalism. 18th century is one important period. The second turning point is the period of the French Revolutionary Wars, the reaction against Jacobinism and the patriotic wars against France which become in effect counter-revolutionary wars and which force liberalism off its radical stance because Jacobinism looks like the last, the point towards which it is tending and so Englishness intervenes between English liberalism and French Jacobinism and turns people back as it were into the consolidation of liberalism within a broader English consensus. So the period 1790 to 1820 is a second important period of reversal. And the third, which I'm going to talk about in more detail at the beginning of next week, is the period from 1880 to 1920. That is to say, when the proletarian challenge, when liberal democracy is formed, when the proletarian challenge is contained, when the threat of labor is finally constitutionalized, When the new imperialism emerges and when Britain becomes the first backward advanced capitalist society in the world, the first backward advanced capitalist society in the world, you may think that that's a contradiction in turn, but actually that is one of the keys to the problems of British society in the 20th century, that it advanced into the stage of advanced industrial capitalism backwards, rather than forward. It went in it sideways. But those are the three key periods. Now, one of the things that I suggested yesterday that underpins the containment in the earlier period is indeed the fusion or the coming together of different ideas. And if you remember, I tried to say, tried to suggest to you that if one's talking about how a cultural ideological formation comes to crystallize, one should not try to understand that as composed of individual ideas. There is never one great single idea in a cultural or national ideology. There are always more than one idea, and the ideas are linked together. They form a kind of network, And it's the connection between them which provide a vocabulary of thought which enables people to think their own everyday life situations within the terms of a particular cultural configuration. That is how an ideology works. It provides the discourse of understanding and comprehension. It provides the meaning that people, as it were, can put together for themselves in order to explain what it is that is going on, why the world is like that, and what their position is in it. And whenever one looks at an ideological configuration of that kind, one must be aware of the fact that the same term can exist in more than one ideological configuration. So that there is a different conception of liberty or the individual in different conceptions. So it's not just the term, it is how the term is defined within that ideological configuration that matters and how that is linked with another term so that if you want to get for instance the notion of equality if you think of equality equality is a concept that exists in liberal discourse and in socialist discourse so the same term exists within the two languages but When a liberal says equality, it doesn't mean the same thing as when a socialist says equality. A liberal means equality. People are equal because they all have natural rights. A liberal does not mean that they are equal in their condition. It certainly does not mean that they should be equal in the outcome of their lives. Quite the opposite. because liberalism is also competitive. Liberalism believes that individuals must compete against one another. So it can't believe in equality of outcome. But it does believe, as opposed to an older aristocratic notion, that everybody begins the same because you're human. So it's your humanity that constitutes the equality in liberalism. Whereas within socialist discourse, equality means something different. Equality means equality of outcome, that people, as it were, should end up without huge disparities of wealth or power. But liberalism believes in huge disparities of wealth and power because it believes in the market, and it believes in individualism, and it believes that if you don't work and save and accumulate, you lose out. That's the law of the game. So you see that you can't trust what the word says. You have to try to see what the word means within its configuration of other concepts. You have to use a number of different concepts to compose the constellation or galaxy out of which a particular ideological discourse or cultural formation is formed. Well, one of the ways in which liberalism is, as it were, contained or traditionalized is by the fusion of a number of different ideas. and I hinted at them yesterday but I want to just identify them once again. The idea of liberty when harnessed with the idea of the sovereign individual and linked with the notion of property and tied up with the conception of respectability and underpinned by the notion of patriarchy gives you a conservative rather than a radical liberalism. If you have those ideas going for you, it's hard to construct liberalism as a radical doctrine. Because, and you can see why, property stabilizes liberalism in the word. It gives it what is called a vested interest. The rising classes that subscribe and find their project, historical project articulated within liberalism become what is called the landed interest. They get an interest in a certain conception and configuration of private property. So that notion of their rights and liberties becomes tied, tied and pinned down to an actual substantial material interest of a particular social, in a particular social relation, the relationship to land. and land now not treated as God's estate. Locke had to go through a whole argument as to why anybody could possess land at all because the old view was that of course the land was given to everybody to enjoy. How come that any one person could say well this is my fence and this is my land if it belonged to everybody? And Locke's argument within classic liberalism is immensely torturous as to why it is the land still really belongs to everybody, but it just happens to belong particularly to a whole series of Whig gentry families. And it just happens that they have the right to put a fence around it. And Locke goes through that argument. It's a very interesting argument because the reason why, he says, it's possible for some men to possess property is that they mix their labor with nature. They mix their labor with nature, and that gives them a vested interest in the land. So the notion of property and of private property and of property that belongs to the individual, of the sovereign property and the sovereign home and the sovereign estate of those three ideas, that is one of the things that, as it were, makes liberalism become an ideology of the rooted rather than an ideology of the upheaval. And the notion of respectability is similar. Respectability is, you might say, the inside of property. Property is the outer manifestation of a stable life and respectability is the inner conviction of a stable life. You don't know that you have arrived in society, that you are a proper member of society unless you gain the respect of others, unless there are others below you who give you respect. Then you know you have respectability. If there's nobody else to respect you, the idea of respectability is impossible. So you can't have respectability unless you have a hierarchy. There has to be somebody down there who respects you. And that confers an inner conviction, Not the outer show now. Not the outer substance. That's there in the estate, in your accumulation, what you're accumulating, wider and widening, increasing property. But now is the spiritual property. Yes, the intangible spiritual property of respect. There's an argument in the 18th century about how the men of property become properly civilized, how they become gentled, how they become gentlemen. and that is thought to be a deep and complicated inner process of refining the sensibility of taking on certain inner values and until that happens the interior of men's spirits and minds have not been properly transformed but once that is given once respectability comes into existence then as it were outside and inside form a stable whole yes the men of property know where they are because they are respected in society by those who are below them they have arrived at a certain status in society well and the sign the token where that exercise of social authority is given must not only be in the external world but must also be in the little domestic world of the family. So the questions of patriarchy, of the pater familias, of the man of the world who is also the center of the domestic universe, of women in their place, of marriage as an unequal contract, of the family as a series of dependencies, which are expressed not only in the domestic ideology that begins to form up in the period of the 18th century, which is actually expressed in the position in law, the inability of women to own property of a certain kind, the continuous separation of the home and work, and of the man of the world who shuttles between the two kingdoms and the increasing subordination and inconclusion and confinement of women to the domestic sphere, of the capacity to have women at home as a sign of substance. Only men of substance could afford to keep their wives out of work. If you were poor, the wives had to work as well, including in the lower echelons of the commercial classes. The English bourgeoisie begins with a very different division of labor between men and women, with hardly any physical separation Between home and work, people lived above the shop, and women worked alongside men in a whole range of early bourgeois professions. And one of the signs of the arrival of these people as people, men of status, is that they separate work and home. They move, they construct the first suburb. It is they who move out of the urban centers and construct the first centers of home, home and work, and the confinement of women and the family to home and of the men as the mediators between the haven of home and the public world. the exclusion of women from the political, and the arrival of men of substance, the monopolization of political power by the men of substance. Well, that is one of the major contributory factors to the consolidation of the liberal bourgeoisie as an established class. And it happens in the period of what we might call the Whig ascendancy. The Whig ascendancy. when, as it were, there are two aristocracies. Marx says it very clearly. It's a wonderful passage in Marx, especially in the 18th premiere, when he talks about the two aristocracies, the old conservative aristocracy, the titled aristocracy that owes its roots to feudalism and absolutism, and the new aristocracy, the men who have arrived, the men who have arrived because of property and capital and respect and the family. Now, in Britain in the 18th century, there are these two classes, these two classes, two dominant classes, you might say. Within the dominant formation, there are these two quite distinct cultures vying for ascendancy. And the emerging one, the rising one, is the one which has been formed in liberalism, but which is becoming the hegemonic social formation. It's becoming the establishment, as you might say, of English society. Okay, it's then that fusion around a certain set of notions, a certain set of discourses, the discourses of liberty, property, respect, patriarchy, paternalism, etc., which both create the culture, and not only the culture, the practices and the forms around which liberalism is consolidated into a new kind of English orthodoxy. It becomes essential to the new definition of the nation and the definition of the English nation that we are the inheritors of or that we can understand today really is formed in this period. You have to think of that definition of the nation as a historical construct. It's nothing in nature. There is no such thing in nature as the British nation. The British nation is just a signifier. It's a signifier for a specific set of historical processes. The nation is constructed. What we are looking at is how the nation is constructed, how it's produced as an artifact, how it becomes, how it comes into the world as a real and material and cultural thing, how a new kind of national identity is defined and a new kind of patriotism, that is to say something which defines how the people are to belong to this nation. Because, you know, an ideology doesn't just construct the thing to which you belong. It also constructs the forms in which you belong. And it constructs as if were those who belong. It constructs the subjects of belongingness. So at the same time, as the nation is being defined, the people are being defined. because there's no nation without the people who feel they belong to it. So the nation and the people and the relationships of patriotic obligation and respect, belongingness, a sense that this is us. We are the people of the nation. The nation is the expression of the spirit of the people. Those relationships between spirit and people are constructed in this long history that I'm trying to describe. Now, out of this, I want to just turn aside for a moment to pick up two other ideas, which I think give something specific and peculiar to the way in which this process occurs in the English setting, in the English context. And before I do that, perhaps I ought to say to you, to remind you, that everything that I'm saying about the construction of English cultural and national identity could be said about anybody else. So I hope you are not listening only with your English ear. I hope you're hearing what I'm saying with your Italian ear too. The moments which construct Italian cultural identity, which create the Italian national popular, very different, very different. The bringing together of the different discourses are very different. So it's not the same in that it happens at the same time in the two societies. But yours too is the effect of a historical construction. The Italian people is also the result of a very specific history. It has its own conjunctures and periodization. And it has its own forms of belongingness. They're different from the peculiarities of the English. These are the peculiarities of the Italians, but every nation has its own cultural peculiarities. So I just wanted to remind you that it's not only a British story that one's trying to tell, though that is of course the story that I'm particularly concerned with. Now one of the things that's peculiar about the English story, if you just think of the turning point that I gave you before, between the English Revolution of 1644 and the settlement of 1688. Then between the rise of English radicalism and French Jacobinism in the 1790s, and, well, whatever you might call it, Peterloo in the 1820s. And then again, with the beginning of the crisis, the rise of imperialism, the beginning of the crisis in the 1880s, the emergence of the proletarian struggles, the First World War, early feminism, et cetera, until the general strike in 1926. Those are the three pivotal periods. Three pivotal periods. Now, what I want to say about them is, first of all, just think of the length of history which that covers. If you wanted to do that for the Italian nation, you would have to start much later. Not only that, but each of those moments ends with a historic compromise. Each of them ends with a historic compromise. None of them produces one hegemonic project, one dominant culture, or one dominant class formation which is capable of remaking the whole of the society in its image. Each one ends with a trade-off, a trade-off. The Puritan revolution cuts off the head of a king to make a point, But in the end, it settles for a constitutional monarchy. A constitutional monarchy. What is a constitutional monarchy? Is it the proper monarchy? Well, no. It's not a proper monarchy like absolutism. Well, is it the parliamentary rule? No, it's nothing so raw and crude as that. What is the legal and constitutional authority in Britain? Is it the divine right of kings? Certainly not. The Stuarts are dead. Well, is it, you know, what comes out of the American Revolution or the French Revolution or Jacobinism? Is it the popular will? It's not, you know. The central constitutional authority in Britain is a thing, a subject called the crown and the lords in parliament. The crown and the lords in parliament. Who is it who decides who is to be Prime Minister? The Queen. The moment of the creation of the next Prime Minister would be when the Prime Minister is summoned to Bagheem Palace. Who tells the Queen who should be Prime Minister? The party. The party tells the Queen who to call. Who is it who promulgates laws in Parliament? Is it the people who elect a government? No, because once that happens, it has to go up to the House of Lords to which nobody ever elected. And from there it has to be signed, Queen Elizabeth, before it can become passing to law. The English have never, ever constitutionalized the popular will. It's an idea. Of course, there's lots of popular government. There's an election, popular parties. their representatives and MPs and parliament and cabinet and government, but actually still British constitutional government is the inheritance of a compromise which seeks to retain certain good elements of the monarchy. I'm going to talk about the monarchy in more detail tomorrow, but you will remember what Badgett said about the monarchy. The English government, he said, has two parts. One is the useful part, you know, the useful part, which actually does the business of governing the cabinet, the administration, the legislature, et cetera. And the other is the symbolic part, the symbolic part. And what you need there, it is the symbolic part, he says, the theatrical show of monarchy, which holds the sentiments of the people together. The people don't feel they belong to a government because it's efficient. The people feel they belong to a government because it symbolizes their unity. Okay, the compromise. And though I don't want to go into detail, the 1790s to the 1880s is also a period of historic compromise. Because, of course, the period of upheaval of English radicalism is followed by an enormous range of concessions. It's followed by the beginning of the great reforms of 1832. So reforms have to be given, concessions have to be made, but they're not made to the radical program of Jacobinism. They're not made to equality, liberty, and fraternity. They're made to the more compromised forms of liberal democracy. And there's another word, another wonderful historic compromise, the combination of liberalism and democracy, which we now call liberal democracy. That is to say, the preservation of the market and of capitalist relations and of private property, which guarantees certain kinds of liberty. and on the other hand, the coming of mass democracy. British democracy, political democracy, is of course a combination of the two things, deeply intention and contradictory, but it's a compromise. And when I come to talk about the 1880s and the 1920s, I would want to talk about that as the striking of a historic compromise. And I think the 1945 is yet another historic compromise. Yes, the moment of the founding of the welfare state is when capitalism accepts the welfare state in order to go on being. It's a trade-off. So one has to look at the extremely long period of English history as constructed through a series of historic compromises. So it's not surprising that the idea of compromise itself has settled deeply into English common sense. that where everybody else in the world, as far as the English are concerned, are sectarian, sectarian, ideological, attached to great ideas, willing to die for the cause, the great genius of the English people is that they know when to compromise. Never too soon, because then you give too much away, but never too late. In the Second Reform Act, just before the people actually brought down the railings, give a little, give a little, give a little more, give a little more. The ability to stay on top while giving, to compromise, to settle for something. Well, the second idea is very closely related to that. It is the idea of a settlement. 1688 is called the glorious settlement. And since then, there have been a series, not only of historic compromises, that is to say, where the great fundamental social forces have to engage in a compromise or negotiation or trade-off with one another. They have also to settle for a certain balance of forces. The idea of the settlement, of a settlement. One of the great contemporary thinkers of English conservative thought, Enoch Powell, who I'm going to quote several times this afternoon, said, conservatism is a settled view of human society in general and of our society in particular, which each succeeding generation only expresses. Only expresses. A settled view. Now, I don't know whether you have the word, the term, a settlement. Just think of what it means. To focus on a settlement means that you don't focus on the upheaval. A settlement is what happens after the upheaval. First of all, everything is in turmoil. Then everything is settled. The upheaval and the settlement. But you focus on the moment of the settlement, not at the moment of the break. So the rupture and the transformation, and after all, English history, you know, is a series of transformations. The English Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, the birth of English radicalism, etc. A series of ruptures and breaks, but they're read in terms of the settlement. They're read in terms of the ability to strike a balance of social forces. That balance of social forces shouldn't, you must mistake what I'm saying when I talk about a balance of social forces. A balance doesn't mean that they're equally weighted. A balance means that they are in relations of subordination and domination, but they're in such a way that they don't constantly fight and argue over the old things. They now, yes, they're in relations with one another. And there is a structure of social authority which the subordinated begin to accept. They begin to accept that they are, as it were, They play a minor role in the larger configuration. That's what I mean by settlement. In the settlement, when the settlement clears in 1688, the Puritan sects are not in command. The Levellers are not in command. Cromwell's army is not in command. The men of property are in command. And they have a role. They have a project for the others. They have a project for the others. That is, of course, the conception of hegemony. That is what hegemony means. And you mustn't use the concept of hegemony as if it means that everybody thinks in the same way. It doesn't mean that. It means always the balance between different elements, but so organized that there can be a certain kind of consolidating social authority which cements these different elements together and which allows a society which is so settled for a period to undertake the next phase of historical development. Not until the settlement of 1688 could English agrarian capitalism develop a properly bourgeois culture. Not until the settlement of 1780 to 1820 could England begin the great march towards the reforms which introduced liberal democracy. and not until the great settlement of 1880 to 1920 could English society remain both capitalist and imperialist and democratic. Could it absorb the contradictions of mass democracy? So in each phase, a form of social authority is instituted which contains, it doesn't remove subversive elements, it doesn't wipe them out of existence, but it draws them into a configuration of authority and power which allows some major historical development to occur. Okay, let me now spend a few moments talking about what I wanted to call the other side to the construction of these series of compromises or settlements which structure or phase the construction of English cultural identity. Let me remind you that the notion of Britain and of being British, the notion of a patriot, of patriotism, has not always been associated in English thought with the political right. Far from it. The earliest associations of modern patriotism are with radicalism, not with conservatism. It was the old system that was thought... ...article on English patriotism, which perhaps you may know. which traces the development of patriotic sentiments in English society and which shows in the language of patriotism by Hugh Cunningham. It's called the language of patriotism and is reprinted in History Workshop 12, it's 1981. And it shows the degree to which early patriotism had very clear roots in the radical tradition. It was identified with Cromwell. It's a notion of the elect nation. Even in that same Puritan tradition, Milton once said that Britain, which was formerly styled the hotbed of tyranny, will hereafter desire to be celebrated for endless ages as a soil most genial to the growth of liberty, as a soil most genial to the growth of liberty. That identification of Britain as the source of liberty, as the nation of liberty, the cradle of English liberties, indeed of the place from which the whole idea of liberty has emerged, is a very radical conception. And radicals from that period on, right on into the 1840s and 50s, right on into Chartism, you will find numbers of occasions on which radicals tried to, as it were, ground their appeal or their program in popular support by claiming that they best represented the nation. When the reformers who started to talk about parliamentary reform in the 1790s wanted, as it were, to lay claim to say that they didn't come from faraway France with these strange ideas. They tried to ground themselves in the notion of Britain as the center of a new kind of liberty. So the association of patriotism and radicalism are in fact quite deep and historically extremely important. But it is the case that in the 1790s, for the first time, with the reaction against Jacobinism, with the recoil against the French Revolution, with the increasing sense of the danger and the threat from English radicals, with the intense fervor of the propaganda which was launched in order to mobilize Englishmen behind a patriotic counter-revolutionary war against France, and with the concomitant growth of English evangelicalism, which in fact conceives the task through religion and morality of restoring the moral fiber of the nation itself, and which is one of the main constituent elements in the construction of domestic ideology. In that period, in that formation, for the first time, Patriotism is dislocated or disarticulated from its radical connection and re-articulated with conservatism. And in the same moment, the notion of liberty, which up until then had been the flag of a radical or subversive idea, becomes harnessed or traditionalized within conservative thought. Now, I mentioned Burke yesterday and Burke's reflections on the French Revolution. That's one of the moment exactly when you hear that voice that is moving away in shock and horror from the radical ideas of Jacobinism, which sees Jacobinism as the end point of radicalism and which is in recoil against it. That is the moment of the formation of English conservatism. Modern conservatism is formed in the recoil against Jacqueline. Of course, there are conservative ideas before. You remember what I said about origins yesterday. When I say it's the formation of English conservatism, you won't mistake me as saying that there were no conservative ideas before that. Of course, a long tradition of conservative ideas. But what we regard as modern conservative ideas, conservative ideas of modern English society is formed in that moment. And it's formed, that's to say, not only independently or autonomously, but it's formed exactly in the movement of reversal, away from the extremities of liberalism, which are to be found in the Jacobin Creed. That is the moment of the formation of conservative thought. Now, Burke formulates that. But before I read it, I want to remind you one thing about Burke. Burke is now held to be, in a sense, the father of modern conservatism. He articulates an extremely organic view of society. What I want to show you in the passage I'm going to read you is how Burke constitutionalizes the idea of liberty, how he absorbs the revolution of 1688, how he builds that into just one more English tradition. Okay, there's no surprise about why that is the conservatizing of certain liberal ideas. That's not the important question. I want to remind you that Burke remained throughout this entire period a fervent subscriber to laissez-faire liberal economics. He was unswervingly committed to ordinary common-sense political economy. So he's a conservative of the market. He's not a conservative of the pre-market or pre-feudal kind. He's a conservative, and that is to say, who absorbs both the market and the idea of liberty into the conservative tradition. He articulates, he links together traditions which don't necessarily belong throughout history. And he absorbs certain elements of patriotic sentiment. I read you the passage. It's an extract from Reflections on the Revolution in France. You have to listen carefully because the argument is even more old-fashioned than mine. The Revolution of 1688, remember what that was? The Revolution of 1688 was made to preserve our ancient, indisputable laws and liberties. and that ancient constitution not a new not the new dawn of liberty etc. that ancient constitution which is our only security for law and liberty our only security for law and liberty if you're desirous of knowing the spirit of our constitution and the policy which predominated in that great period which has secured it right up to this hour, pray look for both in our history, in our record, in our acts of parliament, in our journals of parliament, and not in the after-dinner toasts of the revolutionary society. It's extremely important when you listen to a well-articulated ideological formation of that kind. Not only what it links together, all the things it's collecting together that are good, tradition, history, the Constitution, 1688, are liberties, but also what is excluded, what is the other. The other is the revolutionary societies that are talking about constitutional liberties. Not that kind of liberty, this kind of liberty. Ideology always, the discourse always divides the world. Yes, it ruptures the world. It establishes a contestation. It establishes certain equivalences. The past, the constitution, liberty, all equals are inheritance. But that is not what the revolutionary societies are about. You see the structure by which the ideology is now constructing the idea of why liberty is a conservative idea. The very idea of the fabrication of a new government, a new government, is enough to fill us with disgust and horror. And you should remember who the earth is. Us. Burke immediately assumed that he can speak for all Englishmen the us is not just him or his friends or people who think like us the us is a construction it's the construction of the English people as a collective subject that's who the us is and you must listen every time Burke says us or we think etc you will know that the subject of the English is actually being formed it doesn't exist before that formed here. The discourses are forming it, shaping it right there. We wished at the period of the revolution and do now wish to derive all that we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers. So everything that happened anew in 1688 was simply that which their forefathers gave to us you see how the rupture the break is healed over and settled because we are it we are connected through it with our forefathers an inheritance from our forefathers upon that body and that stock of inheritance we have taken care not to inoculate a single thing that is alien to the nature of the original plant. That is a warning shot to the French and the Italians and the Germans and the Prussians and all those other things that are not natural to the original plant. That is the notion of England as a natural entity and foreign bodies as it were an inoculation. Something that swims over parasites that come across the channel and infect people with their funny ideas and then you get the French English as it were meeting in Jacobin societies and beginning to read funny literature and to hear about Voltaire and to bother about the encyclopedias the infection of foreign ideas well we have only preserved the revolution this is Burke he's not talking about and the revolution he means the revolution of 1688 not the revolution of 1789 That old revolution is an inheritance from the past which we have had the care to preserve from the inoculate against any external infusion. Now, here comes the invention of tradition, the construction now of the continuities as to why things that people experienced as a revolution was nothing of the kind. Our oldest reformation is that of Magna Carta. you will see Sir Edward Coke that great oracle of our law and indeed all the great men who followed him are industrious to show the pedigree of our liberties you know what pedigree is? pedigree of our liberties they endeavor to prove that the ancient charter the Magna Carta of King John was connected with another positive charter from Henry I and that both the one and the other were nothing more than a reaffirmation of the still more ancient standing law of the kingdom. You see how now the continuity of English history is practically so lost that we don't know when it begins. It was there from the beginning. It's like nature. It has never been anything other than that. In that matter of fact, for the greater part, these authors appear to be in the right, Burke says. Perhaps not always, not always, but if the lawyers mistake some little particulars, it proves my position still more strongly because it demonstrates the powerful prepossession towards antiquity with which the minds of all our lawyers and legislators and of all our people have always been filled. And here comes the notion of the settlement now, and the stationary policy of this kingdom, not changing policy, the stationary policy of our kingdom in considering their most sacred rights and franchises as but an inheritance. As but an inheritance. Something which is passed on from the past. The same policy, he says, pervades all the laws which have since been made for the preservation of our liberties. And I just want to read one last part of that. You will see that their whole care was to secure the religion, laws, and liberties that have been long possessed and only lately endangered, taking into their most serious consideration the best means for making such an establishment that their religion, laws, and liberties might not be in danger ever again of being subverted. They moved all their proceedings by stating as some of the best means of doing so, in the first place, to do as their ancestors in like cases have always done. in vindicating their ancient rights and liberties and to declare, and there they pray, the king and queen, that it might be declared and enacted and all singular rights and liberties asserted and declared that they are true and ancient and indisputable rights and liberties of the people of this realm. Now, after Burke, it's very difficult indeed to conceive of the notion of English liberties as exclusively a subversive force. He's tamed it. He's absorbed it. He's reworked it into a series of continuities. He has reconstructed a historical break of the most profound kind, a historical reformation, a transformation, as a long continuity. Notice the way in which Burke constructs the idea of the break as a continuity. Notice how he establishes the chain of connections back to the Magna Carta, to the past. Notice how everything fills him with disgust and horror, which is about the fabrication of the new. Notice the emphasis on order, what he calls a just correspondence and symmetry between the present liberties and the past. Notice his emphasis on continuity, what he calls a condition of unchangeable constancy. Notice his emphasis on what he calls a permanent body of which only some appear to be transitory for the moment. That is to say the idea that what is true about English rights may seem on the surface to change from time to time. But there is a kind of continuing essence, an essentialism, which never changes. Of course it changes in its outward manifestations. It looks different. Burke is not a fool. He knows. He's a great historian. He knows, therefore, that the society of Magna Carta is not the society of the 1790s. So, of course, it recognizes change. But in its essence, in its essence, nothing changes. In its essence, the new liberties are the old ones. They remain the same. They remain connected with one another. And although I can't, I didn't want to read on into the passage, part of the passage where he uses this, he talks about the inheritance of those liberties as specifically a kind of family. He talks about the way in which the nation is indeed to be understood in the metaphor of the family. And thus the relationship which binds people into the nation, he says, is a relation in blood. It depends upon our dearest domestic ties, upon adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections, our state, our hearts, our sepulchre, and our altars. If you read the passage of Burke and you looked at the concepts with which Burke is doing this operation, you would discover the lexicon of English conservative ideas. You wanted an inventory. You wanted a keyword. You wanted to write your own keywords. Read Burke. Don't read Burke just to pluck the words out as if they are neutral or as if they are static. The words are operators. They're doing something. They're like little machines. They're transforming one kind of historical reality into another. So Burke's language is, now I use a completely different idiom, a machinery of representation. It's a machinery of representation. It's the mode through which English history is represented, not represented, represented in a new way. It is transformed in the representation. Representation always transforms that which is being represented. It always constructs a definition of something which didn't exist before it existed. The language itself, the discourse, is a representation. That's why it's possible to say that without those concepts, we would have no new meaning of what it is to be English, which is capable of absorbing the tradition of English liberty. We wouldn't have one. Burke is one of the instances. He's not the only one by any means. This is not a theory of the great author, you know. But I use Burke as an instance of the discourses of conservatism. which are re-harnessing, which have demobilized liberalism, dispersed it, scattered its elements, and then picked up some of those elements and are weaving it into a new formation. And the concept, the language, is the machinery by which that reconstitution of a new discourse, the new discourses are being forged. Secondly, what is going on is an ideological or cultural operation. It's an operation which recasts break as continuity, change as essence, revolution as order, warring classes as a family. Those are the things which are being transposed. Once they go into the Berkian machine, they come out differently. They're being reworked. It's like producing coffee. It's like going to an ice cream machine. You feed it in the one end and what comes out of the other is, you might say, well, it's out of those elements, but you wouldn't recognize it. You can't go back from the thing that has been reconstructed to what it used to be. It has been fundamentally changed. It has been transformed, been reworked. Now, that cultural operation consists of not discovering a tradition, but constructing a tradition. The tradition that Burke identifies may or may not exist. It may or may not exist. Whether there is indeed a continuity in English liberties from the mists of time, which steps, marches via the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, the Declaration, etc., up to Burke's home I don't know but I suspect that there isn't but he constructs it into a tradition when you therefore talk about English traditionalism you must not understand English traditionalism as a natural feature of the fact that it is an old society because all societies are old always with lots of people living in the places for a lot of time it is the invention of tradition that's the phenomenon we're looking at we're the production of tradition as an ideological or cultural form it is the form by which tradition things are traditionalized it's an activity a practice the praxis of making things traditional making things traditional and I don't want to take that any further I'm going to take that tomorrow tomorrow when I talk about the monarchy I'm going to remind you that the modern traditional conception of the monarchy is created round about 1870. Like the modern traditional English Christmas emerges about a minute after Dickens. Not back in the midst of time, not 300 centuries back there, etc. but just day before yesterday. Just day before yesterday. And indeed that the more the tendency is of the society to fracture and break up, the more traditional it becomes, the more people talk about tradition. You listen to Burke, it's Burke facing the French Revolution and the English radicals and the roar of English Chartism to come who discovers tradition. It's in that moment that tradition is the rock that Burke can hold on to. That is something that stabilizes the English nation. It's our good sense. We have always respected, understood how to protect our liberties right back to the invention, the construction of tradition is one of the deeply conserving tendencies in English culture. It happens to surface at this point inside English conservative thought, but that's not the point that I'm making because the traditionalizing of this kind is not confined to conservatives with a big C. It is an ideological or cultural operation which is extremely familiar to the formation of modern English thought. Well I want to take that story a little bit further forward now because I want to shift I've been talking a great deal about the 17th and 18th centuries. I want to try to move a little bit more towards the more contemporary period, the 19th century, et cetera. And I want simply to remind you that the next great phase of the articulation of English traditional thought, which is inside the conservative formation, occurs towards the end of the 19th century. It doesn't occur again until the period of the 1870s and 80s. And if you want the kind of second figure of major importance with which to connect it, if Burke is one, the Israeli is another. The Israeli is another. Israeli is, of course, looking at quite another period. He is in the period after Britain has become industrialized, after the formation of the industrial classes. Israeli arises when the working class, when the populace is knocking at the door of political and economic and social rights. And the Israelis' problem is that Burke's notion of the conservative nation cannot survive democracy. Burke's notion of the conservative nation cannot survive democracy. Something more has to happen at the end of the 19th century to the idea of English conservatism and English traditionalism if it is to survive the era of popular democracy. And Disraeli is one of the great architects of what we call not modern conservative thought, because I think the lexicon of modern conservative thought is already in place around the period of the anti-Jacobin wars. But Disraeli is one of the principal architects of what I would call popular contemporary conservatism. He gives the popular element. He grounds conservatism in popular thought. That is to say, he makes it possible for the industrial working classes of the end of the 19th century to conceive of themselves as best explained and accounted for within the language of popular conservatives. That is not an entirely successful project, but that is the project of Disraeli. What the Israelis see is that if the franchise is to become an adult franchise, if everyone is to have the vote, then who on earth is going to vote for the conservative landed interest, which clearly represents such a narrow band of English society? Now, how can that interest and the interest which have accumulated around it be preserved through the transition of mass democracy only by in some way attaching the people or constructing the people in a way where they recognize their best interests as a part of the nation, as one with others in the nation. Only that is to say, by trying to represent, see the same idea, trying to represent the cleavage of different classes and social interests as unified, or at least more unified than divided. And the language within which, the cultural language within which the political ideology of popular conservatism has to be rooted, is in the language of the nation. It is only the idea of a popular nation and of the ability to identify conservatism with the popular nation that secures the capacity of conservatism to survive the transition to mass democracy and indeed in the 20th century to construct English democracy within the confines of an essentially conservative form of social thought. The Israeli was, of course, drawing on many important elements which you don't find so well articulated in Burke. He draws, that is to say, on a wide range of cultural forms and cultural discourses. The Israeli does. He has a wider vocabulary. He extends and expands the vocabulary of English conservative or traditional thought. He operates and harnesses the powerful notion of deference. Deference is not quite the same idea as respectability, but it's very close to it. Because you can't have deference unless there is somebody who defers to you. Deference recognizes the hierarchy in the status of different social groups within the society. But the idea of deference is that those who are below don't just recognize the power of those who are above them, but recognize their authority, their right to be above them. And that is caught in a very familiar English phrase, which is sometimes used to explain the extraordinary phenomenon that between a third quarter and a third of the English working class, since it received the vote, has systematically and undeviatingly voted conservative. Undeviatingly voted conservative. How do you explain people whose social interests are so profoundly different, whose life situation is so totally different from that which is inherited in the conservative tradition, can nevertheless come to see themselves reflected and refracted, constructed in the discourses of popular conservatives? Well, deference is one of the accommodating devices, the accommodating devices. Deference says, you were born to rule, and we can't organize a speech office. So you do it. You're born with a silver spoon in your mouth. You are the natural rulers, clearly. We don't aspire to rule. We aspire to a place of our own, a little place, a pub of our own, our own neighborhoods, our own parts of the cities, etc. don't intrude down where we live but the great tasks of ruling belong to someone else. The deference which strikes through English society. Another idea which is essential to the way in which popular conservatism is constructed in this period is the period of the long continuity of the English countryside. the long continuity of the English countryside, the images of rural continuity, of rural stability, of England as the garden, of England as the garden, and the image and metaphor of Englishmen as tending the garden, of England as developing not according to historical, but according to natural rhythms, is an image which is powerful not only in conservative thought, but of course in radical thought as well. There is as profound an evocation of England as a country, as the countryside, in Baldwin, as there is in Orwell. Orwell understands that long continuity of the English garden in the same way in which Baldwin does. They give it a different registration, but the image, the metaphor of rural England, as not, of course, where the workshops of the world occur, not where things are made and business is conducted, but where the real life, the real heart of Englishness resides. Where the real heart of Englishness resides, the countryside. Why? Because in the image of paternalism, of the respect of the Lord for the peasant, of that which united those who were clearly hierarchically disposed one above the other, but who were willing to live in a kind of natural harmony, so the myth went, with one another. There are no peasant revolts in this story. This is a system of narration, a way of telling the story of the relationships of English villages and English gentry in the countryside and of the English lord, etc., in a quite different way, which excludes as much as it includes. It has the positives of the created, the humanized landscape, which English painters and English designers and English architects are so wonderful at summoning up. When the commercial bourgeoisie in the middle of the 19th century wants to confirm its own idea of its status, It goes a little bit out of the town and recreates the English country estate. They recreate it on a plot of land, sometimes not more than a quarter of an acre, two little garden strips, yes, and the odd statuette at the end of the garden, sometimes nothing more than a little cover which becomes, you know, the bower. But it is all a simulacrum of the great landed estate. It is the dream that arriving means not only arriving in social status, but arriving in a place, a place in the garden, arriving in the landed place, in the landed estate, in the home of a certain kind. That is what it means to arrive. And it's always out of the town, out of the hurly-burly of commerce and the city, out of where the real goods come from. Because if you ask who pays for the estate, How did they come to construct the bower? Well, it's all made downtown, yes, in the nasty business of buying and selling and hoarding corn and striking a contract, etc. And indeed, the bourgeoisie builds its own temples down there in the town for the men to occupy. That is men's business. But what really civilizes them is the garden, is the retreat, the worldly retreat, the home of heaven. That image is one of the most powerful organizing concepts that is used again and again by conservatism to make deferential, to represent as deferential the relationships between different social interests, social classes, and social forces in the society. If you can cast them in the metaphor of the landscape, in the discourse of the landscape, you can create that relationship of deference and paternalism. which was said to unite the peasant and the lord, the local landlord and those who were his villains. So the new languages, new languages of a popular democracy are forged again, you know, just in the same way as Burke forges them only when the threat of Jacobinism and radicalism is in the face. The Israeli is one of the architects exactly when mass democracy looks him in the face. He sees the people who are about to get the vote. He says, none of those folks are going to vote for me. Why am I going to vote for, you know, for Israel? They're not going to vote for dukes and lords. They're not going to vote for people who have sat in their rotten boroughs and failed to represent them all this while. They're not going to vote for the old aristocracy. The old aristocracy, the old classes, the old landed interests, if they are to survive with their old values, have to be represented. They have to be presented in a new form. They have to be made more popular. So the idea, as it were, that these conservative ideas are simply naturally popular in English history society is, again, quite incorrect. Quite incorrect. They are created in a certain historical and discursive way. They are actually constructed into place, they are put into place in a certain period. and as a result of the response to certain very clear historical forces. I don't want to spend much time because I want to close shortly, but I just want to read you something from the Israeli just to give you a flavor, just a flavor of what that language sounds like, just to set aside the extract that I read from Burke. By now, you ought to be able to hear the discourse, the machinery of representation working. Since the settlement of the Constitution, now nearly two centuries ago, now nearly two centuries ago, England, muses Disraeli, has never experienced a revolution. Though there is no country in which there has been so continuous and such considerable change. How does this come about? Tumultuous change and yet endless continuity. How is this contradiction that is so deeply English resolved? Oh, because the wisdom of your forefathers, not your wisdom, the wisdom of your forefathers placed the prize of supreme power outside of the sphere of human passions. Outside of the sphere of human passions. It is the hot-blooded Mediterranean and the French that get heated about the great ideas. What the English understood is that if you are not going to have the brakes that really rupture things and transform life, You have to place certain ideas, the idea of supreme power, outside of the arena of the human passion. Therefore, whatever the struggle of the parties, whatever the strife of the factions, whatever the excitement and excitation of the public mind, there has always been something in the country around which all classes and parties could rally. representing the majesty of the law the administration of the justice and involving at the same time the security of every man's rights liberties and the fountains of their honor that's a hundred and nearly a hundred and twenty years after the first formulation by Burke I express here my confident conviction he continued that there never was a moment in our history when the power of England was so great and her resources so vast and inexhaustible and yet gentlemen it is not merely our fleets and armies our powerful artillery our accumulated capital and our unlimited credit on which we so depend as upon what do you think he's going to say what is the clincher that the Israeli needs here not just capital artillery, armies fleet, commerce and credit what does he need to complete it well he's brought the wisdom of the forefathers in. He needs one more element. He needs to harness one more element. As upon that unbroken spirit of all our people. That's the bit he needs. Conservatives cannot become popular unless it roots itself. Unless it is the, unless what he's saying is it is the same as the spirit of all the people. It doesn't belong any longer just with the Lord and the Master and the estate, the great estate in the humble village, in the tiny home, in your own heart, lowly as you are. Yes, the spirit is common. The spirit is common. Therefore, everybody can partake in it. The unbroken spirit of our people, which I believe was never prouder of the imperial country to which they belong. Yes, you see that. On the one hand, the great imperial power. And on the other hand, the spirit of the people. And what the language, what the discourse does, now the machinery of representation, it puts an equal sign between them. The empire is nothing but the spirit of the people sent abroad. The two things are one and the same. They belong together. Whether they really belong together or not is not the question. The discourse constructs the equivalence between the two ideas. So there's no point saying, well, in other societies the two things don't belong. That may be so. Or in English society, the two things didn't always belong. After all, all the people didn't greatly benefit from imperialism. Not all. They certainly didn't benefit equally. Some people who exported capital benefited a great deal more out of imperialism than people in their little hovels. But nevertheless, this discourse equalizes the two. The spirit of the whole English people and the greatness of England's imperial destiny are one. This is the voice of the construction, not just of conservatism, but of popular conservatism. And that bringing into the discourse of the connection, that is to say, the construction now, not of the nation, but of the people, is what is going on here. The construction of the people, of the English people. You have to have a subject for the relationship to work. And the people have to come to see or feel or understand themselves in a certain way. Not as the patriot. Not as the people who have defended liberties against the aristocracy. Not as the people who cut off the head of a steward king. Or who sent the old Church of England flying. Not those people. Not the people who rioted at Peterloo. Or who shook the railings at the Reform Act. Not those people. You see how every ideological discourse excludes. You have to wipe out about 99% of what has happened in order to construct the positive of what the people are. Not those people. English people are not those people. They were some foreigners who strayed across. They were the proletariat. They're not really English. They were the English radicals. They didn't belong really in the spirit of the people. The spirit of the people can be constructed as those who are at one with everybody in recognizing the common greatness constructed through Britain's industrial destiny as the workshop of the world and the greatest commercial power on earth. Well, that is the construction, the traditionalizing of the conception of the people. I told you I've quoted him on the page again. I want to quote him now. The life of nations, no less than the life of men, is lived almost entirely in the imagination. What matters is the corporate imagination. What matters for the nation is the corporate imagination. Within that mysterious corporate being, Nothing can be more important than the picture of its own nature, of its own past, and its own future. The picture of its place amongst the nations of the world, which it carries in its imagination. The subject matter of this imagining is nearly all of its history. The form of such imagining, however, is a myth. Is a myth. The life of nations, no less than that of men, is lived entirely in the imagination. What on earth can Paul, you know, Paul, mean by saying that? What can he mean by saying that? Well, I think that you won't surprise me to know that Inalpa is talking about what I was just talking about. I think he's reminding us that before we ask the question, before we restrict the question of Englishness, of the English nation, of the English people, et cetera, simply to the question of what are the material and historical forces which have shaped them and believe that somehow by giving an account of that we've accounted for everything. He's reminding us that no such entity or social fact would exist outside of what I want to call the national imaginary, the great collective imaginary by which men and women imagine what the nation is, have it constructed for them in their imagination by the discourses which I've been trying to identify and imagine themselves as together as part of a common people and construct the imaginary relationship between them and the nation to which they belong they become the subject cultural identity. It's deep respect for traditions. The sense that even in the present England is an old country. That the English are always living and have always lived in a sense, imaginarily in an old country. The country was always old. It was never new. There was never anything new. This is an astonishing national myth to live by, because most other modern nations live, of course, by the notion of the new, the new, the novel. What can be created, what has been created out of nothing? Yes, the myth, the myths that construct many of the European nations, that certainly constructs America, is the notion of the new. But England has always constructed its conception of nation and people in terms of an old country. It is the oldness, the continuity, the essentialism, the sameness, the unbroken invariance of the deep structure of English life and thought, which really are conceived of as essentially English. That is what I mean by traditional. Now, that's a feature of English culture of thought and life. not confined to conservatism. What I then went on to try to suggest was that although liberalism, in a sense, created the conditions and the discourses in which the break into the modern was thought, it is the conservative discourses which have been dominant in constructing or representing or restaging the modern conception of English national cultural identity. That is the great, as it were, ideological or cultural shift which has occurred across three centuries in English social and cultural life. And the coming to dominance, the formation, don't regard them as natural. The formation of those discourses, remember what I said about liberalism, how certain liberal elements had to be disarticulated and re-harnessed to something else, How patriotism had to be divorced from its connections with radicalism and then linked to conservatism. How the images of deference and paternalism and the English countryside and so on were the operators by which these harnessings or articulations were constructed. That's why I mean to call it an operation. You may not like the language of machinery, but the language of machinery is better than the language of nature. I'm trying to dispossess you of the notion that the English are naturally traditional. They have made themselves so. It's a huge historic act to make their history a tradition, to construct the traditions by which they live, through which they give themselves meaning. Culture is in that sense a practice. It's a production. It's a making, not an inheriting of something that was there before. If it was there before, it is made to be there before. And the making of what was there before has to leave out nine-tenths of what was actually there. You can see that in quite ordinary common sense, everyday discourses. You can't, I defy you, define for me a popular story, a popular film, or a popular television program, which has anything to do with Puritanism, the parliamentary revolution, or Cromwell, which is not on the sides of the Cavaliers, the romantic, long-haired, sons of the aristocracy, the wonderful Stuart princes. Now, this is the country that is the mother of parliaments, the mother of parliaments. And how did parliament happen? Well, eventually, they had to put one of the stewards down and go the act the final act of regicide they had to cut off the father's head in order to create a modern parliamentary regime that is the birth of English liberties, it is nowhere celebrated in the discourses of popular historical reconstruction what is reconstructed is that moment as the romance of the cavaliers the romance of the losing side the romance of bonnie prince charlie yes all the princesses only flutter around the cavaliers the puritans as you know are ugly yes they're iron sides they are anti-pleasure yes they don't like anything soft or delicate they abolish the theater they take all the pretty pictures off the wall, yes, that, you know, I mean, they are the stern ones, the men of iron, yes, thank God we saw the back of them, yes, thank God we saw, we had a little taste of them, and the English have been so sensible as never to go back to those bad old days. Since then, they've been willing to tolerate, yes, the more decorous side, back came the king in a modified form. Back came the creed in a lower road. Back came the aristocracy in a more decorous place. Back came the land. Back it all floods. Yes, it all floods back in popular discourses. So it's not just in political language. It's not just in the great, you know, articulators of the political parties or the great heroes of political figures, the Israeli, Burke, etc. I'm using those as convenient resting places for the elaboration of a set of discourses which construct the nature as traditional. I wanted to remind you that that has to do with the use of a discursive conception of culture. I constantly use the term discourse. I use the term sign. I use the term representation. I use the term languages. That is where these cultural facts that give meaning to history, function, and operate. That is how culture functions and operates ideologically. It operates, as it were, through the languages of representation. Through the languages of representation. Those are the objects of, as it were, a primary kind of evidence in cultural studies. The invention of tradition is by no means restricted to dominant conservative thought. Certainly not. I mean, in a sense, the invention of tradition is a very common cultural form. And what it does is, of course, to give importance and significance, to give symbolic form, sometimes ritual form, to a particular event. It lifts it, it raises its significance, because it gains significance from being linked with past events. It's not just a one-off thing which people have just thought of. And it is perfectly true, as you say, therefore, that the notion of tradition functions inside radicalism as well. And I was trying to suggest that when I talked a little bit about the tradition of rights, yes, of the freeborn Englishmen, who of course located themselves within the tradition in order to claim the rights from which they did not have for themselves. And that is a very long and very important tradition. It operates in relation to popular disturbances in the 18th century. It operates in relation to the reform movement and the radical artisans in the 1790s. You know, even more dubious characters like John Wilkes claimed the mantle of tradition. It was about those kinds of traditionalists that Dr. Johnson said, patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel. Anybody seems capable of coming forward, of clothing themselves in the garb of tradition in order to win respect and to gain respect for their case. So you're quite right that it's the very common phenomenon right across the traditions of English thought. Now, I suppose what I've done is I've concentrated on the traditionalizing of the more dominant in the more dominant discourses. But one of the questions that I would like to ask, I don't want to assert it, but I want to ask, is whether the location of radical movements in tradition wasn't itself a double-edged or contradictory phenomenon. Because on the one hand, it strengthened the case for radical, so it enabled you to make the case and legitimate the case for expanding your rights. But at the same time, it affirmed the continuity of your rights with what went before. So in a sense, it made it difficult to make any kind of deep break, although it made it easier, in fact, to extend rights to new social groups and new social interests. So I think tradition always has that double binding element, even when it occurs in radical discourses, in radical politics, of opening up a space and at the same time binding. And one must never forget the, that is to say, one must never forget what I would call the conserving limit which the notion of tradition has. And a radical movement which, as it were, is not only attached to the notion of tradition, but which also has a quite firm conviction and commitment to the notion, even if utopian, of the radically new, has, I think, a greater potential for actually breaking some of the past, although no doubt in twenty years' time you would look back at it and say, well, I can see the continuities with the past, after all. It wasn't a totally new break. There are very freely, absolutely new breaks like that in history. But what I'm talking about is ideologically. The strong reliance on popular tradition, on the tradition, for instance, of the free-born Englishman, is, I think, an extraordinarily contradictory question in English radicalism. And it has immensely popular strengths. And at the same time, I think it contains radicalism, within the broad stream of English thought, English national thought. But that's how I read it, and I would be interested to know whether there are people who have another interpretation of it. Or whether you do. You might think that it breaks out of the confines more than that. Yes. yes i'm going to talk about respectability quite a lot tomorrow yes because i think respectability is uh is one of those important ideas which harnesses one group to another yes it's a it's the it's the one which creates the image of one group in the image of another yes because you have to aspire to the life or values of those above you to gain their respect so it knits the society in a series of interlocking chains respectively. So it's connected exactly with many... I suppose one of the more general points that I'm making is just to remind you of the immensely powerful and complex binding strands which run through English culture. The binding ones. They don't confine it to one path. I hope you don't misunderstand me when I'm trying... I want to talk about the English characters as if there's only one. It's an enormous variety. But it is strongly bound together, interlaced together, and it keeps, as if we're discovering, modes of cultural articulation which reinforce those binding and unifying, settling, conserving, traditionalizing, stabilizing elements of the culture, though that's by no means the only inheritance that's going historically. Larry, you want to... What the, what the, uh, next week. *laughs* Oh, yes. Sure. Well, I'm going to talk, yes, I'm going to go on, I'm going to talk tomorrow, yes, about how that notion of the traditional nation is now reworked around the questions of race and identity and imperialism. And then next week, next week when I'm talking much more about the 20th century, I'm going to pick up all the threads. I'm going to talk specifically about the Falklands, about nationalism, because what I could say at this stage What I'm reminding you is that when you look at the foreground of politics in a society, you don't understand how it works until you understand that it is able to pin itself into the consciousness and culture and lives of ordinary people through these cultural roots. That's why I'm interested in English cultural identity. Because English cultural identity is then mobilized. It is then mobilized and of course then represented and rephrased in the political discourse. But political discourses have their much wider roots in these deeper formations in English history and English culture. They arise out of it, and a politician who wants to make himself or herself popular, or who wants to enlist the popular masses in the mobilization of some event, like going to war in 1939, or going to war in the Falklands, has to be able to conjure up, has to use a discourse which resonates with these already formed cultural roots. That is indeed how I understand the relationship between ideology and culture. Yes, culture is, as it were, the ground of existing discourses and meanings created historically on which new ideological forms must operate. They have to operate, as it were, on the ground of the cultural common sense. They have to operate in and through existing cultural identities. They have to selectively mobilize the national history and national inheritance in order to move the people. They have to work with the way in which the people have been historically constructed as a subject. They have to enlist that subject in the political project. And one thing that I'm going to say about Thatcherism is that that is precisely what it does. That is the secret of its popularity. That is the secret of its popularity, its cultural roots, not its success in its policies. Its policies have been hopeless. But its ability to speak the language of English culture is immense. It understands what the construction in the dominant mode of the national popular is. And it has worked and worked and worked to build that selective definition of the national popular as the cultural underpinning of a new attempting new hegemony so I'm I'm moving definitely no go on this is this guy I shouldn't try to do that off the top of my head can I think about that and either come back to it this afternoon or start with it tomorrow. Because it links very much with the idea of respectability. I mean, tomorrow, where I want to end up is with a sort of inventory of what I call the traditionalist worldview. Not at a more common sense level, not at the Berkht Israeli level, but in the level of everyday. And because I think respectability, a certain liberalism and a certain class connotation are all fused in that, it might be a useful way around the idea of the gentleman pulling together. because I think it's a very great difference, for instance, between its origins in the gentry, its reconstruction in the attempt to civilize the gentry, to which Addison Steele and the whole attention to manners, to what is right and wrong kind of behavior is a way of civilizing the bourgeoisie, which produces the gentleman's ideal. And that's very different, I think, from the 19th century middle class notion of the gentleman, although the two things are not unconnected, but it's gone through another transformation. And that's quite different from, I think, the kind of imperial connotations that it gets. The city, finance, yes, the English gentleman, the gentleman with the rolled umbrella, yes, etc. That has a particular end of the century, early 20th century connotation. And because England is an old country and likes to preserve its archaic relations, Many of them are still around and indeed in power. And if you get into power, you become like one. So there's the two things. I'll try and do that around the figure of the English gentleman. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, I put it in this way. If you think that all ideological discourses have a fixed political and class connotation, then patriotism, of course, belongs to the right. Yes, it has appeared again and again in conservative, fascist, totalitarian discourses. And it's opposed, as it were, in the traditional languages of socialism by internationalists. And that, you know, reflects a real major historical moment in the development of socialists internationally. Yes, the great moment around the First World War, where the nation proves to be greater, the pull of the specific nations. proves to be greater than the pull across nations of the call to the international working class is, you know, one of the deepest divides in contemporary socialism. The moment when nationalism rears its head and is far from being a kind of dead and archaic and ancient tradition, actually strikes across the socialist, internationalist tradition. Now, if you don't believe that that an ideological discourse has a necessary or fixed class or political connotation. We believe that is to say that in each specific conjuncture, it can play a quite different political role, sometimes more than one role. Sometimes its role is contradictory. And that's not just a mysterious contingency, it just doesn't happen like that. that part of what we mean by cultural struggle and social transformation is indeed the attempt to harness ideological discourses to different political positions. Now, notice I'm no longer talking about it as if the political positions or the classes give rise to the ideologies. I'm talking about it almost the other way around, that the languages of making sense of, say, how we belong to the nation already exist. And the question is, to which political project can it be attached? Is it the nation of the landed interest, or is it the nation of the common people? Yes, now the ideology exists and has pre-existed. It's been formed in that process that I've been trying to describe. And the question is, can different political positions actually use those languages to articulate what they want to happen in history? If you look at it that way, then, it ought to be possible to once again disentangle some of the elements of English patriotic feeling, yes, the genuinely national popular elements of patriotic feeling, from their incorporation or articulation within conservatism and re-appropriate them for radical or socialist ideas. I don't know that that's exactly what Orwell was thinking about. I think Orwell was thinking about something slightly different. I think Orwell was thinking, but it's quite, it's connected. What Orwell thought was a little bit like Burke, you know, that if socialism remains an idea which is, you know, only mainly to be found in St. Petersburg Square, No good, sensible, commonsensical, pragmatic Englishman will ever take it up. It's the foreign doctrine, comes from somewhere else, comes from outer space, outside their universe. So it has to be reappropriated within the idioms of English cultural and national life to appear to be something which is possible, which is possible. It's only, that's to say, when you get a genuinely English socialist, that it is possible for English persons to feel, well, you don't have two airs and a tail to subscribe to this foreign idea. It says that was the function of traditionalizing radicalism, to say radical ideas are part of the air that Englishmen have always breathed. Then people are willing to draw breath. But if you say this is a foreign noxious doctrine which comes from somewhere else, they never will. So a lot of debate, of course, it's an idea which is deeply imprinted in Gramsci. Here's the whole notion of the centrality to any politics, of coming to terms with the national popular, of the national popular as an immense cultural resource for the construction of a popular rather than a restricted notion of the nation, is deeply in Gramsci. Gramsci is the most profound articulator of that, of the necessity of radicalism and socialism for grounding itself, coming to terms with the common sense of the national popular culture. And that debate is immensely revived just now in England. Huge revival, hugely revived. Because, as Lara was saying, it's been understood exactly the way in which the reactionary version of patriotism has been harnessed and mobilized in the interest of the Falklands, a new right, etc. And those on the left don't want to present themselves as outside of that universe, as speaking the same language but having a different project. So they want to ground themselves in the contours of English lie. In that sense, Orwell's England, your England, and the Lion and the Unicorn are immensely important documents in English socialism. Immensely important. They are the equivalent in English socialism of the birth of the idea of the Italian road, which is the same idea. The idea of the Italian road to socialism. Of having a socialism which recognizes the specific features of the Italian social formation, which recognizes its own peculiar history, and which doesn't attempt to run across it, but which works within. Of course, to dislocate power, that social formation has been constructed in one configuration of power. So there are struggles, but they're not struggles from something external to the culture. They're struggles within the culture. And you have to, as it were, grasp and grow the radical notions around notions within a universe which people already recognize. You have to work on and with common sense. As Gramsci said, if you work on it, you can't take it for granted. You need to transform it. But you can't work against it or outside it. You have to work with it and transform it. That argument is going on. Now, one of the problems is this. There are two positions with respect to this argument. And I'll only sketch them out because I'm going to talk a lot about this when I talk about the question, is there an English ideology? When I talk about the question of the popular, which is coming next week. But I just sketch the two positions. One is what I would call the fully discursive position, which suggests that since ideological discourses have no necessary class or political belongingness, anything can be articulated with anything else. So there's no reason why there shouldn't be an English national socialism just as there is an English national conservatism. One could harness the dynamism of English popular ideas and simply latch it into socialism, plug it into socialism, rather than plugging it into conservatism. That's one position. And my own position is that that is probably potentially possible, but that one has also to work with the actual history. And the history is one in which, as I've tried to describe to you, patriotism after has a long subterranean connection with radical ideas but it has a dominant connection with conservative ideas. That articulation, once made around the 1790s, has gone on and on and on. So that formation is deeply stabilized. It has now two centuries and a half underneath it. And it's not easy to disentangle it and begin to harness it to something else. Hugh Cunningham, whose essay on the language of patriotism I recommended to you, has a wonderful sentence which says, after the era of imperialism, it was impossible to speak the language of patriotism on the left. Now, I don't think it is impossible, but I think it's extremely difficult. I think that every time radical discourses locate themselves within the language of the nation, there is a huge tug like the sea, like the tide, which moves you over to the right shore. You have to pedal like crazy to stay out of the clutches of over there. It's not impossible to do, and I don't think that one could conceive a popular language of socialism which doesn't indeed articulate some of those elements. I think, for instance, the popular language of socialism would have to reconstruct the historical memory of the English people. It would have to recover what I just told you was lost. We would have to get some popular stories which presented England as on the side of Parliament rather than on the side of the Cavaliers. That at least would be a start. If we downgraded Bonnie Prince Charlie a bit and softened the features of Cromwell so that people could look him in the face and say, well, he was an Englishman too. No, that would be a start. Popular memory is so enthused with the conservative definition of the nation that there are almost elements which it is impossible to work with, and yet there are elements which it is impossible to work without. So we are in this difficult business ideologically, culturally, of trying to drag certain elements free of the constellation of English patriotism and its harnessing to conservatism, and pull the national popular, reconstruct the national popular. So, just as I said before, that you shouldn't think of the discourses of conservatism as functioning outside of their cultural roots, so the cultural roots of conservatism are what stabilize it, so now you should see the political project of constructing the left as, of course, centrally concerned with the project of constructing the cultural roots of the left. Because if the left and socialism has no roots in English life, why should the English be concerned about it? Why should they be bothered about it? It comes from somewhere else. It has nothing to do with them. So the idea that the construction of the cultural roots of English socialism is a kind of minor task, you know, not a truly political task, not real politics, but something that, you know, the artistic groups do. You know, the video people can take care of that, but the real business is in Parliament. where Parliament is moving to the rhythm of English national culture which is driving it to the right shore as fast as possible. You just listen to the Falkland debate and hear what the Labour Party says when it gets on its feet. Britain is going sailing to this island down in the bottom of the Atlantic where only the sheep live, largely, where they can't turn on the electric light except via a pole that goes to the mainland of Argentina. And we're going to rescue the sheep and these few souls from the clutches of a dictatorship to which we have just finished selling hundreds of planes and nuclear weapons and so on, our best friends down there. We're going to rescue it from them. And what does the Labour Party say? What can it say? But, well, this is a project of the nation time we pull together. This is the moment when the nation pulls together. Yes? It's as if, I mean, if ever you're under the illusion that people make up ideologies, here you will see that ideology is a ventriloquism. The mouths come open, and the culture speaks through. Nation. People, flag, let's go, our boys over there, the phrase is, yes, pour out. Michael Foot. Michael Foot. You know, the inheritor of Swift, the biographer of Bavan, is the archetypal English radical. The archetypal, the last gasp of English radicalism could only say this is the moment for the nation to pull together. So one shouldn't underestimate the tug which that historical articulation gives. Yes, one should conceive the arena of a culture as lines of force, tendency. It's not necessary that patriotism will always end up on that shore, but the tides move that way. The lines of force run that way. The tendencies of the culture pull it that way. And if you want it to go that way, you are working against the grain. Do you understand? Everything moves you that way. Now you're trying, and each time you go, you're bucking, like trying to swim against the tide. You can make motion, but it's very hard. If you just let yourself float, you'll just go like that. That is how I understand boundaries, dominance, lines of tendency. Not as necessary and inevitable, but as historically powerful. As the balance goes that way, the balance always has counteracting tendencies. but what matters is which is in dominance not the dominant, not the only thing but which is in dominance which is the dominant tendency so this argument, the question you ask is really at the very centre of some of the political debates in Britain now it is the debate about can there be, can one rediscover in the national popular the popular interpolation the popular roots of an alternative conception of the nation an alternative construction of the people. Can one restage English history so that it points in another direction than the direction in which it is going? Everything, in a sense, is at stake in that question. Well, if it's too late to do that, it's too late to do anything. so let me say Afro qualified no I don't think it's too late but it's about two minutes to midnight it is pretty late pretty late but then the English are very good at snatching defeat out of the jaws of victory I mean they're very good at pulling back at the last minute at just conceding something so one goes on politically hammering away. Yes? And look, you know, remember that, remember that I've been concentrating on the dominant instances. Yes? And yes, one mustn't, one could give an over-integrated, over-conservative, over-traditionalist view of English. There are lots of, you know, there are lots of dispersed elements there to pick up that also feel themselves as deeply English and don't see themselves as in any way deeply associated with kings. flag, queen, you know, country, the Falklands. There are other traditions to work on. One is not working absolutely in the void. There is another popular national history which is deeply subversive, which is no respecter of crown and tradition, which in the 18th century used to think the monarchy was the biggest hoot in the world. The biggest hoot in the world. If you wanted an image of a really corrupt society, they would quote aristocratic society. the Prince Regent was the archetype you couldn't get more corrupt more deeply corrupt so there's a strong English sense that you know it is the underside of the liberal revolutions the underside of English radicalism so there are things to work with but what is you can't begin to work in that unless you understand the terrain in which you're working and the terrain has been constructed another way that's all the times they of a world. Yes. Well, I think that that is one of the great contradictions. One of the great contradictions. Because certainly what I tried to say when I talked about liberalism was that of course liberalism is the culture of the modern world. It is the culture of the dynamic society, of the accumulating society, the expanding society. So the notion of progress, like the notion of reason, are built in to the liberal break with older societies. And in the 19th century, of course, alongside the dominance of English commerce created in the 18th, 17th, 18th centuries on the back of English naval and maritime power as a result of the expansion of the English colonial system and so on. Well, I mean, for a There's no question, it seems to me, that Britain saw itself at the forefront of progress, as the harbinger of progress, the engine of progress. And that is really the last moment when England has what I would call a global destiny. It came to, it reaffirmed that global destiny in the idea of the new imperialism at the end of the 19th century, but that's only because it was going. It was just about to disappear over the hill when it raised the flag to the pinnacle. Ever since then, though the idea of progress is there and is very powerful and is one of the things that keeps English industry, commerce and trade going, it seems to me to have been surrounded, boxed in, by some of the more conservative notions, conserving notions that I've been trying to outline. if England had a powerful historical notion of progress it would have broken through some of those settlements and compromises which I've been trying to describe so I think the English idea of progress has always been a tempered idea of progress it's always been progress under certain conditions it's always been a progress which expanded the material wealth of the English, but never at the expense of the orderliness of English life. It's never so far as to fundamentally disrupt what kept the society in a kind of orderly dynamic state. The notion of English progress is the idea of an orderly progress, the idea of a disruptive process, progress, of a progress which breaks through, is not at the center of the English notion of progress. It is a highly revolutionary concept, the idea of progress, in its full, fully framed form. It's an idea which, as you know, is not to be found not only in revolutionary thought, it's to be found at the center of Marx's conception of capitalism itself, and why he conceived of capitalism as such a profoundly revolutionary force was exactly because it installed at its centre the rhythms of progressive development. Progressive development. I don't think the British have ever believed in progressive development in that dynamic sense. They've believed in advance, increasing enlightenment, reform. But always, they've never put forward the slogans of progress and change without coupling them with the notions of retrenchment and stabilization. Progress and stability are the great watchwords. So progress in the English vocabulary, I think, means something rather different from what it means in certain more extreme or more revolutionary discourses. I think it's always been what I would call like a balloon that's tethered. You need it to power the society, because the society is not great unless it's progressing, expanding and developing. But at the same time, the development must never outrun the society's capacities to tame, civilize, make orderly and contain that progress. And I think that dialectic, that dynamic between progress and order is closer to the English conception of progress, certainly in the 19th and 20th centuries than the idea of progress, which I think lies at the heart of some of the more revolutionary conceptions of the global destiny of, say, capitalism. But you've been looking at the question of progress, haven't you? You've been looking at the history of the idea of progress, so you may not agree with what I've just said. Yes, yes. So when I think about the way you are creating a new book, what I feel like? the old school board, which is a smooth part. So when centuries ago they spoke about the dry cover of the bulging, now they think of other things so provinces are the true thing and it exists. But I'm afraid that this concept is not right because it's not a sort of a big Italian native. also the traditionalism of the who traces all of the sikhiyas in the the thing in terms of a forest when you act with so much that is plain that what is unimposed and he them and made them a credit for Yes, oh yes, I know what you mean very well you heard the this is a very profound issue not easy to respond to simply or to resolve I don't know anybody who is I was going to say I don't know anybody who is progressive, who doesn't believe in the idea of progress obviously at the tautology but you see what i mean that uh to not to be reactionary is to believe somehow that uh that at least in the possibility of things getting better think getting better and what you should not misunderstand me is saying is that history remains the same history does not remain the same for a moment the the the culture of traditionalism has all the labor to do that I described. I described it as a machinery, as a machinery of transformation. It has all that work to do because it has to mask history. Yes, it has to present history as meaning something as a continuity. It has to present change as something else, as stability. Yes, so that doesn't mean that there is no change. So it's not an argument about change. it's not even an argument about radical change yes not all change is radical but it's certainly the case that English history is full of the deepest ruptures when you can see the accumulation of change in so many different areas all happening in a conjuncture where a conjuncture moment like 1790 to 1820 or 1880 to 1920 is over determined by the different necessary progressive evolution yes, as to say inside the stops and starts and the rapid movement and slow movements and despite the attempts to collect all that culturally in tradition and to stabilize it that there's a kind of long, long march of history which is always on an upward incline. I think that deeper teleology is what is negalia. Not the idea of change or the idea of improvement. But I think almost every improvement, when it's contained by a settlement of the kind I've been describing, is contradictory. It has positive and negative features. as progressive and reactionary elements. And one can't give an adequate account of them without recognizing that double-sidedness. I don't mean it that the one means that it's negative, that you shouldn't have had it because it has bad features to it. But I mean it's hard to disentangle it as a pure moment of progress. The pure moments of progress always have their brecky and bad side, their negative features, etc. So one needs a more contradictory notion of what progress is about. One needs a more ruptural history, and I think one needs to abandon the notion of the inevitability of a progressing development. 他有胃耳拜,還要豪富開交 我愛的,你也不想說你不想說 yeah yeah so I I do the tip here the the there's see for the day so my evening to the high-brow you're in this well then a number of things yes a number of points there first of all you see I don't equate Hegelianism only with idealism I equate Hegelianism also with this notion of the idea unfolding of the unfolding progressive evolutionary unfolding of anything. So I think there are Hegelian ways of thinking the material as well. Yes, that's the first point. The second thing is that I hope you don't misunderstand me by saying that we should concentrate on the ideological and the cultural and neglect the economic and the political. I've not been talking about that, but I constantly refer it to agrarian capitalism, the class formations. I don't forget for a moment that these things don't happen just up there. They happen throughout. But I don't know that I any longer think that the economic gives one that perfect unfolding and it's only the political, cultural, and ideological which is confused. I think the economic is that way too. And I think that about capitalism. Think about capitalism, which inaugurates, of course, you quite rightly say, the takeoff from the stable structures of the feudal society. So it introduces the idea of the dynamic economy and it expands the capacity. At the same time, it deeply alienates men from work. It creates its negative side. I know that the dialectic unfolds from that or is supposed to unfold from that. But I don't know that I find even that sense of an infinitely progressive shape to history secured at the level of the long economic duration. I think I want to think about the possibility of reversals, even at that level. Yes, and the contradictions and advances always taking their negative side. So I at any way break up the landscape. And I tell you why you've been quite right to speak personally, and these matters are not just intellectual questions. They are personal and political, but philosophical questions. There's a while we're talking about there. I don't make the distinction, you know, on and the other. I now, whereas I too for a long time, as you did, though that I would lose my grasp on any positive or progressive hope, if you were, if one lost hold of the notion that whatever the struggles and throwbacks, there was this longer movement upward. I now feel about it exactly in the opposite way. I think it is a kind of false guarantee. I think it's what I need to make me sleep well at night. Yes, it's what I need to take away the nightmare that there may be no socialists. Yes, it's my defense against thinking the impossible. Yes, it's what I clutch at when I remember that awful, terrible sentence of Marx which says, you know, there's always a choice in the end and barbarism is probably the more likely one. It's more probable. And as the weaponry gets bigger and Reagan gets stupider, I do think that barbarism is a much more likely historical outcome than socialism, I have to tell you. I think it will take the whole enormous weight of everything everybody on the globe of the earth can possibly do to prevent barbarism rather than a more humane social and equal social order from arriving. So I don't want to be protected from the naked fact of that alternative, by the hope that somewhere behind the backs of all of us, history is working to really make it come right. I don't think that that is so. I think it can. It's not a pessimistic view. But it's not, I don't any longer hold the long historical hope, which I think that that bugue. *mimics refuse. That I don't refuse. I don't believe that there are two histories, a previous history where there was progress and now no history. That is the ideology of postmodernism. And that is when postmodernism becomes ideological. Not the many, many important things to which postmodernism points, but the moment when postmodernism says history was moving until day before yesterday and has now stopped, that is the moment when it becomes ideological. No, that's not what I'm saying. I'm saying there are still now, in the present, if we know how to read them, exactly the same rough balance between positive and negative that there was when capitalism first emerged. The history has never been any different from what it was right now. Marx's great capacity was to look through the contradictions and see what the positive basis for constructing something better was. And we can do that now. We can do that now. You couldn't look at the massively rapid development in the transfer of information or the capacity of men and women to dominate information, to use information, you know, as an ordinary everyday tool and not think that the dialectic of progress still at work. Let me make that quite precise. The attempt to plan a modern industrial advanced economy before the information revolution, which is just coming into being, was doomed to failure. It's only now, only now that a different kind of planning from the planning that, you know, tries to put everything into one house in Moscow Square, where they decided kind of how many hat pins would come this year, how many electric irons, etc. That ancient notion of planning was because we did not have a means of understanding the relationship between demand and supply as rapid as the market. We are just beginning to be able to simulate the market on a computer. The computer works faster than the market. It gives us more information than the market. This is not a romance of the computer. The computer also descales. It also confines women to the subordinate part of the four. you know that is the contradictory nature of the progress it never gives it is always jainist face it never gives one face but it is not different from the possibilities as they dawned in 1780 in 1850 not different not to history not to history just the same the same old the same old contradictory, unresolved historical dialectic. The interplay of positive and negative, of meaninglessness and meaning, of progress and reaction. Just that old game, that was the game Marx was in, is the game that Biko was in. They've always been in the game, in the flood of the contradictory unevenness of history. So I really don't accept the notion of two histories. I think to accept the notion of two histories, you see, requires a simple notion of progress in the past and then a kind of complexification. But that is only because we find it hard to imagine what the contradictions were like there. I think if you translate yourself back 100 years, the place would not look marvelously progressive. You know, it would look like a big old mess of exactly the same kind where you had to look around really hard and say, you know, where is it? Is it really going forward? Is it really going forward? 1880, is it really going forward? Well, try 1780. Is it really going forward? It would have been very hard to discern. Very hard to discern. Not two histories. Not the laws of history, inevitable laws of histories anymore. But not two histories either. I'm sorry to be so fierce. It's only because these are matters that matter. These are questions of the matter. Thank you very much. I'm sorry I've kept you too long. .

I think about the English gentleman today, but I've postponed him. I've postponed him to tomorrow. I think I'll try and end the week with the English gentleman. But today I want to talk about one of his most important props, imperialism. The theme of today's lecture is race, monarchy, and empire. And I want to start with two quotations. is a quotation from an important Edwardian writer, James Fitzjames Stephen, who was writing in a book which was ironically entitled Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, three ideas in which he did not believe, but he called his book Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, nonetheless. And what he said was, if you can think of the theme of my talk about liberalism in the last two sessions, you will, I think, be interested in what he said. He said, India was the best corrective in existence to the fundamental fallacies of liberalism. The best corrective to the fallacies of liberalism for Englishmen was India. India, the idea of empire and all that was associated with India. The second is a quotation from Inok Powell, which will remind you of some themes that I spoke of yesterday. He's writing, it was in a speech that he gave to a society called the Royal Society of St. George, which was founded in 1894, was one of the many imperialist societies founded around the turn of the century. And it still goes on meeting, and Enoch Powell was invited to address its annual dinner one year in 1964. and he said, there was this deep providential difference between our empire and others that the nationhood of the mother country almost unconscious of the strange, fantastic structure which was built around her. England underwent no organic change as the mistress of the world empire. so the continuity of her existence was unbroken. Thus our generation is like one which comes home again after years of distant wandering. We discover affinities with earlier generations of the English who feel no country but this to be their own. We find ourselves once more akin to the Old English. To the Old English. Okay, the theme that I want to introduce to you is really threefold. The theme and the interconnections in the formation of English cultural identity of race, monarchy, and empire. I'm talking about race principally, though principally terms of the impact of race on English thought. I'm not yet talking about the emergence of the long history of blacks in Britain, and I'm not yet talking about the important ways in which British culture is being transformed by the imprint of ethnicity. I'm going to lecture on that in the public lecture at the beginning of next week, and I'm going to talk more about that when I talk about cultural differences and new identities towards the end of next week. Now I'm talking about the impact of race on the British. I'm talking about the function of the idea of the English or the British race in the formation of English culture. Towards the end, of course, I want to say that that is an idea which is impossible without constructing also that which is not British. You don't know what is British until you know what its opposite is. So I will talk, in fact, about how the British constructed those who are not British, but I'm principally concerned about the impact on English culture. The rise of imperialism, of course, Britain is involved in the expansion of her empire, both in colonial terms to India quite early on, deeply involved in the slave trade from the early 16th century on, massively involved in colonialism, especially in India throughout the 18th century. So imperialism is not in any sense a new formation for Britain, but it is quite clear that there is something like an ascendancy of the idea of empire, of Britain as an imperial nation, at the period of what has come to be called the New Imperialism, which occurs towards the latter half, the last decades of the 19th century. From the mid-1860s, 1870s onwards, right through to the First World War, and afterwards, that is the period of what we call the High Noon, the Midday Sun of British Imperialism. and it's a period which of course has I'm going to speak of it culturally but it's a period which has its deep political and economic roots it could only have been achieved as a result of the enormous commercial financial and maritime dominance of Britain and of British capital as a global force in the 19th century in the middle early and middle parts of the 19th century British capital is constructing the world market, constructing and dominating the world market. And without that, this later phase of imperialism would not have been possible. A second crucial underpinning of British imperialism is the financial control of the world market, which is established in this period in the city of London. I will talk in the first lecture next week, when I talk about the crises of the British state, I will talk about the extraordinary damage which it has done to the British economy, that the city has been such a successful force in world economic life. You may think that the financial city, the fact that Britain, London, has been the center of the financial markets, and that sterling, the British currency, is a world currency, you may think that that is a sign of strength. Actually, it has been one of the main causes of the industrial backwardness of the British economy in the 20th century. But there's no question that that consolidation of English financial power in and around the banking system of the world, financing the expanded trade of the world, which occurs from the 1870s onwards and which establishes the city of London once again, now as the financial center of the world, was one of the main material underpinnings of the new imperialism. A third feature which you have to bear in mind is that this is the period when England, when Britain is competing with other rising industrialized nations. Actually, you know, this is the period when Britain loses, when Britain loses its industrial hegemony. It ceases to be the leading industrial nation of the world. This is the period when Britain first competes against and loses in the competition, first to Germany, then to Japan, then to the United States. So the high noon of imperialism coincides with the loss of Britain's commercial and leadership in the world for the first time. But actually, you could think of imperialism as the last splurge, the last reaching by Britain for this greatness in a competitive struggle. As you know, Britain becomes locked in a competitive struggle with the other colonizing powers, with France, with the Portuguese. with the Dutch, with the Belgians, with the Germans, in the scramble for Africa, all those powers see their greatness as consolidated by their capacity to seize a piece of Africa, carve it up and make it, as it were, harness it as the subordinate, our primary producing countries which support the growth of the industrialism in the metropolitan powers. So in this period you're getting the formation of that critical dynamic between dependency and the metropolitan powers, between the non-European world harnessed in a subordinate position to the metropolitan powers, Germany, France, Belgium, and Britain, trying to underpin their commercial and financial capitalist dominance in the world by their mastery over these great territories of the Third World, of Asia, of Africa, of the Orient, of Egypt, of Latin America, and of China, trying to incorporate, to englobe the whole of the Earth's surface underneath the flag. As you know, this is the period, therefore, of the rise of the imperial idea. Throughout the middle parts of the 19th century, many well-established English politicians thought that the empire was a millstone around the necks of the British. You know, that they had to send money over there and they had to look after it. It was a burden. Lots of people wanted to get rid of these colonial encumbrances. It is in this period that the idea of Great Britain comes to be identified with Britain in its imperial role. Britain at the center of a whole colonial empire, when the greatness of Britain is identified with the ability to color every part of the globe red, to color every part of the globe red, the spread of the imperial idea. Now, this lust for empire is a lust for empire, and I want to speak of it in those terms. I'm going to talk as well as about the pleasures of domination through empire. I'm going to talk about the romance of empire, because the empire is a great love affair for the British, a great love affair for the British. So this entanglement of Britain with the rest of the empire, with its global destiny, the identification of the idea of England with the idea of its global destiny, of the flag marching everywhere, is a great romantic story, and it's that story which I'm going to try and tell you. But I want to remind you, as a sort of cynical note at the beginning, that this holy mission to imperialize the world, colonize the world, was underpinned by the grossest of forms of political domination. I came to England in the early 1950s and my education was financed by Cecil Rhodes I won a Rhodes scholarship I am extremely happy to say that I am not the person that Cecil Rhodes thought Rhodes scholarships ought to be given to indeed my appearance at Rhodes house I hope set the old man spinning in his grave and I hope he is still revolving. I was extremely pleased to take his money and to try my best throughout my history to do the worst I could for him because he is one of those great imperialist plunderers who embroiled the state in a corrupt collusion in Southern Africa who ran riot by treaty and borrowing and lies to englobe the territories of native peoples, promised them things which he never offered them. His eyes could be seen rolling around, glinting with the diamonds and the gold that he could see coming out, popping up out of southern Africa. And the only thing that he could think about, yes, the glint, the only thing that he could think about the glint is that it had to have a Union Jack waving above it. Not until it had a Union. He was not in that sense just attached to the plunder of the colonial world through capitalist imperialism. That wasn't good enough. It had to be British. Had to be British. So the Boers had to be set aside and other people had to, in the race, he had to be first. And it was consolidated when, and only when, the flag wafted in the wind. So let me remind you of what it is, the real material struggles which underpin the imperializing of British culture. What is less well known is the impact of imperialism on Britain's domestic life and domestic culture. This is a story which is much less well-known. Indeed, in the 20th century, right now, many well-intentioned liberals in Britain think that now that we have wound up the empire, hauled down the flag, given native peoples their independence, really that's a story which is behind us. We can forget that. We can just take it out of the culture, pluck it out of the culture. It was a sort of foreign body in the body politic. It wasn't really native to English soil. After all, you know, it was these great careers were carved in the Himalayas and in Khartoum. Well, we can forget all that. Just retreat back to Little England. And what I want to insist is that there was no Little England left. Little England was transformed by this experience. Britain itself, the home, the Garden of England, was imperialized so that there is no way in which the imperial history is outside or external to British culture. It is interior to it. It's not a question of the British making up their minds now whether they want to be imperialist or not. They are, whether they like it or not, that is the categories through which they perceive themselves as English and British, still in certain very important ways. Now, it's therefore this internalization of imperialism, of empire, that I want to talk about. It's not out there, but in here, inside, that I'm talking about. So I'm not talking about what the British did in India or how they sold up the railways in Latin America or how they sold opium in China. That's a different story. I'm talking about how they made imperialism grow in native soil, how it came up with the primroses, how it blew in with the mist, how it came down with the rain, how it came to be the sugar at the bottom of the characteristic English drink, the English cup of tea. The English cup of tea, the national drink, comes from somewhere else, comes from up there. The tea leaves were out there, had to be brought, and the sugar had to be brought in order to make that thing of which the English feel there is nothing more essential to them. If you want to have the most English thing that you can get is an English cup of tea. And it cannot exist without the empire. Could not exist without the empire. So it's in that sense, the imperializing of English culture, of English thought, that I'm trying to describe. I don't know whether you know that there was in this period, politically, one of the most important social movements of the time, which was called social imperialism. Social imperialism is an important phrase, social imperialism, not just imperialism, because social imperialism was a doctrine which applied the expansion of empire to English domestic politics. What it said, and it was part of a campaign which was addressed very specifically to the working class, very specifically to the lower orders. It wasn't a doctrine for the upper classes of the aristocracy. It was a doctrine which was intended to take the idea of empire to the people. And what it offered at its center was a trade-off, a trade-off. What it said is, if you will help us to expand the empire, to unify the empire around Britain and to carry the British flag as it were everywhere in the world everyone in Britain can profit from that everyone in Britain everybody can get a stake in that not just the civil servants and the colonial administrators and the great people who went out to have careers and the soldiers not just them it will feed the price of the ordinary bread in the street for the ordinary man It was, in other words, an attempt to engraft, to graft, to sow in the idea of imperialism into the lives, the everyday lives of people, so that they could think that though I'm poor, I've never seen the empire, I've never been, I don't have the money to travel, etc. Nevertheless, in some sense, the improvement of my standard of living depends on the success of the imperial idea. That's why social imperialism was a gospel for England, as well as for the empire over there, a trade-off. It implied a new conception of the state, because without a conception of the state, you could not achieve this trade-off. Since, after all, who was going to finance the expeditions overseas? Who was going to organize the sale of trade? You needed a unified state to which these different societies could belong. India and Egypt and parts of the Caribbean and parts of Latin America, in order to belong, had to belong to a central imperial state. Now, I'm going to talk about what happens to the state in a whole number of respects in this period, this very period, at the beginning of next week, when I talk about the crises of the state. But the modern British state would not have come to play such a large and enlarged role in English political life without imperialism. It was social imperialism which said, you can't create an empire out of laissez-faire. You know, just that will create just trade. But if you want a unified system where people in Canada and Australia and New Zealand and Rhodesia and Kenya see themselves as, you know, the extended arms of one state, one sovereign state, then you have to have at the center of it a strong state with a strong identity, a more powerful and interventionist state than we have had before. So the imperial idea is partly crucial in helping to construct for the first time the shift which happens in the late 19th century in the British conception of the state itself. What's more, the coming of that, the dawning of the new imperialism has the most monumental effect on ordinary British politics. One of the crucial figures of this whole period is Joseph Chamberlain. And Joseph Chamberlain's career is absolutely textbook. It's like a textbook. Joseph Chamberlain begins as a radical liberal. He begins with a popular campaign around questions of education. He helped to create the strong local state. The idea almost of the state building libraries and swimming bars and city centers, etc., is developed through Chamberlain's involvement in the government of Birmingham. It's called, it's so close, it uses the state, the local state, so much as an instrument of creating the support that it's called municipal socialism. That's where Chamberlain begins. And he ends as a high Tory, an arch Tory, with his monocle and his stiff white collar and his striped trousers. A high Tory, a Tory imperialist. It's imperialism that moves Chamberlain right through his career from the radical reforming left of the Liberal Party right through to the imperialist high Tory right of the Conservative Party. And in the course of that movement, Chamberlain destroys the old liberalism. He splits liberalism right down the middle. The Liberal Party is split between the pro-imperialist and the anti-imperialist. There is a liberal imperialism as well as a liberal anti-imperialism. And Chamberlain is the one who says, who pulls it, as it were, across the political spectrum and says the imperial idea is the central one. And if liberalism won't give that a home, I will go where that has to have a home, which is inside the Conservative Party. So he is one of the figures who moves the idea with the idea of imperialism and the empire, shifts liberalism from the language of radical reform through its populist phase right into the image of high Tories. As you know, Chamberlain is, though he never becomes prime minister, is the central dominating figure of the new conservative formations at the end of the 19th century in Britain. central figure, and it is to him that Rhodes goes with his little plan to capture Odisha. Nobody knows to this day exactly how deeply Chamberlain was involved with the plans to spark off a rebellion in Rhodesia, which would allow Rhodes to seize, to make the final leap, which seized the diamond and gold mines and which precipitated the Boer War. But what is perfectly clear is that high-minded Joseph Chamberlain had his fingers in the pockets of all kinds of plans and deals to expand the empire in southern Rhodesia and in South Africa. So, the construction of modern South Africa and the imposition of European dominance flows out of this involvement of the new state with the imperial idea. what is more and Chamberlain is a very good figure very representative figure in this sense but by no means the only one there is Roseberry there is Milner there is Cromer these are men some of them soldiers some of them civil administrators who make their great reputations out there they rule India like little princes or they carve up Khartoum or Egypt yes they make their great careers their principalities out there in the colonial empire they have their young men around them who are the coming men of power Milner had a group a highly brilliant group of colonial administrators who were called his kindergarten and they come in from the empire they come in from the empire to power and what they find in their place in the way between them and power are the old formations, the old politicians, the liberal and the old conservative parties. And they are part of an attempt to shove that old system aside. They are impatient with democracy. They are the enemies of democracy. They are the little Caesars of the empire. Milner expected to be made prime minister. He expected somebody to offer him the prime ministership like Caesar was offered the crown. They expect to say, you are the imperial consul. And in the period of imperialism, don't worry about democracy and all those little local difficulties of getting elected and so on. You would sweep in to the top. When Kitchener is involved in his escapades overseas, he expects that that will be matched by a political career at home. It doesn't, it hardly matters which party. He would come home and he expects the parties to fall into his pocket. He doesn't need to go and join them. They fall into his pocket. Of course, he's what one might call a natural conservative. It's a surprise that he figures that the best route through is somewhere within the echelons of the Conservative Party. This is a period, it's on the eve of the extension of the franchise, so that Britain is about to become a mass democracy. and in that period Britain comes closer than at any other time in its history to having a kind of Caesar-like dictatorship. There are more forces around in Britain from 1900 through the Irish Troubles and around the time of the First World War than at any other time when there are politicians playing around with the idea of a kind of coup. A kind of coup. Ireland was ready made for a kind of coup and Carson had people out there drilling troops drilling for a kind of breakaway if the English Parliament was ever so idiotic as to try to give Ireland away so this is a period when the Caesarist the Bonapartist solution comes closest to being realized in English politics when there is a real threat there is a time when people in the conservative party are dreaming of the dream of a kind of military, quasi-military uprising based in Ireland which would overthrow the party system. It is a kind of proto-fascism. And the root, the figures who lead that are connected in one way or another with imperialism. They are the enemies of democracy. They regard democracy and the old party system. You should, I hope, be familiar with this language. Yes, the parties are long and laborious, and democracy takes a long time, and everybody argues, and there are no clear decisions. Would that one had a decisive hand. Yes, a man who knows how to rule India could rule Britain. That was Milner's dream. Some of them are, you know, are grown-up adolescents. Yes, they occupy the world like the heroes of the boy's own papers. They see themselves almost like cartoon figures. But nevertheless, they believe in the exercise of power. Now, what they also believe is that that power is not to be exercised simply from on top, but it is to be exercised by a kind of swelling up of the people. The people must claim the call for the conflict. They have the dream of the people calling for the council. And the idea which unites this, which Rosebery, for instance, dreams for a long time, that the Liberal Party is going to summon him to power. He's always in the wings, waiting to be summoned to power. And the idea which would power him right to the top is the idea of imperialism, the idea of empire. So the notion of social imperialism, of imperialism as an intricate part of English politics, of conservative prime ministers who toy with tariff reform, with the tariff reform movement itself, which is under address of the idea of empire to the working class, specifically intended to imperialize the working class. And this, as the ground of a new kind of politics in Britain, is a story which, of course, is too un-British to be told. You have to hunt hard to find this crucial period of English history described in this way, hunt very hard to try to understand how perilously democracy was poised just at the moment when it was about to come into existence in a proper way for the first time in England, and of how the challenge to it was launched through the idea of imperialism. Well, it's not only that, it is, of course, the importance, theoretically and scientifically, of the idea of race. There isn't a long history of the idea of racial purity in Britain, but in this period the idea is also born, or the dream, the hope, of building a pure English race. The idea is, of course, linked to the development of social Darwinism, to the evolutionary theories of Darwin, which are appropriated as a political and social ideology in terms of the notion of scientifically improving the race. Scientifically improving the race. This is the period of the popularity of the science of eugenics. Of eugenics. Yes, that is to say that by selective breeding, One could breed out the weaknesses and the infirmities and the tendency to disease that was thought of as lodged in the lower classes. And one could breed a true breed of English men who were capable of being this imperial race. It's the first time that you get in English, serious English thought, the language of an English race. and the notion, the concept of a race, or the English as a chosen race. Part of the reason for that is indeed precipitated by events in the empire itself, the Boer War. And the relative failure of the British in the Boer War precipitates a major crisis back at home. Because what they suddenly discover is that the working class is not very healthy. They're not very good at fighting wars. full of disease and rickets and too short, too small to fight the Boers. There's a great, the early defeats of the Boer War are received at home as a warning that Britain must do something to improve the health of the ordinary English man if it is going to have an imperial destiny. And therefore, you will understand, you see the logic now. How do you do something about that? Well, the state must intervene. The state must do something about health, about school milk, about improving the diet. It must take the fall of the population rate as a serious question. Between 1890 and 1905 or 1906, there are no less than four royal commissions or select committees on the question of population. That Britain's population is in slow decline and something must be done to lift the rate of the population itself. Yes, the notion that we should have more proper, healthy Englishmen and they can go out and colonize the world. Population itself becomes a social problem. And of course, the laissez-faire state, which you know doesn't intervene in education and doesn't intervene in schooling and so on, is not appropriate to creating this new imperial race. And consequently, that is another way in which the state becomes more and more involved in raising the general level of the population for imperial purposes, for the purposes of becoming a chosen race. You may be shocked to know that I believe that some of the roots of the modern welfare state are right in this contradictory base. It begins here. In part, it begins here. You may even be more shocked to know that some of the firmest early believers in the eugenics and the breeding up of a truly imperial race are Fabian socialists. The Webbs, Sidney Webb especially, is committed to the notion of socialism, by which he means the greater state intervention. and one of the things he thinks the state must do is precisely to improve the quality of life of the people, the education, sanitation, expand education, etc. For what? Because this is if you're going to run an empire, you can't run an empire with sick men. So you see the state gets a vested interest now in the quality of life of ordinary people, of the poor and the sick. It has a stake in the lives of the working class for the imperial idea. So what I'm trying to show you is how a whole series of social and political developments which have contradictory outcomes. The welfare state is, of course, in many ways a very positive development. But it begins in this question of raising the quality of English social, economic, and political life to the level appropriate to an imperial nation. That is the depth to which the notion of an imperial destiny penetrates every corner of English life in this period. Right, and I want to talk, to turn now to another feature of this imperial idea because I've been describing its impact very much on economic life, on policy, on politics, on leadership, etc. But I want to turn to the crucial question of how this idea becomes popular. How does imperialism become popular? Between the 1880s and the early decades of the 19th, 20th century, right up to the First World War, the empire invades every crevice of popular culture. Indeed, not only does it invade it, It actually creates much of what we now call modern popular culture. The English Music Hall has a very long tradition in English popular theatre, and in the early stages it has its roots in a great deal of anti-patriotic and radical form. But by the 1880s it is saturated with the language of imperialism. It's a period of the growth and rise both of forms of musical comedy and forms of melodrama and of the great spectacularization of the English theatre. A period when, for instance, pantomimes and plays depend on the capacity to stage enormous pageants. I mean, great feats, great engineering feats. the interest in tableau, in pageantry, in spectacle, is just a central part of popular theatre of the period. It's also, incidentally, a central part of the very early rise of the British cinema, which happens in the early 10s and 20s. Many of the films which are made have these kinds of imperial themes at their centre. There's a kind of popular celebration of what we can call the nautical tradition, The future of the British gets tied up with the image of the British sailor. Everybody, this is the English phrase, a well-known English phrase, everybody loves a sailor. Everybody loves a sailor. The picture of the Jolly Tar, the Jolly Jack. The Jolly Jack is, of course, the person who takes the ordinary seaman. You see that it's not now a celebration of Cromer and Milner and Kitchener. This is the celebration of the ordinary sailor, the sailor in the lower depths, who is himself the bearer of the flag, because he's got to sail the ships and make the goods and sell them. He's got to take them out. He is the vehicle of popular imperialism, the nautical tradition. If one sums up the penetration of these themes and images in popular spectacle, in popular melodrama, in nautical comedy, in musical comedy, in pageantry, and in exhibitions, one can only speak of the theater of empire, the popular theater of empire. Empire is staged in Britain. The idea that the empire happens in Delhi or Calcutta or Kingston or Rhodesia or Kenya has nothing to say, nothing to compare with the staging of the empire at the center of the empire in London itself, in England itself. I read you just a list of popular dramas with so clearly an imperial theme in this period that it sounds in the titles. The Defense of the Consulate, The Great Mogul, The Nabob's Fortune, The Savoy Nabob, The Begum's Diamonds, The Indian Mutiny, Zulu Chief, Cape Mail, Kimberley Mail, The Diamond Rush, the dancing dervish, the prince of the empire, our British empire, the Chinese insurrection, the Indian mutiny, the fall of Khartoum. Everyone, every event in the wars of conquest and imperialism are celebrated at home in terms of popular theater, with all the magic of melodrama, of suspense, and of pageantry. The fall of Khartoum is staged, yes, with whirling dervishes and with imitation castles. The Chinese insurrection is staged with gunboats sailing onto the stage and huge cannon firing off. Yes, they're immense popular tableau, gigantic popular tableau. At the summit of that stands those things which we now regard, of course, as high art. Without this, Gilbert and Sullivan would, of course, not be possible. not be possible. Gilbert and Sullivan is simply just one of the other, one of the better of those who adapted musical comedy to the celebration of the imperial theme. Every key episode of imperialism is restaged in Britain through the theater of the empire. The British suddenly in this period discover the gift of the exhibition. The gift of the exhibition. Now, there's a crucial change. In 1851, on the site of the Great Exhibition, that was an exhibition, of course, about British industry, about British commerce, about Britain as the supreme mechanic of power. What was displayed was Britain's capacity to make things, to make goods, how wonderful it was at mastering the Industrial Revolution. the exhibitions of the 1890s and the 90s and the 1900s are not about Britain's mechanical or commercial power they are about the empire they are the Prince Royals exhibition of the empire there's the colonial and Indian exhibition there's the empire of India which occupies the Arab's court for months there's the Greater Britain exhibition there's the savage South African exhibition which is described as a virtual representation of life in the wires of the dark continent for the enjoyment of the masses. That's how it describes itself. There is a gigantic eight-week spectacular which occupies the Wembley Stadium, which integrates the military, imperial themes, scenes from wildest Africa, natural tigers taken from Central Africa, etc., which is so wonderful and so powerful that it says the visitors will inspect the empire from end to end in the Wembley Stadium itself. Everything can be seen. You can't travel over there. You can see it right at the corner of Wembley, from one end to another, the great splendor of empire displayed. The Daily Mail is so excited by this that it relays the earliest relay broadcasts. One of the earliest relay broadcasts. Indeed, it's one of the first broadcasting outside broadcasts ever relayed. Broadcasting goes to Wembley to bring the message to the people of this great splendor of empire that is being unfolded in front of them. The society proliferates, civil society, not organized by the state, but civil society proliferates with imperial societies. The Victoria League, the Primrose League, the Imperial Federation of Labor, the Imperial League, thus League of St. George. that is to say the ability of people in their ordinary clubs and so on to attach themselves to organizations of women to become involved in the Victoria League and I'll tell you a joke about the Victoria League. Victoria League still exists and if you're a Rhodes Scholar like I was when you get to Oxford Rhodes Scholars only go to Oxford because Rhodes gave the money you see the idea of Rhodes was to give the money to bring the best the elite from the colonies to give them the best education in Oxford. And then, of course, we should all go back and administer it in the spirit of Oxford. And Rhodes Scholars are looked after by the ladies of the Victoria League. These are high gentry and aristocratic ladies. You've got Rhodes Scholarship. Well, the ladies of the Victoria League still tend the needs and wishes of Rhodes Scholars. So they have tea, a great tea in Rhodes House for incoming Rhodes Scholars, to which we all go. And then they select their Rhodes Scholars and offer to take them home. Invite them home for three or four days. I was invited home to Lord and Lady Talent. They live in a place called New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem. The New Jerusalem. So in the depths of the first New Year I ever spent in England, I traveled by train into deepest Surrey to discover the New Jerusalem, this wonderful grand estate. Lord Talent, who himself doesn't belong to Victoria League, Victoria League is ladies who are involved in this. He had other connections. He was the deputy director of the BBC and the first director of the Empire Films, which are the films that in the Second World War, you know, created the Humphrey Jennings films. All the early films about the Blitz were made by the Empire Films Association. Well, Sir Stephen Talents only sat, he was at that time the gardening expert for The Observer. And he sat at this window, beautiful window, looking out on his estate, covered with snow. And every time he saw either the first primrose or the first robin, he would write it down. That's what his column existed of in the observer. Today at last I saw the first primrose. So he watched through his window for the side of the first primrose. Meanwhile, myself and this crazy American from the west coast of America, from a tiny college called Pomona College, would never see, I mean, you know, he'd never seen a country estate in his life. It's that the oranges were still hanging off his ears. He and I, Jim Stubbins and I, arrived in the depths of winter for the Victoria League. We had a tea party of the local Victoria League ladies. And then we retired. And I tell you only this part because I think it might amuse you. When we retired at last and got upstairs, this wonderful house, which was hanging, draped with imperial banners and crossed Zulu spears, and the horns of rhinoceros which had been shot on the borders, etc. When we passed these trophies and got upstairs into bed, we were both met by a gigantic warming pan. Out of our bed, which was a canopy, there was a huge handle sticking because our beds were warmed by a great copper pan with coal in it. That's the only thing. What did you expect? An electric blanket or a hot water bottle. So there was a warming pan. Now, this is the problem. What do you do with a warming pan? You can't take it out of the bed and put it on the floor because we'll scorch a hole in this floor which has been there for 700 years. We were much too shy at half past 10 in the night to ring the bell For some servant to come up, please take away the warming pan. So we wandered around this room with these two warming pans. For about three quarters of an hour, we tried to put them in the basin. They smoked, they smoldered. These are the ladies of the Victoria League, still in existence. They still think the empire is where it is. They don't quite know how people like me got to be mixed up in the Rhodes Scholarship. But nevertheless, they are tolerant and broad-minded, and after all, our dusky friends, you know, from the outer depths. They too belong, are part of the great family of the empire. The great family of the empire. The ladies and the great family of the empire. Well, in this period, imperial societies like these proliferated, linking and binding the aristocracy and the middle class in civil society to the idea of the empire. Then there are the youth organization. The youth organization. Just think about them. The scouts and the girl guides. Where do you imagine the scouts were scouting? Where do you think the guides were being guided to? They weren't being guided in Britain. They were supposed to develop the skills of the empire. They were supposed to go straight from being a boy scout and be able to survive out there in Timbuktu. That's what you were being told. how to rub sticks together if you didn't have a match, because, you know, I don't make matches in India, so you could light your own fire and roast a little pan, all for God, Queen, and country. God, Queen, country, and empire. Yes, the girl guides and the Boy Scouts. Well, that was for the more refined, for, as it were, imperializing the more refined of the English youth. When you got below that to the recalcitrant roughs of the working class, you needed a bit more discipline. You needed a bit more discipline. That was the boys' brigade. The boys' brigade. You have to march them up and down, yes, rather than, as it were, dress them in gentle shorts. The scouts, you know, wore shorts, yes, in all English weathers, in all English weathers, because they were really prepared for the topics. They were just hovering at home for the time being. They were just, you know, passing the winter there, unfortunately, till they could get to where their destiny was, which was where shorts were appropriate. Why else would you develop, as the uniform of a juvenile organization, khaki shorts? Well, the whole image was the image of the scout, of the person in the desert looking out. So the whole problem, what comes to, I'll talk about tomorrow, the problem of hooliganism and of youth is resolved by the state and other institutions, the church, establishing these organizations That's not the point. The point is the image in which the organizations are established are the image of an imperializing nation. An imperializing nation. And for those, that's for those who were not very religious, although, of course, you had to swear by God, Queen and country, Baden-Powell wouldn't have had anything else and live a morally virtuous life, as you know. You couldn't be prepared for the rigors of India with a corrupt moral life, etc. But for those who were more deeply religious, there were all the missionizing societies, which is another way of englobing especially young girls in the society of the propagation of Christian knowledge and the religious tract society and young evangelical England. Evangelicalism, which had already moralized the English middle classes at home, now set out on a much grander world mission to moralize the colonial people. And you could do something like that by running a tea party or a jumble sale at home to buy a few Bibles, to keep a few missionaries alive out there, taking the gospel as if were to them into the outer darkness. Out there was, of course, dark. It was dark in every sense. Full of black people, or brown people, or yellow people. Darker at any rate than human beings. But also dark in the sense that it was unknown. You never knew when something wild or strange would jump at you, or clutch you, or nibble at you, or eat you, or bother you. So it was the sense of darkness. You have to get the notion that the empire was not created in a fit of power. It was created in the spirit of mission. The British had a mission. Indeed, I want to come on to tell you how the British experienced empire as a great burden. They never wanted it. But this burden of civilizing the world was loaded on top of them. And, well, what does a good scout do? He takes on the burden that he's offered to them. He does what a man has to do. A man has to do, he has to go out, prove himself on the frontier. I won't talk about the invasion of imperial themes in the literature of young people, but you know if you've ever read Orwell's Boys Weeklys or ever seen any of those magazines, Boys Own Paper, or if you know the writings not only of Kipling and Stevenson but of G.A. Henty and Ryder Haggard and Abakan and Edgar Wallace. I mean, you know, Edgar Wallace, the creator of Tarzan, was, of course, one of the first correspondents for Reuters News in South Africa. Conan Doyle, who is the founder of Sherlock Holmes and who has all those themes about the yellow peril and the funny snakes that come in from over there, the funny people that are bringing things in, is, of course, one of the, went out to South Africa, the leading physician. And Buchan, who creates the great adventure story of empire, was, of course, not only private secretary to one of the arch-imperialists themselves, Milner, part of the Milner kindergarten. So the construction of boys' literature and the beginning of boys' papers, of stories, etc., are simply infused with the tales of empire. The tales of empire. The same thing is true of the popular press. This is, after all, the period of the creation of the modern popular press. A paper like the Daily Mail is the first of the truly popular papers, the penny papers. Yes, not the long, serious papers like the Telegraph, etc., but of the papers being read by the newly educated masses. And papers like the Daily Mail are created not only by journalists and newspaper owners like Harmonsworth or Stead, who are deeply involved in social imperialism, but their whole popular address are forged with the language of the Boer War, of Kitchener, of the fall of Khartoum, of Britain being great in its activities in relation to the world out there. I mention only two other things, because they may be familiar to you. I'm trying to conjure up the extraordinary range of the forms in which popular culture in this period, that emerge in this period, emerge, colored by the imperial idea, shaped by the imperial idea. I don't know whether you know Elgar's music. It is the most English of English musics. Popular, tuneful, martial, ceremonial. It's written for ceremonies. Colourful. Exhibitions and the pageantry and the displays and the spectacle. Music written with and informed by an imperial spirit. And the last snapshot I want to give you is the birth is the religion of the monarchy. The religion of the monarchy. Now, you know, at certain periods in their history, the English are one of the nations of the earth who have been rudest about the monarchy. The monarchy used to be among liberals and radicals, a huge joke. when it was not regarded as a scandalous institution. For a long time, the British monarchy was regarded as scandalous. Scandalous. And people would say what they liked about it, make up funny rhymes and poems about it, with the subject of irony and satire and funny drawings, and they called their kings and queens by... You remember, in the 18th century, they regarded the whole of the British Empire as really fat Germans who would hardly speak English at all, who would never even learn to be properly English. They were a foreign royal home, royal line, after all, and had been planted on Britain as a long consequence of the result of the Glorious Revolution. So they treated the monarchy, you know, as a kind of joke. What's more, the monarchy in that early period was never conceived to be above politics. They were part of the political system. In the 18th century, any cabal or political cabal that formed up had either to have the heir of the prince regent or the heir of the king or the heir of the queen. They were involved in the nitty-gritty of the forming of political factions. They were another rather special bourgeois family. That's what the monarch in that period were regarded as. They had the touch of royalty, but they were not etherealized. They were not etherealized. They were not regarded as a spiritual group apart. Now, gradually, throughout the reign of Victoria, the monarchy comes to be regarded as a spiritual thing apart. It's quite late, you know, quite late, relatively late. It begins with the popular touch of Prince Albert, who is Queen Victoria's consort, who is himself not English, another German, but who makes huge efforts to make himself acceptable to the English people, and he gets involved in a lot of good works, he gets involved in the creation of exhibitions, etc. He gets involved in philanthropic endeavours. He roots himself at the heart of popular English life. After the death of Albert, Queen Victoria retires into a sullen silence. She took ages to mourn the passing of the Prince Consul. To mourn the passing of the Prince Consul. She couldn't reconcile herself to that. In the middle of that, there's a tiny episode when the affair of the Queen with a commoner called John Brown generates stories so proliferating about the Queen that she is known as Mrs. Brown. When is anybody going to see Mrs. Brown again? So you see the idea of the monarchy as something which is next to God, of the royal family as a sort of simulacrum of the holy family, has not yet been born. But somewhere towards the end of that period, the monarchy begins to etherealize. It begins to take off from real earth, from this earth, and begins to be a thing separate. It is involved in the state pageantry. in the Golden Jubilee of 1887, and then in the Diamond Jubilee of 1897, when Queen Victoria is celebrated by again bringing in a gigantic spectacle the whole of the empire. The empire spreads out in celebration about the queen, who is now no longer Queen of England, but Queen of the Empire, Mother of the Empire. And everybody is brought, dancing tribes, camels, elephants parade through. It's like a kind of tribute from the world. All the tributaries of the imperial world flow in to London to celebrate this fat, dumpy lady who is their mother, the mother of the great new imperial family. Now, around the monarchy in this period, gather a whole series of rituals and emblems. And it is now believed that those ritual and emblems have always been associated with the English monarchy, since time immemorial. The fact is not true. They were discovered or invented in this period. Many of them existed before, but their connection into the English monarchy, the fact that they're taken as the emblems of English monarchy, that tradition is invented in this period. And there are people who invent it. Viscount Isha, for instance, who was the person in the Queen's household who took responsibility for developing these pageants and spectacles around empire. And do you know there are many of them? Not only are there the diamond jubilees and the appearances of the Queen at the opening of Parliament. The Queen used not to appear at the opening of Parliament. Now the Queen regularly appears at the opening of Parliament in full royal regalia. And not only that, but of course the coronations of a new king. And there's a new king, two new kings before the end of the century. There's Edward and George. Coronations, deaths, funerals, any public celebration, defeats and victories have to wheel out the full pageantry of the royalty. And Isha is the person who discovers the connection. He is the Burke of the peerage, of this period. Because he it is who says that the queen can now wear a particular star, which he will tell her dates back to Edward the Confessor. And now it's implanted. And everybody believes it's always been there. They think that no queen has ever appeared without one. Although this is the first time when any queen appeared with it. So the trappings of royalty are collected, accumulated in this period. I hope you'll see the connection between the investment in pageantry and spectacle, in exhibitions and in popular theatre, and this theatrical show which the new monarchy becomes, the theatrical show. It's also, of course, scattered in a plethora of memorabilia, of little trinkets. I don't know whether there's anything like this to correspond with this in Italian life, but when I was a schoolboy, when I was in junior school, five and six, any public ceremony in Jamaica, if we were willing to turn out, you got a little Union Jack, about so high, which you could flash, And then you got a medal made out of tin, printed with Mafeking or Kitchener on the front, or a little cup, a mug, coronation mugs, royalty mugs, flags, new medals, new coins, special gold sovereigns, etc. for each occasion. The spreading out of the empire, the idea of empire, through the memorabilia, the trivia of popular culture. the popularizing of the monarchy throughout this period and into our present period is one of the great stories by which the imperial nation is staged in the theater of empire at the center of English culture. It's a wonderful story. One of the most important moments in English broadcasting is the decision of Lord Reith in the newly created BBC to invite the king to broadcast to the nation. The first broadcast, and it's a wonderful historic picture. One of the pictures at the beginning of the history of modern broadcasting in England is the picture of the king and this early microphone, speaking in his cracked voice, first to the nation and then, of course, to the empire. That, as you know, has gone on. The queen regularly speaks on television at three o'clock on every Christmas afternoon, every Christmas afternoon. Half the population watch it in reverence and the other half watch it in irony, but everybody watches it. Everybody gathers. Millions and millions, 24 million viewers are watching the Queen's speech to the nation and the Empire. It's always about Commonwealth themes. Always about the Commonwealth, about the Empire. It's always about the family, our little family. So she will show some pictures of, you know, the grandchildren. She will refer to Charles and Diana. The notion, the intimate notion of our family and the great family out there. Those whom I haven't seen can't know. It's much too wide and great for me ever to know. But of course, I paid you a visit in Fiji last year and I'm coming to Kenya this year. So I'll see you all. I've either just seen you or I'm going to see you. Which connects the family out there with the family in here. The popularization of the royal family. Now, you might say, well, doesn't this lower it? If you're describing the kind of rise, the etherealization of the royal family, aren't you describing its domestication? Not at all. I'm describing the double thing. I'm describing the movement between the etherealized and the domesticated family. It's the discourse, it's the dialectic between these two ideas. That is to say that the royal family is at one and the same time exactly like everybody else. Perfectly normal. They eat, have fun, jokes, crack bad jokes, make love, you know, occasionally. All the things that everybody older, have family rows, just like everybody on the one hand. And at the same time, they are not like anybody else. Yes? It's not that they're not like anybody else or that they're just like us. The Danish monarchy, that is the bourgeois monarchy, because they ride bicycles. They are really just like us. The English royal family is just like us and not like us. They are like the stars. They're like the stars. We know them as intimately as Marilyn Monroe or Humphrey Bogart or James Dean. We know them inside. We've lived with them. They are part of our dreams. They capture our fantasies. they live our fantasies for us. And yet at the same time, if you see them on the street, hi James, I mean you don't say good evening your majesty, hello Charlie, yes because that familiarity both bridges and acknowledges the distance which separates the populace from the monarchy. There's a very particular English construction of the monarchy. So the domestication, the involvement of the monarchy with not only pageantry, but of course with the modern media, it's become the centerpiece of the calendar of broadcasting in Britain. At the beginning of each year, when a broadcaster is deciding what are the key moments of the rest of the year, you know, sketching out the calendar, well, the first thing you put in are the great state occasions, the opening of Parliament, the Queen's birthday, those are the days when, of course, you know you was put aside 40 cameras, 25,000 retainers to cover this great spectacle. So it's become the calendar, the symbolic calendar of the mass media. So they've been mass mediaized. They've been constructed into a celebrity. Yet at the same time, of course, they retain all the things I was talking about before, which is the product of an invented tradition. They go back ever since. They don't go back ever since. They don't. The German royal family only came at the end of the 17th century. They don't go back before that. And they're mixed up with a whole lot of other royal families. They're the product of Queen Victoria's great fecundity. She had one child who married into every royal family and a whole number of other places in Europe. So they have friends and family relations everywhere. But they don't go back to everywhere. They don't go back to the Anglo-Saxon kinship. They can't trace their ancestry through Magna Carta. nevertheless they come on as somebody whom you just know but who nevertheless has this long deep historic tradition which is signified in the emblems that construct their continuity with the English past and just as the monarchy every now and again looks as if it's set fair to run out of steam it gets an injection of energy of new energy from outside Lady Diana is the injection of energy It's the revitalization She is the equivalent of monkey glands for the monarchy Of giving it yet a new thrust Nothing has so contributed The touch of celebrity of the mass media As the new, wonderfully fashionable Beautifully clothed and groomed And cut in the modern style Lady Diana the monarchy and the love affair of the english with the monarchy is the greatest soap opera in the world it is the greatest soap opera in the world there is no no other the resources of the mass media have never been not only in england you know don't uh don't you laugh knowingly yes some of our most famous royal photographers who follow them up hill and down dale as they ski, peering through their bedrooms, looking up their skirts, are Italian. Oh yes, oh yes. Where at the last moment the English Reserve will stop the intrepid journalist from asking the last question, did he sleep with you last night? Die. somebody else a German from Stern or Italian photographer will ask so it's a romance of the world it's not romancing you know that Lady Diane Charles have just been in Dallas I mean that is the that is the end story that's a final episode of the mass mediaization of the monarchy of the full assumption of soap opera as the ultimate national ideology well I want to talk about the last the last element in this story and then I'll draw to a close the last element is what I want to call the romance of empire the romance of empire this is Enoch Powell I've quoted Enoch Powell several times I don't know if you know who he is He was a leading conservative politician who later broke with the Conservative Party and has become a unionist, like that career I was describing to you, gone to Ireland as a unionist politician. You know, Paul in 1958 made the most explicitly and open statement of English racism that has ever been heard in English politics. in a famous speech called the rivers of blood speech he inveighed against the invasion of britain by the blacks and he said if they don't stop and go away and leave us alone there will be blood in the streets that is inok paul okay i may read your sentence from inok paul i fell head over heels in love with india If I had gone there a hundred years ago, I would have left my bones there. I would have left my bones there. I fell head over heels in love with India. It is not possible to understand English racism unless you understand how at one and the same time They are deeply despising of the blacks and the browns and the yellows over whom they have dominated in the empire, and yet how the empire has constituted a romance story, a romance story for the British. The idea of the jewel in the crown in India. Yes, the idea of India is the jewel in the crown. the idea of India as the meeting place of East and West, of India as the place where the English come face to face with that more powerful and romantic but unnameable thing. Yes, it's E.M. Forster. It's E.M. Forster, the passage to India. The passage to India is a metaphor. It's a metaphor for the romance of out there, of the mysterious East, of the seductive East, of all the things out there that you can't get at home, of servants and wealth and splendor and decoration and grandeur and the languorousness of the East as compared with the hard, puritan, military, toughness that's required to run an empire. This is the love of the colonizer for the colonized. And unless you remember that that is also an element which constructed the relationship between English people and the reality of the empire, you won't understand what this imperializing of English culture was like. The empire was largely lived, apart from a few rogues and renegades like Cecil Rhodes, as what is called the white man's burden. The white man's burden. it was given to the English as a historic destiny to civilize all the rest of the uncivilized world not as a wonderful thing not as a joke but as a burden something they carried on their backs and the only spirit in which you could civilize the world was in that of selfless administration it's not an administration that wanted to of course an administration that had to be tough, an administration that had to be disciplined, but it was the discipline of the unruly child, a father to the unruly child. You had to chastise the natives because of course they knew no better. You had to chastise them, but you really were trying to teach them how to be disciplined, how to be disciplined among themselves. Of course, you may have to shoot a few, or whip a few, or knock a few around. Of course, you picked up thousands and thousands and thousands of them in the 16th and 17th centuries, and stuck them in the bottom holes of ships that you had sent out to Africa. And a third of them died before they reached the Americas. Tough luck, hard luck. You needed somebody to run the plantations in the Caribbeans and the Americans, And you couldn't ask a white man to do that. So, of course, there's a... I'm not trying to present this as if there was a humanitarian impulse only in the imperializing mission. What I'm trying to suggest to you is that the British lived, that is to say, the experience they made sense of, they related in the imaginary to their imperial mission, not as a conquering nation, but as a civilizing nation, as a civilizing force, as an educating force, as a force that was bearing a great burden selflessly. They had to be patience, the infinite patience, to outlast the patience of the East, was the patience of the Father. Patience of the Father. This is the family with the Father. Another aspect of Romantic nationalism is, of course, which I'll come back to tomorrow when I talk about the gentleman, but the image of the dashing gentleman, the dashing English gentleman, braving the world. And of course, of the essential English. You know the English are the only imperial nation that actually dressed for dinner in the Himalayas. I mean, stifling hot as it was, the sweat running down their stiff collars. But you couldn't drink sundowners properly, not properly, not properly, without putting on a longer, the ladies putting on a longer frock and the men putting on a frock coat. Yes, they would dress for dinner because the English had to be English wherever they were found. If you stumbled across them in darkest Africa, you know, hello, are you Livingston? Yes, he had to be properly dressed. You couldn't meet him in his dressing gown or his pajamas or, you know, in his swimming suit. He had to be properly dressed with a staff and the scout's scout shorts and a trim pith helmet. So the fact that Englishmen could go anywhere and remain English, that the colonial experience didn't creolize them, the French got creolized. And some of the British that's lived out where I live in the tropics, lived there for so long because slavery is much longer than this history I'm describing. They got creolized. But the English of this new imperialism did not get creolized. They created the natives in their image. They created, for instance, Anglo-India. With that sly civility with which they made some Indians the kind of images and replicas of themselves. Mimics of themselves. You know, a wonderful novel by V.S. Naipaul about the relationship, the complex relationship between the native and the colonizer, which is called the mimic man. The mimic man. okay the romance of empire but i want to remind you another aspect of empire which is the scholarship of empire the scholarship of empire you see the british only came to know about the empire through a gigantic effort of the construction of knowledge anthropologists ethnographers travelers explorers scholars in Sanskrit literature missionaries who studied the peoples among which they moved linguists teachers soldiers administrators poets who wrote about the east translators who took the sacred books Oma Kayam from the Eastern peoples and translated them into English. Philologists, comparative linguists, comparative anatomy, comparative law, the study of the systems of native law, native law in Africa, native law in India, etc. The construction of the great museums of this period. You go into South Kensington, the great museums of the period are all constructed in this period. And they're all constructed with at their center some element of the imperial idea. The institutes, the Institute for Tropical Medicine, Imperial College, the School of African and Oriental Studies, the learned societies, Indian scholars, African scholars, the scholars of scholarly administrators, the Imperial War Museum, special journals that did nothing but you know translate from the original languages there's a huge explosion of knowledge which constructs the knowledge which the british have of what other people were like it constructs the knowledge you should never believe that as it were the people were there and there was a natural encounter between the english and them in their native lands and that's how the British gained knowledge of them. That is not the case. The knowledge was constructed. It had to be built. Scholarly knowledge had to be constructed, generated. A whole apparatus and institutions of knowledge had to be constructed, through which the English came to know the colonized. Now this is the point, the theme on which I want to end. I want to say that it is not possible to know, I mean for us or for the English to know what Englishness is, unless you know what it is not. Yes, you have to know what is not truly English, and then you know what is English. It's like, it's impossible to define for me what night is, unless you can tell me what day is. Our definitions depend on the construction of the positive thing that this is, against the knowledge of what is the other, the construction of the other. I don't want at this time to talk about what are the deep processes within us which make us only know what we are and have an identity through the construction and the relationship and the denial of the other. That is a deep process to which psychoanalysis has, of course, contributed an immense amount. But I just want to say that after the period of the formation of the self, so the national self is also constructed through the building of the knowledge of the other. And that knowledge has to be positively constructed. Now that positive construction of knowledge is never, of course, disinterested knowledge, though scholarly knowledge did indeed find out a great deal about how people had lived in other parts of the world. But it is never disinterested knowledge. It is always knowledge which is in the field of power. In this case, the relationships of domination and subordination between the empire and the colonized. So the way in which African people, Indian people, Egyptians, the Chinese, came to be known to the British was to be known as the colonized, as those who were not British, as those who were other than British. And the identity of being British is constructed in this polarity between the positive and the negative, between the self, the British self, and the British other. It is my insistence that without the construction of the colonized other, the English would not know who they were. They would not know who they were. Now, I just want to reflect for a moment on this question of knowledge and power, because I think it would be quite wrong to assume that the British, in the period of imperial expansion, were cynical about the form in which they encountered other people. It is not the case. So you can't explain the gigantic assumption of superiority which underpins English culture. just the notion that we are naturally, ineffably, better than most of the other people. Not only different from, but better than, without seeing how that is constructed in what Foucault calls the interchange between knowledge and power. Yes, there's no knowledge of the imperial world that was not part of the power, the power relationships between colonizer and colonized. and in order to just pin that I want just to read you a passage about Egypt in which you can see this them and us this English self and the other self being constructed actually in the language itself and it's a quotation from Edward Said's book on Orientalism which is a very important contributor to this story that I've been trying to tell it's a speech from the conservative Prime Minister Balfour Balfour is Prime Minister just before the First World War and he is one of the figures who is central in consolidating the idea of empire nation monarchy and conservatism he appropriates these discourses of nation empire imperialism, the colonizing power and the monarchy. He harnesses all of those and identifies it with conservatism. It is in this period that conservatism becomes the party of nation, empire and crown. This is Bafou. First of all, he says, he's speaking about Egypt. Look at the fact of the case, the fact of the case. Western nations, as soon as they emerge in history, show at once the beginnings of those capacities for self-government. So it's not something which the British had to learn or the French had to learn. As soon as the nations emerge, they naturally show the capacity for self-government. You may look through the whole history of the Orientals in what is broadly called the East, and you will never find the traces of self-government. All their great centuries, and they have been very great, so here is the romantic element. Yes, it's not, they're not stupid or poor. It's not that they don't have great writings or great art or great literature, and they have been very great, but they've all been passed under despotism, under absolute government. all their great contributions to civilization, and they have been great, have been made under the tyrannical form of government. Conqueror succeeded conqueror. One domination has followed another. But never in all the revolutions of fate and fortune have you seen one of those nations of its own motion establish what we, from a Western point of view, call self-government. You see the construction of what they are and what we are. We are what they are. That is a fact. It's not a question of superiority, he says. Not a question of inferiority. I suppose a true Eastern sage would say that the working government which we have taken upon ourselves in Egypt and elsewhere is not work worthy of a philosopher. It is dirty work, inferior work, the work of unnecessary labour. Yes, there is the idea of the burden, of unnecessary labour. Well, is it, Balfour asks, a good thing for these great nations, and I admit their greatness, it's the third time he's said it, in case you didn't think, and I admit their greatness, that this absolute government should be exercised by us. I think it is a good thing. I think that experience shows that they have got under us far better government than in the whole history of the world they have ever had before. And which not only is of benefit to them, but is undoubtedly of benefit to the whole civilized West. And here comes the trump card, the thing which I hope will convince you that the English live their relation to the reality of imperialism as a mission. We are in Egypt, not for the sake of the Egyptians, though we are there for their sake. We are there for the sake of Europe as a whole. We are there for the sake of Europe as a whole. And Britain especially, he means. Now, if you just looked at Balfour's speeches, the way in which he dichotomizes the world, yes, there is now us and them, the naturally British, not something learned through history, learned by conquering other people, learned by ruling. No, naturally, we are born with the idea of liberty and self-government. And they are born with the idea of despotism and tyranny. There is an unbridged gulf between us and them. No long cohabitation, no rule, no being friends with them will ever bridge. This unknowable difference, the cultural difference between them and us. Now, underneath that, you can see the values being lined up. We are rational. We know how to govern. We are orderly and disciplined. And they are weak and pleasurable. They're fond of pleasure and sexuality. They're sensual, where we are serious. The values line up, them and us, them and us, the equivalences. And then it is congealed, it is sealed with an essence, the essence of the British and of the East, the East. The East for the English is everywhere, out there. The East is unknowable, romantic, but unknowable. You can never, the British can never really get close to it. They occupy it, they discipline it. They, of course, are going to retire back to London when, you know, the natives get unforgiving and throw them out. Well, what are you to do? You tried your best, you know, you try to rule them as gently and humanely. But of course, people are never grateful and never grateful for the good that you bring them. Well, what do you do in your dignity? You retire. You run down the flag. You pipe God save the Queen and the land of home and glory. and you take the boat slowly into the sunset. You retire from the great imperial destiny. It's unbridgeable. There's a great romance, a great pull, an enormous pleasure for the English in what they have done over there and in the life that they could have out there. English stories are full. English narratives are full of out there, over there, when we were there, when we were in Egypt, of tales of their adolescence, when I ran away to sea. The narratives, high and low, popular and serious, Conrad and Enti, Ballantyne and... And we tell themselves the stories of the romance of out there could never lead you to think that imperialism was a kind of fit of domination. It's not a fit of domination. It's not an ideology, not a cynical ideology. It's not a manipulation. There isn't somebody up there, you know, turning the little plugs. I'm going to make the British people imperialist. Yes, ideology does not work like that. But it is the construction of a culture. It's the construction of a culture which shapes everything, touches everything that is truly English. Is there any hope in things like Scottish and Welsh and Irish nationalism of countering the more conservative or reactionary trends of British nationalism? Well, I'd say just two things about that. One is the positive thing. That, yes, I mean, Irish nationalism is, I think, a thing of its own. Yes, Irish nationalism doesn't belong to the English constellation at all in a very deep way. But of course, nationalism is at issue, is one of the central questions in the relationship with Ireland. Because the Irish, Alstow, are more fiercely nationalist than anything else. They're 101% British. So the question of nationalism is central to Ireland. Scottish and Welsh nationalism is also very well developed. And I think people who, who are accustomed in a rather casual way to identify the English with the British, should be somewhat more careful in discriminating one against the other. The period I'm talking about is a period which I think can be rightly called British. But really one needs to distinguish quite carefully between aspects of Scottish and Welsh nationalism and the sense which is articulated against the English. Scotland has a quite different historical tradition, a different cultural tradition. Scotland has links, for example, with France and Italy and with the European Enlightenment, which Britain never had. So there are real separate histories. And then Scotland has an economy, now the centre of so-called North Sea oil, which the British have been glad to grab for themselves, but which, if Scotland was a separate country, would have created enormous wealth inside Scotland itself. Scotland is a kind of dependent semi-colony of England. So in that sense there are genuine roots in the nationalisms of the British Isles which are opposed to aspects of English nationalism and which are also much easier therefore to link in with radical politics. Welsh nationalism has always had a strong roots in the Welsh valleys, in the Welsh Labour movement, in the dissenting churches, in Methodism and Wesleyanism, etc., which are the roots of English radicalism and socialism. Scotland has always been a much more consistently radical and socialist place than the rest of England. There's a much larger industrial working class in and around Glasgow, for instance, which has supported the Red Clyde. The closest England ever came to a revolution was staged in Red Clyde. So these are, of course, contradictory elements within the formation of English nationalists. But now the negative thing that I would say is that these nationalisms are somewhat weaker than they were 10 years ago. Yes, in the period when people were talking about devolution and really imagining that you could have had a kind of independent government in Scotland and Wales, certainly in Ireland. well, those indigenous nationalisms are not as strong as they were before, though they probably are a sort of barometer of English political life. So I wouldn't be surprised if you've got another upsurge of Scottish nationalism in the next 10 years. But I think they go up and down. I don't know whether they are really deep enough. Certainly, if you wanted to develop a socialist revival in Scotland or Wales, I would be very surprised if it wasn't connected with the nationalist currents. But outside of that, in England itself, they don't have the same purchase. The other thing that you have to remember is that these are not pure nationalisms either. Scottish nationalism is a very strong force, but Scottish nationalism has one of the most strongly invented traditions. There's a tradition of the amateur Scotsman, which has never been seen ever in Scotland at all. On New Year's Eve, I don't know whether any of you have ever been to New Year's Eve in England. New Year's Eve is a public holiday in Scotland, and much more important in Scotland than Christmas. Well, at New Year's Eve, the essence of New Year's Eve is the production on English television of Scottish New Year's Eve night. And what is there is a parade of what is called popular tartanry, yes, of idiots, you know, appearing to dance reels in, you know, in Scottish, yes, in kilts, etc., and speaking in heavy Scottish accents, and which Tom Nairn has done a wonderful analysis, yes, of that as a dependent formation. It is like that because it's a mimicry of a non-hegemonic nationalism. It's a nationalism which was never strong enough in relation to England to create Scotland as an independent cultural and political center. And so it kind of dresses itself up for the English. It plays at being Scottish. So you shouldn't think of these marginal nationalisms as, you know, there's corrupt English nationalism and there's pure, these other pure nationalisms. They also have their invented traditions, their mimicry, their double-sidedness. Yes, they also have been corrupted by the relations of power which link them with Britain. Yeah. Tomorrow's lecture is. Yes, the lecture called Is There an English Ideology? Yes, we'll attempt to go back over the last four lectures that I've given. And now make more explicit the theory of ideology which has underlined what I've said. I want to talk about the non-class, non-political elements in ideology. I want to talk about ideology as a discourse, that is to say, the articulation of elements. And I want to try to answer the question, can you just pull a term out of one discourse and put it in another without having real discursive effects? Tomorrow is a more theoretical lecture than the ones I've given. And I want to try and address that. I'm going to talk about Laclau. And I'm going to talk about the question of the popular. I'm going to talk about popular interpolations. I'm going to talk about the idea of interpolation as a way of accounting for not only the centrality of the field of the popular as the arena where ideologies, where hegemony is contended for, but also of how this summoning up of the people, The construction of the people is actually done in ideology. So what the question you ask is absolutely central. And just quickly to respond to the particular point that you make, no, the term is never untransformed if it's articulated in another discourse. So that when Sidney Webb picks up the imperial idea, he links it with the socialist idea of the mission of the state. Whereas when other imperialist writers pick it up who are non-anti-socialists, they don't necessarily connect it that way. But you are quite right in saying that imperialism does not belong necessarily to one discourse. And that it appears in this period in the discourses of the dominant and the subordinate. In the discourses of left and right. And not only that, but it is what the discourses of empire and imperialism are one of the most powerful cross-class discourses of English culture. Because specifically, they appeal to the nation, all the classes, yes, and the people. If you want to be part of this imperial mission, some of us may be high and some may be low. Some may be the colonial administrator and the other may be the humble sailor. But everybody shares an interest, yes, in this mission which unifies the nation. In that sense, it is moving against class ideologies and class politics and class cultures. It's cross-cutting those class differentiations in society and trying to unify people across them. Now, when that enters the discourses of, say, the working class, popular jingoism, for instance, it has a very different resonance from that which it has in the language of the high imperialists. So I don't believe that elements, discursive elements, have no effectivity of their own. What I do think is that they have no necessary or universal class connotation or political connotation. So if you know what it is in one discourse, you can't read off what it is going to do in another discourse. But I'll try and elaborate that more theoretically tomorrow. well uh i general in general theoretical terms uh i think that uh i think race is a social category yes in that sense i agree with you i think it's not only shaped by social beliefs but also shaped by social practices. So I think in that sense, I think it is a social and historical construct. Secondly, I don't think there's any one such thing as racism. I think there are many racisms. That again, I don't want to expand on too much because I'm going to talk about that. I keep promising, but your questions are so good that you want me to give everything on one day. But the lecture on race and ethnicity does try to deal with what is specific about English racism. And it comes out of the lecture I've just given. Because I think that English racism, I mean, I might as well give it your way now since you asked the question. I'll elaborate it more fully in my lecture. But I think English racism is not the racism of the pure race, the Aryan race. It is the racism of the innately British. Yes, it has much more to do with the sense that race is the signifier of the otherness of other people. Yes, then it has to do with a specific notion of the purity of the English race. Therefore, I'm sorry to tell you, I believe that the British think that the Italians are a kind of race. See, I think they think almost anybody else. I think they think if you set sail from the south coast, from Dover, for about five miles, you discover another race. I think it's very different from, yes, the German or the Nazi or the French fascist conception of race, which is much more biologically grounded. However, I have to say, in the period I was just describing, I think we come nearest to a biological conception of race in English racism. This is the period when they're almost beginning through eugenics and social Darwinism to think that there is really, you know, that you can measure the size of the cranium and the weight of the brain and actually find them, you know, different races segmented. Let me at this point interpose a qualifying remark. It's been said that, of course, there are people with different genetic pools, that the races have different genetic pools. And the question as to whether people, races have different genetic pools, is a very complicated issue. And it's a very complicated scientific issue. For instance, I wonder whether you know that if you take a random sample of the difference within a so-called racial population and between one racial population and another, the distance within the race is greater than that between the race. Yes, the random genetic differences between a white Caucasian and a Negro is less than the random distribution of genetic difference between one white person and another. So if the races are different, they're different historically, a long history which has spread them out across the globe, but genetically it's quite difficult to prove the identity and specificity of race. However, let me add that even if you could prove that, it doesn't prevent race being a social category. Just like sex is a social category. The fact that everybody procreates and that people have more or less the same kind of organs has nothing to do with the construction of sex or sexuality. Because sexuality has to do with the roles, with the meanings, with the histories. Yes, with everything, with the culture of sexuality. And that is, of course, the imprinting of culture over nature. So even if there's a kind of loose genetic or biological, you know, basis to the four or five or seven or three or however many you discover races, it doesn't affect the fact that as a historical reality in the 20th century world, race is an idea which is massively historically, culturally, socially, politically and ideologically constructed. So what I've tried to do is to answer the question about race, but I don't want to fill out the question about race in British racism specifically, but I just want to lay the idea to you that it is somewhat different from the way in which race appears in other discourses that call themselves race. And it comes back to your question. They all say the word race, but they don't quite mean the same thing. If you read Gobineau, who is a theorist of racial purity in France, they don't mean race in the same way in which the British speak of the British as a race. The British are referring to all the historical peculiarities which have distinguished their culture. Race is an ethnic conception, not a genetic conception for the English. The club is a central institution, and if you wanted a really nice project in this area, you would study the English club at home and abroad. Now, and I mean, its beauty is the fact, for one thing, that, of course, it is part of civil society. Yes, there's no formal, the state doesn't create the club. Of course, in the colonies, many of the people who go to the club are the husbands and wives of state officials, administrators, soldiers, etc. But the fact that they're in the state doesn't affect the fact that the club is run as a private civil society organization. It's a membership. You have to have a membership to belong. It therefore consolidates the hegemony of the colonial classes socially. Yes, precisely because it is not a part of the official structure of the empire. It is part of its social world. Yes, and you have to belong to it. Yes, you don't pay up your, you don't pay your dues, but you have to belong to it. Now, one of the most interesting things is that when the British find themselves hemmed in and faced by the natives and the wild, uncivilized troops over there, The clubs admit women. But when they come back home, the women become the natives. So the English club at home is the gentleman's preserve. But the English club overseas, you bring the women in. Yes, because that's where they can relax, have a gin and tonic, gin and splash. Yes, gossip, talk, arrange tea parties. Yes, meet one another. It's a social gathering. It's a gathering in which the empire can, as it were, slightly undress, you know, take its hair down, gossip about the natives, tell naughty stories, tell dirty jokes, etc. It is, of course, internally divided, for men only go to the bar, the women are served. It has natives in it as waiters, of course, but they don't understand or are not understood to understand. So even when the natives perfectly well understand that they're talking about them, they are supposed to appear as totally impassive. Yes, the waiter comes in and he doesn't serve the tea perfectly like an English butler and doesn't understand that they're saying, these wretched natives, you know, I sweated in court today and I couldn't make them understand me, etc. They talk about the natives as if they cannot be heard. So it's a wonderful kind of social microcosm of the internal and external relationships of the colonial world. But what I like so much is when the idea of the club, which is formed also in this, of course there are clubs in the 18th century, but the real true gentleman's club now, which is the Englishman's club in London, when he leaves the family at home, voyages up to London, and, well, engages in official business, or business in the city, or in Whitehall, etc., then has a drink with the chaps late at night, or wants a game of billiards, or wants to hear the news on the stock exchange, or wants to read the South African Daily Rand, or the newspapers of the empire are always in the club. If you go into a club's club library, You will find the Canadian papers, the New Zealand papers, the Australian papers, the Rhodesian papers. You can read everything in two minutes of Westminster. But in there, you really don't want women. So the same forms, the populations are not the same, but the same segregation exists, but informal segregation. No written rules which says no natives can come in here. And if you know they're in literature, are, for instance, some of the most wonderful passages are exactly about that tiny elite of the colonized, like the Anglo-Indians, who are sometimes invited into the club, but are, of course, deeply patronized while they go there. Yes, the English think, you know, they just don't understand how would they ever come in here, but they would never dream of telling them so. I don't know whether you know the four-part series called The Jewel in the Crown, which is also a favorite television program, but it's a wonderful four-part television series and a four-part novel, and it has beautiful things about the club, about the colonial club in India, and about that tiny group of Anglo-Indians who came to the club but were never really part of it, and also how they used to freeze out of the culture of the club those English persons who were too close to the natives, who fraternized with them too much, who had Indian women or Indian girlfriends or fell in love, who took the romance with India too far and actually fell in love with an Indian. Well, that was really going too far. You know, of course, that in India and in parts of Africa, the entire club would be picked up in the summer and swept up the hills. to a more temperate climate. So they would go up the hill. First of all, they would send the women up out of the monsoons and out of the heat of the plains. And then they would go, finally, and the club was recreated in another place, in the cooler atmosphere, the cooler, greener atmosphere of the hills. And this wonderful, persistent image of English life preserved, simmering in the tropics, simmering in the tropics is a wonderful picture of the way in which the imperial idea is kind of domesticated, naturalized in English society. Yes, asking is, of course, a very, very good and quite, yes, quite difficult question. It's a perfectly right question. And I will try to answer you not just, you know, in a simple way. I'll try to speak a little bit around it because I want my intentions to be clear, really. I don't want you to misunderstand me. First of all, it's not my intention to say in any simple way, you know, the British are awful. I think you could tell a similar story about anybody. So, the second thing is that you I hope will see in the way in which I've been trying to do it, that I don't believe that they're awful as a result of a ruling class conspiracy. that's not to say that at certain times it isn't politically used and mobilized and so on. Of course, there are conspiracies, but that doesn't make history a conspiracy. In fact, I've been trying to reverse the idea. Rather than saying politics generates these ideas, I've been trying to show you how history generates the ideas, the culture, and how then politics feeds off it. So I want to get away from a conspiratorial, single-minded, monolithic, linear, propagandist conception of culture and ideology. Okay, the third thing is that my account is deliberately revisionist. And it's revisionist in two senses. The one thing is that, quite rightly, in the 70s, what happened was an enormous, very important, crucially important rediscovery of popular and radical histories. From the making of the English working class, from Thompson, the new social history, which discovered the unspoken voices of radicalism, the radical tradition, etc. And I have the most immense respect for that. it's transformed the conception of English history. It's brought into the arena, into the agenda, an alternative, the alternative histories from which various movements of all kinds have constructed the possibilities of radical solutions rather than conservative ones. However, however, I do want to prevent that alternative history in its turn becoming a kind of orthodoxy. And I think it has gone now too far, history from below. History from below is fine, provided you don't forget that there is history from above. Provided you don't forget the dominant history. It's been a concern of mine ever since, and I'll tell you from ever since, ever since culture and society, ever since Raymond Williams' culture and society. Because my feeling about culture and society was on the one hand, What a marvelous book it was at discovering this alternative cultural and society tradition. But that you could never understand the cultural and society tradition unless you understood Burke, Adam Smith. Unless you understood the overground tradition that they were reacting against. When Coleridge says men must be weighed, not counted. Weighed, not counted. Unless you understand political economy and utilitarianism, you don't know why he's making such a fuss. He's making the fuss because all around him were things, not philosophers, but only people thinking people can be counted. 50 over there and 5 there and you pay them. Yes? Do you see what I'm saying? So I want to just prevent, my revisionism wants to prevent a kind of heroic radicalism becoming itself a kind of non-contradictory orthodoxy. to supplant the old idea of stability, etc., which was the old Whig history. Now, I don't want it to be replaced by an uncontradictory Thompsonian history. And I have a specific argument with Thompson, because I do think that though Thompson is wonderful on the 18th century, I think he's better on the 18th century than on the 19th, wonderful on the 18th century, and fantastic on the 1790s, up to Chartism, that after that, he does not understand what happens to England. He does not understand what happens to England. In the debate about the crisis of British society between himself and Anderson and Nairn, he is, of course, marvelously right about the deep character of the English bourgeois revolution. But he is wrong about imperialism. He has never understood imperialism. now revisionism is of that kind an intellectual kind a slightly correcter story but it's revisionist from another end which is a more personal end as somebody who's been a socialist and on the left a Marxist for a long time in English politics I think the left in England and Marxists have told themselves a cover story about the depth of English racism. The story which would suggest to you that only the upper classes were racist. And the working class could never be racist because after all it is the subject of history. It's the agent. And that is not the case. I don't mean by that that the working class is naturally racist. I don't believe anybody is naturally racist because in Rivespire, I don't believe racism is a natural phenomenon. But I think one cannot begin to counter racism without understanding the depth to which it has penetrated to in English culture. And the degree to which dominant English culture is formed in the mold of imperialism and racism. And the degree to which that has shaped and influenced popular culture imaginary. Not overtaken it, not entirely obliterated all the other elements, but deeply penetrated the popular imaginary. So, I want to bring that element more deeply into the account. Now, you may say, well, that's just race and ethnicity, imperialism. But in what I'm going to say in my argument about British racism, you will see why I connect that with the question of British cultural identity. Because I think the British cultural identity is formed in this period. I think all of this is internal to British identity. And I think a lot of people who are very good, what I would call right on anti-racist in England, really think racism is, you know, something you can drop off. You know, the English could leave it if they could change their minds tomorrow about racism and they would drop off. It's not internal to them. And it's been part of my own intellectual project especially since writing the book called Policing the Crisis to talk about these elements as internal to English culture inside it, interior to it formative, constitutive for it I'm not saying that the English can't learn to be non-racist but they can only do so by the deepest transformation of their whole culture because racism only to do with India, which has become independent, or Jamaica, which has become independent. It's inside the culture itself. The culture as we know it now has been formed by this long history. So I want to argue about its centrality to the formation of English cultural identity without trying to say, you know, simply to invert it. For the radical Englishman, put the racist Englishman. It's not as simple as that. But I want to restore the balance, or what else is there called. I want to bend the twig back a bit. Yes, I think we've become so enamored of the heroic story of the freeborn Englishman that we've forgotten what the freeborn Englishman looked like on the Himalayas. I want to remind you what the freeborn Englishman looks like in a pith helmet and short trousers, taking the gospel, the mission, to where I came from. He is British too. really British, deeply British, in the best and worst sense. So it's, yes, a project of that kind. Yes, it's not just an intellectual, you know, trying to intellectually analyze something out there. And also, I should add, I'm not trying to analyze something out there which isn't part of my own history. This is the coming to terms with my own history. I was born in Jamaica. I was born in Jamaica where, I talk about this more when I talk about cultural differences, but the idea that you're born in Jamaica with a notion of the British out there and you were something separate is totally wrong. Our culture was shaped by Victorian values. When my mother first took me to, as a road scholar, to Oxford in 1951, she said she was going home. Home! My mother was going home to London. to Oxford and she meant it and she meant it and when I went home 10 years after that after the huge wave of blacks going to work in Britain she said I hope the people over there don't mistake you for one of them so the notion that you know that us were us black African slaves my mother would have died years ago at the faintest thought that she was, had any remote connection with the black African slave. Though she was my colour, I don't know how she got that way. If she didn't have a connection with the African slave. But nevertheless, that thought would have killed her off at once. She thought that in some imaginary way, she was directly connected with the House of Habsburg, because her maiden name was Hopwood, and Hopwood was, she thought, was a kind of long, umlaut-like, you know, transformation. Yes, Habsburg to Habsburg to Habsgood, etc. Yes, and in any case, that really, if the Queen Mother, if Queen Victoria had seen her, you know, she would have said, you are my daughter. Yes, so the idea, you know, that we are outside of this formation that I'm talking to you about, that I'm kind of analyzing the English, like picking them up like shrimps, and seeing how they work. I'm trying to unpack the mechanisms which Fanon told us, yes, in black, in black men, white masks, yes, are inside and outside, the interior and the exterior. Yes, I'm trying to unlock those things which have the net, the fault in which anybody who comes from the slightest, most remote corner of the English empire is caught. We are caught inside at one point, yes, in this field of force which constitutes the English as the English. And I end with one other remark which you might think overdramatic. If you live in England for long enough like I do, you might come to think that if the English are not re-educated about themselves. They will murder us all in our beds. They have the capacity to blow us out of the water. So, black people, non-English people, and the English themselves, have a vested interest in bringing the submerged unconsciousness of Englishness up for inspection. It's very deep down. It's one of the deepest. And you talked about Italy. It's quite true, of course that we're on the scene phases like that yes in other countries but one of the differences is that it's a much longer and slower yes and in a way kind of deeper process that has gone on in England more intricated with other features yes with the absorption of liberalism and the constitution of the state etc yes not something that dawns late relatively late in the national life yes and therefore that of the reasons why it feels as if England is more naturally a conservative country. Yes, I don't think it's naturally a conservative country. Conservatism isn't imprinted on English genes, but I do think it is right analytically to say it's a conservative culture with a small c. Yes, and that when you pick up radicals and socialists and extremists, you don't have to go very far before you begin to find some of the elements of Englishness well in place, deeply in place, in spite of the, you know, the ideas they may be about to storm the Winter Palace, but they do have certain connections with these cultural roots that I've been trying to describe. So that's the formation that I'm trying to unpack. I mean, not only can you find the imperial theme, I think Robinson Crusoe is, I mean, I think if you read, if you understand Robinson Crusoe, you understand England, really. Because everything is there, isn't it? Everything there? Absolutely everything there. Yes, a man on his own. Yes, man. What I talked about in my second lecture, sovereign, man, a sovereign individual. Yes, nobody else at all in the world. Just the capacity to survive, to struggle to survive, etc. But what is wonderful about Robinson, I mean, that is a myth which there are many versions, but what there is not is the wonderful turn into Friday. That is, what a genius. To understand that this confirmation of the sovereignty of Robinson Crusoe cannot be confirmed until somebody else is there. It has to be a social relation. and the relation is black. The relation begins with a footprint on the sand. And he teaches him, of course, to speak. The great civilizing burden is there. But what he teaches him to say is to know who is master. So the relations of knowledge and of power, of domination and paternalism. He looks after him. He is his man, not somebody else's. He is going to protect him, but he's protecting him in his place. So, of course. So, I think wonderful things can be done with Robinson Crusoe. Also, let me remind you that I picked up the story in the birth of what I call the New Imperialism. So, this is by no means the first time that these themes enter into English imagination, English culture. The slave trade, which is, after all, the massive involvement of Britain, not in colonialism, because they didn't have to, well, they colonized the Caribbean because nobody was there, or they fought the other European countries for them. But they took slaves from parts of West Africa, which they didn't rule, but their involvement in that. So the construction of the discourse of Englishness and otherness, which you find in Lady Nugent's journal and which you find, you know, in all the languages of the description of slavery and why it is all right to have slaves because they're not people like us. They are not Locke's sovereign individuals. They can't be Locke's sovereign individuals. They are less. And the way in which the discourse has to construct them as less than human in order to justify slavery because, of course, no good liberal, no good Lockean could believe in the enslavement of your equal. So they have to be not equal. So all of those themes out there, a hundred, two hundred years before the period I've been describing. So the one thing that I would say is this. You need to be careful to discriminate the different histories of imperialism. Yes, and that which is organized around the period of slavery and that which is organized around the discourses of the 18th century are very different from the ones which I have called the high noon of imperialism, the new imperialism. which is created towards the end of the 19th century. But otherwise, many of these themes are really deeply imprinted in English literature, culture, poetry, painting. There's a wonderful book that's just recently come out called Hogarth's Blacks, which are simply reminding you of the number of blacks, servants, little boys, clowns, etc., footmen, who are in Hogarth's paintings of English gentry civilization, English bourgeois life, is full if you look carefully. But you have to look around the margins. The English gentleman is centered. And then around the margins you find these blacks, which are littered. They're life. They are the invisible. The invisible other. So it's a very long time since, yes, Englishness has been in construction in relation to the others. very long time. And what I've been describing is just the gigantic, first of all, the coming together of that. Yes, it's reached a kind of orgasmic climax, imperialism between 1870 and 1920. But also, not only the coming together, but the popularization of it. Yes, it's sort of infusion with every aspect of popular culture, taking the field of the popular as the arena on which it has to consolidate itself. That's the difference, I think, of the later imperialisms from the earlier ones. Now, unfortunately, I'll tell you why and how it all happened. But I will say that education at every level, yes, was also important. I left it out because I didn't want to burden you too much with description. But it was very central to the popularizing of the imperial idea. First of all, let me quickly just give you some examples. First of all, in school textbooks, the rewriting of the history of Britain in terms of the history of the empire. And the different episodes in Africa and in India which become the great historical landmarks of English history. Well, this occurs not only in scholarship, in journals and institutes among scholars, but it is popularized in English history textbooks. Indeed, you could find a lot of history textbooks right now in English schoolrooms which still tell the history of England in this way, with a strong emphasis on the civilizing mission, etc. That's one. A second is the informal influence. And I touched on, for instance, boys and girls organizations like the scouts and the guides and missionary clubs and societies and the literature, boys' own papers. These things can't be separated from what's going on in schools because they are the reading matter, the literature of schools. Our scouting clubs are organized in schools. School masters and mistresses are very often girl guides and the leaders of girl guide troops. So there's an interrelationship between the school and these other juvenile movements. And this theme is very well pulled together in the book about the youth movements of the time. Can you remember what that's called? Anybody? No? There's a book which deals with the formation of the different youth juvenile groupings and movements in this period, Baden-Powell and so on, which is, and I can't just remember the title for the moment, but I'll try and remember it. Thirdly, it enters into the training of small children, young children. There's a wonderful article by Anna Davin called Imperialism and Motherhood, which not only is about the way in which stories of the empire were actually told to young children. But the way in which the very conception of the good mother, yes, and the help which was beginning to be given to the good mother to bring up her children well, was really related to the raising of an imperial race. She was the mother to these, to the people who were going to conquer the world. So imperialism and motherhood is the very central aspect, education-wise. Well, then we haven't talked about the public school. And the public school, which rises to its zenith in this period, is of course, you know, well, you know what is said about the public school. The empire is won on the fields of Eton. That's what was said about the public school. That as it were, you know, in teaching people to play cricket, and teaching people to organize themselves in houses, and to administer themselves, and to internalize the ethic of, you know, strong manhood and good behavior, and cold showers. Yes, I mean, how do you survive out there, you know, in the tropics? How do you resist the lure of the East if you don't get into the good adolescent public school habit of the cold, strong shower? I mean, whenever the... Do you know what the cold shower is? You understand what I mean by the cold shower? Yes, the cold shower is that which dampens down the id. Yes, it freezes the libido of young Englishmen. And it allows them, it inculcates them with the mechanisms by which they can sublimate those sexual energies outwards. They could go out and kind of ride the range or harness a few camels or collect a few tribes instead of self-abuse. So this externalizing of the impulse is a crucial element of the public school ethos. And if you read any of the boys' own stories about public schools, it is the imperial ethic internalized in the education of the English elite. Well then, to go higher up, you would have to go to what is happening in universities, what is happening in scholarship, which I tried to mention before. This is the enormous expansion of ranges of knowledge that are related to the empire. philology, the study of comparative law, of botany and history, of Sanskrit religion, etc. All of these are happening in the Imperial College of Science, in London University, in the African and Oriental Studies, in the School of Tropical Medicine. These new knowledges are being imparted to young scholars, etc., as it were affiliated through the sieve of the imperial idea. So, although there is no deliberate effort to use the schools to teach people to love the empire that simple way, education is one of the critical sites on which the idea of empire is disseminated at different levels. Public school is really about upper-class children who can afford to pay for their education. The scouts are about good, solid middle-class citizens. The Boys' Brigade is about the working class riffraff. But at every different level, there is an educational discourse which is inflected by imperialism. Well,

The theme of my talk this afternoon is, is there an English ideology? But really, the question of an English ideology, I don't want to address directly this afternoon. I've been talking about the formation of English ideologies all week, and I'm going to go on talking about some aspects of that next week. Today, I want to talk in a somewhat more theoretical or conceptual way. I want to reflect back on the things that I've been saying, but to make more explicit, to state more directly and clearly the conceptual and theoretical framework that I've been using. Because I've been using a lot of concepts and ideas on the run, but I've not pointed directly towards them as I go along. I've only just started now so really it is more the question about how I have been conceptualizing the English the object called the English ideologies or English culture the second thing is that I don't want to do this yet in a very formal way by describing to you in detail the theoretical positions of the different people I've drawn on because well, to listen to an entirely formal theoretical lecture on a Friday afternoon is almost as bad as giving a theoretical lecture. of a purely conceptual kind on a Friday afternoon. So I won't put you to that test. Anyway, anyhow, I don't want to talk about it in that way, but I nevertheless do want to indicate to you the different bodies of theories on which I've been drawing, rather than giving you a great march through the grand systems or giving you a great theoretical synthesis, etc. I want to tell you, indicate to you the arguments that I've been through in the course of working in cultural studies, particularly more recently, that have influenced the way in which I have been trying to describe various aspects of the roots to English cultural identity. So I want to talk about theory, but in an informal way, if you can imagine what that might be like. And I want to begin with the problems that someone working in this area, who calls himself or herself a Marxist, has with the classical way in which Marxism conceptualizes ideology and culture. That's the first problem. The problems which Marxists have with Marxist conceptions of ideology and culture. because I think there is no question that whichever of the many Marxisms at the end of the 20th century that you subscribe to and there are many most of them post actually but whichever of the ones you subscribe to there are problems in some of the orthodox classical formations of Marxism in dealing adequately with the questions of ideology and culture. Now, you know Marx well. I'm not proposing to unravel the whole Marxist schema. I want to go right to the problems, to begin with the problems, because I think we occupy, if we're interested in this area, we occupy the terrain of Marxism in a problematic way, inevitably, in a problematic way. the original theses of Marx and Engels about culture, ideology, the superstructures, etc., can be summarized within the framework of three main theories or theses, it seems to me. First of all, what I would call the materialist thesis. And the materialist thesis establishes the primacy, the primacy of material life over ideas. It's the essential argument between Marxism and Hegelianism. It's the way in which Marxism breaks from Hegelianism, in which Marxism becomes a materialist. I don't want to remind you that Marxism does not become any old kind of materialism, that it becomes a particular form of materialism, a historical materialism, an active materialism, a materialism which has at its center not the inertness of matter, but the praxis of social production. But nevertheless, it's a materialism, not an idealism. And one of the most important things that early Marxism does is to invert the commitment which is in Hegelian forms of thought, which is the summit of idealist philosophy, to invert the idea that history is the idea in progress through history, and to say, as it were, what is really moving is the changing forms of material life, and it is that which gives rise to ideas. That is, it's that inversion which gives, which produces within Marxism the scandalous propositions or theories of base and superstructure. Of base and superstructure. The second thesis I would call the historical thesis. The historical thesis. that once, as it were, you have put, you have inverted the normal idealist way of understanding the relationship between base and superstructure, and shown the primacy of the base and the secondary forms of the superstructure relations. The second thing is that Marx is a historical materialism, and consequently there is no permanent essence marching from one epoch to another. History is organized within very distinctive periods or epochs or eras. What distinguishes one epoch from another is considered to be the effect of ruptures in the relations between, say, feudalism and capitalism. The breaks are not simply slow and evolutionary. There are ruptures which divide, which periodize or punctuate history. and consequently the histories of the superstructures, of political forms, of religious ideas, of artistic ideas, of ideologies, of scholarship, of the imagination, etc., will have their distinctive histories. The histories are, in a sense, given by the great periodic movements of essential historical laws, but ideas will be historically relative to one of the great theses of Marx and Engels in relation to ideology. And the third thesis is what one might call the political thesis, that in addition to ideas being, as it were, the result of material practice, and in addition to ideas and the forms of the superstructures being historicized, they're also subject to the play of power, to the configurations of power, so that unless one understands not only what is the epoch in which ideas or culture arises, but what are the configurations of domination and subordination. You can't understand what the superstructures are about, what they're doing there. That's the thesis in the German ideology when Marx and Engels talk about the correspondence between material and ideal life. That class which governs in material production will, broadly speaking, generally, over the lifespan of a long historical epoch, will also be the dominant social force in forming the major ideas, the major cultural conceptions, cultural configurations, and will help to shape what comes to be the common sense of an age. Now, these three great theses about the relationship between base and superstructure are what distinguish the classical Marxist position in relation to ideas and culture from any other position. And I want to say something about them, just simply to remind you that their centrality has absolutely nothing to do with whether you're a Marxist or not. It doesn't matter whether you're a Marxist or not. In this area, all theorizing of any substance begins from those three cities. People who are non-Marxist, who don't believe them, have to enter the terrain by arguing against them. So they form, as it were, they establish the problematic within which argument, debate, etc. has gone on over 150 years, nearly 200 years in relation to these questions. You find non-Marxist, anti-Marxist, etc., having to contend with these three fundamental theses of historical materialism. It's not quite the same in other areas of thought. In economics, you can begin from some other point. You can begin from classical economics. You don't have to, as it were, directly encounter Marxist economics as the central problematic. But in this area that we're talking about, you either encounter the Marxist theses or you're not in serious business, serious scholarly business. Okay, so that's the foundation of the problematic. Now, I don't want to develop a complicated textual critique of what is of the problems with it, but there are problems with it. There are problems with it. Problems with that formulation. And you know what they are. If it is true in the base superstructure metaphor that the superstructures, no matter how complex, how fully elaborated, etc., how relatively autonomous, if in the end their periodization, their basic forms, and their transformation are given not at the level of the superstructures, but at the levels of the base, then they are secondary historical phenomena. You can choose to take them seriously, you can spend your whole life worrying about them, studying them, writing about them, but philosophically they are moving to the rhythm of some other force. Something else is determining and governing the rhythm at which cultural structures work. And no matter how much you play around with and elongate that basic metaphor, you are always in a rhythm which is subordinate to some other rhythm. That's one of the main problems, the problems which come to be known as reductionism. Because if the ultimate thing which governs the arena of the superstructures and the ideology lies at the level of the base of material life itself, or even at the level of what came to be called in traditional Marxism the mode of production, then the temptation in the end to read the superstructures off against the base, to find, as it were, the truth or reality of the superstructures lying outside of them in the base is philosophically almost inescapable. You can delay the moment, and some of the great Marxist theories of the superstructures, delay the moment until about one minute to twelve. You read Lukács, you go on and on and on, and he will never quite clinch it. But in the end, in spite of the immense richness of his own learning and the extraordinary development which Lukács gives to his work on the superstructures, and that is principally what he's written about. The elaboration of consciousness and forms of consciousness and realism and the different literary forms, etc. So he elaborates the superstructures till you can hardly see their dependence on the base. Nevertheless, in my view, in the end, it has to be said that Lukács is still working within a reductionist framework. in the end still working within a reductionist framework so reductionism is a problem and not exactly the same but a similar problem arises from what we call the understanding the base which is itself a tricky subject it's a very tricky subject in martyrdom It sounds so hard, the base, you think you could know exactly what it is. But in Marxism, as you know, the base is composed of relations. And where the base ends and the superstructures begin is not at all clear. And one of the real problems that arose in traditions of Marxist thinking is that the base came to be identified with the economic, something which Marx would have never understood with what we call the economic in some simpler way. And therefore, the tendency of the reductionism became an economic reductionism, an economism, essentially an economism. And the third problem lies in the political theses. It is, of course, of the most profound importance, this argument of Marx is, that you can't separate the structures of thought, of consciousness, of culture, of the imagination. No, no, it's all right. Is there something you didn't understand? Okay? It's a scandalous thesis, but a thesis of great scientific importance when Marx talks about the relationship between material production and mental production, between intellectual ideas and the class that rules, and talks about the securing of cultural domination or hegemony as one of the main functions of the power of a class, that no class can be ruling. unless it also rules in ideas as well, and therefore that the capacity of a class through its intellectuals to rule in cultural production, to become the dominant force culturally, is one of the central forms of its power. This is a very important thesis. But it's very difficult to stop the logic of that argument before you get to the point where there is a kind of inevitable correspondence between the dominance at the economic and political level of a particular group or class and the ideas which correspond to them. That is to say, the idea of a correspondence between material and mental forms. Now, the idea of when those things are combined, that is to say, when the base is primary over the superstructures, when the base is conceived economically, and the class which dominates in the base corresponds to the ideas which dominate at the superstructural level, you do in fact have a reductionist theory. It is a reductionist theory. And in spite of the enormous advances which the German ideology represents, it is, if you read it in its language, in its metaphors, you find Marx and Engels moving almost in one paragraph from a profound insight right into the clutches of a reductionist formulation. I agree with Al Jusserl that ideology, the German ideology, is what he called a text of the break. It's a transitional text. Yes, it contains some of the most important starting theses in our field, ones without which we couldn't begin to think or work. But at the same time, it formulates it in a way which gives rise logically and which did in fact historically give rise throughout the development of traditional Marxism after the death of Martin Engels to a reductionist and economistic way of understanding the relationship between ideas, culture, ideology, and class. so the German ideology is like almost all the important theoretical texts in the world you have to take it with a pinch of salt any theoretical text which you swallow whole will give you indigestion you take it as a tip from me every text to be the last word that can be said on the subject, will turn out next year to be not the last word. And you'll have to bring it up again and just leave a little bit down there. Yes? Thinking is like digestion. You need some and you have to give some away. So the illusion that, as it were, because the German ideology has inadequacies, therefore we should stop reading it, it's a pre-modern text, is, of course, as much rubbish as the fact that because Marx said Adam Smith was ideological, you should never read The Wealth of Nations. Theory does not work, you know, in that way. An entirely ideological text, followed by the big sleep, followed by the truly scientific text. That is not how thinking works. It works by taking some ideas which are not well formulated and reformulating them with some new ideas and that gives you a better or a worse, more provisional view, and you work with that sometimes, and then you see that there are problems with that, and then you go back at some ideas you have forgotten before, and that improves it, but at the same time it produces, that is the path of theorizing, is backwards and forwards and detours. Yes, that's really how it goes. There is no pure line like that, no pure ascending line like that, and no total breaks. So what I'm saying about the German ideology is there is no other place to start, and it is impossible to finish there. You can't finish there, but you can't start anywhere else. Now that fact is perfectly clear in Marx and Engels themselves. If you read on the one hand the 18th Brumaire, and on the other hand Engels' letters, you will see at once that the so-called founders of classical Marxism are themselves unsatisfied, dissatisfied, though they don't always put it down like that, with the formulation that they themselves offered in the heat of the battle against the young Hegelians. I don't want to go into the 18th Brumaire you know what the 18th Brumaire is the 18th Brumaire is not a theoretical text it is a text which describes a historical conjuncture it is on the other hand in my view by far the richest single Marxist text on the theory of ideology if you want the theory of ideology in Marx worked out, handled in a deeply rich and fruitful way read the 18th Brumaire rather than the German ideology. I don't want to say anything more about the 18th Brumaire. I would have, because if I start to talk about the 18th Brumaire, I'll talk about nothing else. It's a wonderful, wonderfully rich text. But nevertheless, the 18th Brumaire does not treat the superstructures in a reductionist way. It simply doesn't. But a more fruitful line of thinking, for me, has been going to... Yes. Yes. The 18th Brumera of Napoleon Bonaparte, which is Marx's account of the revolution in France, revolutions in France, the period between 1848 and 1852, which ended with the consolidation of Napoleon Bonaparte. And it's the essay which begins with the notion that history repeats itself once as tragedy, once as farce. Now, just that idea is a wonderful idea. Yes, the notion that Bonaparte, the second Bonaparte, in order to secure power, has to represent himself as if he is the first Bonaparte. He has to dress up in the ideas of the first. Immediately creates a much more dynamic relationship with the notion of ideas. Now, ideas are really producing a historically effective role. He can't rule unless he can rule in that theatre, in the theatre of the old Napoleon's ideas. You see? They're quite different. And the notion that those ideas are given by the base is just ludicrous. The 18th Brumaire just does not operate like that. What's more, at the center of the 18th Brumaire is a notion, a concept which is central to the theory of cultural studies. That is the notion of representation. The notion of representation. You see, by asking me about the title, now you have gotten me into talking about the 18th Brumaire. In spite of everything, because one of the most important arguments in Marx's 18th Brumaire is that there is a relationship between the rise of Napoleon and his ideas and the class formations of French society, but it is not one of simple reflection. Not one of simple reflection. What Napoleon represents is, first of all, a kind of compromise between classes that cannot rule themselves. And one of the central social forces that he represents are the peasants who cannot rule at all. And so what he says is, and it's a wonderful phrase, he must rule because they cannot rule in themselves. They have to be represented, represented on the political stage. Now, the notion, therefore, that a class has certain ideas and that somebody, some politician, is the expression of that class and those ideas, and he rules, you see that that just doesn't work any longer. There are relationships, but there are not relationships of reflection, correspondence. The person up there doesn't call himself a peasant at all. He calls himself Napoleon Bonaparte II. So there is a relationship between social forces and ideas and politics, but it's not one where that gives rise to that and that gives rise to that, and there's a simple correspondence from one level to another. So the idea of representation now becomes an extremely active one. It's because in the theatre of Bonaparte's politics, there are the signs and signifiers of the forces which Bonaparte draws together into a particular block. And the block is not the block of the working class or something like that. It's a block which is composed of very complex different elements in French society. So, the 18th Brumaire of Napoleon Bonaparte, simply just in the course of writing the history, you know, like what happened yesterday. The 18th Brumaire is like a wonderful political journalist writing about 1969 or 1968, about three years afterwards. It's absolutely brilliant. It's informed by all the ideas, but it's not a theoretical text. It doesn't deal with it conceptually, but it's using these ideas in a much more, in a very brilliant way. So if one wants to, I would not never say that you can get a sense of how classical Marxism thinks about the questions of ideology and the relationship of ideology to class, of ideology to material life, of ideology to their historical role, etc., unless you take the rather abstract formulae of the German ideology within the very rich and complex historical text of the 18th Bumet. Okay, now I can pick up the thread on some more. Nevertheless, for our purposes, the thing which moves one on is to look at Engels' letters, is to look at Engels' letters, because it's perfectly clear from Engels' letters after Marx's death that he and Marx were both deeply dissatisfied with the state in which they had left the question of ideology and culture, although they could not find a properly theorized new set of positions to move to. It's in that context, if I can remind you, that Engels said, well, if Marx ever saw people doing that kind of rubbish, he would never have called himself a Marxist at all. It's specifically about the kind of reductionist way of what he called reading any historical situation in a Hegelian manner, in a kind of schematic manner. And I never think about Englis's question about reading the relationship between ideas and social forces in a schematic manner without remembering a much, much later text quotation from Sartre in The Question of Method, where Sartre says, you know, one of the main troubles with Marxist scholarship is that it only produces what you already know. Yes, it picks up the great bourgeois novel, and it goes through an elaborate analysis, and guess what it tells you at the end, that it's a bourgeois novel, that it speaks. The spirit of the bourgeoisie is in it. Yes, and you say, ooh, how wonderful, what a magnificent... But a lot, a great deal of, you know, of Marxist work produces what it already knows. Yes, it demonstrates what it already knows. In that sense, it is deeply ideological, because all you get at the end is not new knowledge, but the pleasure of recognition. Ah, isn't it wonderful? This theory proves at the end what it says is true at the beginning, that there's a beautiful correspondence between beginning and end, but as for learning something new, seeing something you never saw before, which is, after all, the definition of scientific forms of knowledge, that it's only worthwhile all that hard labor if you come out with something you didn't know before. As for that, Marxism has to struggle very hard to produce something new, something novel, in that sense. Now, Engels' letters which talk, you know, which try to square the circle, only in the last instance, only in the last instance, is there any simple correspondence between base and superstructure. There's no one determining principle. It's what he calls a parallelogram of forces in which all of them interact. act. Or when he deals with the law, he shows how important it is to understand not just the correspondence between a class and its legal forms, but the elaboration of legal ideas, legal traditions, legal institutions, that these play a very important role, though not in the last instance, the ultimate leditor. He wants to keep that notion of the relations which are established in the metaphor-based superstructure, but he wants, he's constantly having to weaken them, elaborate them, try to find ways of talking about them in a more complex form. Well, I think you can see, if ever anybody says to you, oh, let us go back to the classical Marxist orthodoxy and leave all this revisionism aside, well, Engels's letters are extremely useful because they show that Engels was the first revisionist. And if you look at the 18th Brumaire, I think it's clear from that that Marx is his own revisionist too. So there is no non-revisionist Marxism in this whole area of study. No final orthodoxy to be discovered in the footnotes of Capital which will say, this and only this is what Marx thought. Of course, like so many other things in theory, that idea that there is somehow that you could sift Marxist texts, not as the writings, very incomplete, of a great thinker who changed his mind, responded to different situations, whose texts are layered by different discursive levels, etc., but that there is a kind of one truth sitting there like a seed at the centre of the great, a spider at the centre of the great web. That notion is good for feeling good. Makes you feel really good. But as for actually finding it or thinking with it, that is much more difficult, much more difficult. I don't believe in the orthodoxy of orthodox Marxists, only in Marx's radical unorthodoxy. And the idea of unorthodoxy is, I have come to think, essentially a religious notion. It's essentially a religious notion. It's the transposition of Marx into the deity, an idea which would have driven him absolutely wild. Because patriarchal, though he is, though he looks a bit like God, No, he does, especially with that great beard and the boils and all that. He looks a bit like God, but really he wasn't. He was just a very great thinker, profound and revolutionary thinker, but not God, not God. There is no, you know, here beginneth the word, here all thought begins. No one has thought anything before. Not like that, not like that. So when asked to give up the religious illusion, it's taken Marxists a very long time to give up being religious. Which is a funny thing because after all that's where Marx began, how not to be religious. How to think great thoughts and not be religious. How to break with religion. But the break with religion has taken Marxists an immense time and a huge labor. And every time they think they escape it, there's a kind of pull back to the religious aura. we light the candles burn the incense and we think the spirit of the true marks will somehow emanate from the text but it is not so you have to live with the very contradictory nature of marx's discourse capital which is the great work, finishes where it ought to have started. Can you imagine a book which ends with a question mark from the one thing everybody wants to know? What then is class? My God, then he puts a question mark and wraps it up. Not a single word follows he, writes all sorts of other things. He never answers the question. Never answers the question. I mean, that's like God saying, so is there a God? so that this is a finished and complete work all sewn up and that being a Marxist means you know not having to think anymore just locating yourself within the doxa the system becoming a kind of priest of the already completed text of Marxist work that is really against entirely against the grain of Marxist great unfinished project unfinished project as a theoretical, revolutionary theoretical thinker. Okay, that's where I begin. Now, I don't want to say very much about the period of theorizing in cultural studies which works exactly on this terrain. I don't want to say very much about it. Partly I talked about it in my first lecture. Partly it's something which you will know about. The key figures there are certainly Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson. The main form of the work on that whole area is the work which, the paradigms which we now call culturalism. I don't use culturalism as a swear word. I just don't want to, I want to get on to some later formulations because to be absolutely honest with you, though my own work in cultural studies was absolutely formed by those two thinkers, when I think, when I listen to myself or listen to the tapes about how I have been talking about culture and ideology in the last four lectures, for example, I think you would find it difficult to make any direct tracing back simply to Williams and Thompson. I don't think I think quite in those categories anymore. So I want to talk about what has intervened between them and now for me. But I don't want to deny at all the centrality of their thinking. So I just want to say something quite brief about it, but you'll understand why I'm moving rapidly. Yes, I don't want to dwell on that because it would take the whole time to talk about it. Williams is an interesting example in this respect, because as you know, and as we know now, especially from the set of interviews that he gives to the editors of New Left Review, he has always considered himself a kind of Marxist. Raymond is, I don't know whether you've heard him, the last time he was in Naples, you were still in short trousers or still in school, etc. But he has been, actually. Raymond Williams made a really important theoretical turn right in this place. The Neapolitan moment for Raymond Williams is extremely important. The moment when he rediscovers Gramsci and hegemony and when he writes very important essay on the emergent residual and archaic. That comes from his encounter with Naples. So you are not outside the history of the development of Raymond Williams, his thought. But when some of us first encountered Williams in the long revolution and culture and society, I'll tell you, since I'm talking informally, I'll tell you something about Raymond Williams and myself. I first met Raymond in very early on, in 1954, 55, when he was just beginning to work on Culture and Society. And I've never worked with him in the sense I've never studied with him. I've known him from ever since then. He was on the New Lefty Youth Board. I've kept close contact with him from ever since. He and I are about as diametrically opposed as people as you can imagine. He's a Welshman, working class. I'm a Jamaican, lower middle class, etc. Our histories are very different, except in one respect. We both come from outside the heartland of English culture. We are both marginal to English culture because the Welsh working class are not English in the way in which I've been trying to describe it to you in the last four times. So we have some similarities. But I have an extraordinary kind set of coincidences with Raymond Williams. Our life and our thought have intersected at a number of places. And I don't just mean times when we have worked together. I mean times when he has produced a book or a great along lines that seem to me to be worth working on. This is a kind of convergence of an extraordinary kind. So I feel that I have shadowed his great career as a theorist in cultural studies on many occasions. I'd be very, in that sense, very close to him. I've also been very close to Edward Thompson. Closer, in fact, in day-to-day terms because of my involvement with Thompson in the New Left Review, etc. Though Thompson is a harder person to work close with than Raymond Williams. they've been very formative for my own thinking. But when most of us read Culture and Society and the Long Revolution, what it seemed to us was that Williams, not knowing him very closely and not knowing his student days and his days immediately after the war as a young teacher, extramural teacher, What it seemed to us was that here was someone who was close and sympathetic to Marxism, but who had had to refuse Marxism because it did not adequately discuss the areas that he knew about best, namely literature. When we read Williams on Leavis and Scrutiny, for instance, in Culture and Society or in the Long Revolution, What we imagined was that like us, who had gone through literary studies and so on, he had refused the elitism of the scrutiny position. Levis, you know, there was an elitism about the idea of scrutiny. The idea was that only some people in the world had the sensibility to be trained for the fine judgments that were required to be able to understand literature well. Those were mainly people who had been good enough or fortunate enough to squeeze into Levis' seminar room in Downing College, Cambridge. If you hadn't done that, you hadn't been quite touched by the magic of being able in the sensibility. Now, that's a very elitist conception. I mean, the notion that, as it were, you could teach any of these refined qualities in the mass university, for example, would be hopeless, hopeless, that idea. Yes, you had to be... Well, none of us could accept that anti-democratic, elitist, educational, pedagogic structure of Leavis's thought. But we thought, and William says it in the Long Revolution, that in the 1930s, there is a kind of encounter between Marxism and the scrutiny. And in that encounter, scrutiny wins, and the English Marxists at any rate do not, because whatever is the problems, the scrutiny people give a more adequate, fuller, richer, more adequate account of literature and literary superstructures than the Marxists did. If you had to choose between the reductionism of the English Marxists of the 30s and the elitism of the scrutiny people. You had to go towards scrutiny, at least insofar as the theoretical concepts were concerned, because they seemed to understand what literature was about. They didn't reduce it in some way to formally, in the way in which at least the less sophisticated of the English Marxists seemed to do so. So we thought Williams was, as it were, A Marxist who, I mean, let me give you another example of this. I don't know whether you've ever read The Long Revolution in its very fine Italian translation. But very fine Italian translation though it is, The Long Revolution is a very difficult text. Very difficult text. And you know the reason why? Partly, it seemed to me, because Williams had to struggle to find words and phrases which most Marxists already knew, but he was determined not to use them. So he talks about the system of life, where most Marxists would have talked about the mode of production. I have a copy of The Long Revolution and of Culture and Society, which in the margin I rewrite in all the things that I think Raymond is talking about in Marxist terms. When he talks about dominant social character, I write dominant ideology. I mean, he seems to be trying to find alternative ways so as not to fall into the reductionism of using the Marxist concept and being caught in a kind of economism vibe. So, Williams is extremely important in clearly working on those problems, the problematic aspect of early Marxism, and trying to elaborate an alternative kind of cultural theory. And as you know, he comes at one point to a theorization, which is very close to Engels. He says in the Long Revolution, there's no base and superstructure, Because you can't separate off the economics from the family and the literature. They're all, you have to turn them on their side. They're all different spheres. Yes, the family. So he says, one crucial paragraph, you have to take the trading with the family, with the literature. Yes, they're all different forms of material life. There's material life and material activity, which isn't divided into different sectors. And then, now it expresses itself in family. Now it expresses itself in the literature. Now it expresses itself in political life. You see where he dethrones the base superstructure relationship and puts, as it were, base and superstructure now on the same level. No one thing gives rise to it. These are just different spheres of activity. The same people who have a family. Or the activity of reproduction. or the activity of symbolization. They're all different forms of practice. And actually, although Raymond now, I think, wouldn't use those terms of each side interacting on the other, as Engels said, everything interacting on everything else, influencing everything else, it is very much Engels' solution. The form of the thinking is very much Engels' solution. Everything interacts with everything else. Therefore, there is no simple primacy, no simple base, to be extracted from everything else. And when you go to the most developed statement, I think, of Williams' latest position, which is cultural materialism, the idea of cultural materialism in Marxism and literature, well, it's much elaborated from what I've just said, and it's taken on the awareness about language and about symbolization and saussure and signs and so on, But I think it still has that basic notion that there is material activity and then the domains in which that activity finds itself. So I think that's still the form in which it's thought. And although they haven't always got on, indeed there are some famous heroic quarrels between Williams and Thompson in the New Left, And I played both a positive and negative role in some of the quarrels between Thompson and Williams. For example, when I edited New Left Review, I thought, I insisted over many other people in the board that the person who should review the Long Revolution was Edward Thompson. Because I thought Thompson was the person who had the most to say about the concept of culture that Williams was beginning to develop. So that was a very positive move. And the negative move was that in the second version of Thompson's magisterial essay on Williams' book, I left out one page. I dropped it. When I was making up the copy, I dropped it. So historically, there is Williams' book reviewed by Thompson and the penultimate page is missing. It's not there. It's in the next issue with great apologies from the editor. saying this crucial essay lacks its central page and a major argument. So you can imagine how, yes, this footnote in history, I have gone down as engineering this confrontation and then not failing to bring it off properly. Such is history conceived as Minerva's owl. My owl did not fly on the day that I was making up the proofs of this great essay. So, but nevertheless, the serious point is that Edward Thompson also has, of course, given, as Williams has given, a great centrality to the idea of culture. What Williams, what Thompson has even more centrally than Williams is the notion that every historical change or development is also a cultural one. You can't speak of, for example, the shift from traditional society into agrarian capitalism as if it only happens at the level of the economic. You can't just talk about the market or private property. You have to talk about the transformation of the conceptions of private property. You have to talk about the new forms of law. So that when you talk about a shift, a revolution, or revolutionary rupture, like the English Revolution, you are talking about, Edward Thompson says, what he calls the redefinition at every level, not just at the level of the base, which then gives rise to something else. It has to be fought through at every level, simultaneously. You have to get a struggle in the law, and a struggle in the culture, and a struggle in the ideas, as well as a change in the economic life, the economic relations, or a change in the relationships of property in order to understand any great historical movement. In that sense, William Thompson is a historian. He's not a cultural historian in the sense that he writes only about cultural questions, but he's a historian who gives a centrality to the category of culture, who thinks culture not as subordinate or as dependent or as reflecting something else. And you see, therefore, that in their different ways, both Thompson and Williams have been working on this unfinished trajectory in Marx's and Engels' work. They've been working on the very problems that Marx and Engels bequeathed to the next generation. The inadequacies in Marx and Engels' work lead Thompson and Williams to try to resolve that problem in a way, in a particular way. And that gives rise to the immense fruitfulness of their contribution to the field. Well, why move on? Why move on from them? Why not just stay with? Why not just be a Thompsonian? Well, the reason is, for me, is that I became convinced that there is a common problematic which both of them share, in spite of the fact that they argue with one another. And it is the problematic that I just described to you. Different domains, but with one unmediated practice. Material life can be found in any of these different domains. When Thomson writes his searing critique of Audacer for the poverty of theory, one of the elaborate areas of criticism that he makes of Audacer is I would say his notion that there is a different instance for the economic and the political and the ideological. Because Thompson says, the ideological is everywhere. You can find it in the base and you can find it. So you can't separate it out. Indeed, there's no such separation. There is only life. There's only man making history, man making history on anterior condition. In that sense, it is what I call both Thompson and Williams, in spite of their great sense of the different historical forms of culture and society, have theoretically what I would call a praxis view. A praxis or human practice. What Williams sometimes calls undifferentiated creative energy. Just the energy, life itself, material life, working, is the prime thing. And it sometimes takes different forms. But in the same way, you can read those forms across and see a kind of homology working in each. You can see the same things reflected. That is the method that Williams recommends to cultural theory. He says, take the different institutions and you will find surprising homologies between one and the other. You'll find the same structure of feeling occupying the different domain. So each is a kind of correspondence, a kind of symbolic correspondence across the different domains. And Thompson says exactly the same thing. If you want to find the law, the new bourgeois law, private property, you can find it in the way in which they are dealing with poachers. You can find it in the law which they develop. You can read it in Blackstone, but you can also see it in the actual changing property relation. There's no distinction between the economic, the political, the ideological, the cultural, the legal, etc. Stop chopping them up. There's only, as you were, experience. Experience. And experience is a unified and relatively unhomogeneous, not distinguished, not a separated category of analysis. Now the notion that what, that one could analyze history in terms of material practice or human practice, social practice in general, and that what one is looking at are a series of homologies between different totalities. You can see the totalities working across the different domains. This is a notion which is effectively challenged for me and displaced by the theories of structuralism. Structuralism interrupts that notion of the homologous march of totalities. It tries to say, well, I think I'd best deal with that structuralist interruption by talking about one or two specific people. Because without that, I don't think that you can get to understand the concepts that I've been using myself. I suppose there are a number of major figures that one could quote here and people would refer to many one of the figures that is very important indeed theoretically but is not normally recognized in my view is Levi Strauss I think without Levi Strauss structuralism would not exist Levi Strauss is the person who first appropriates the model of language in Saussure and translates it to the domain of culture. He says you can think of kinship like a language. You can think of marriage like a language system. It works in the same way. Women and goods are signs. That is a profound insight. It's a sentence you could not find in Raymond Williams. You couldn't find that sentence in Raymond Williams. So one of the important things for me in Levi Strauss and in Barthes and in the development of semiotics is what I want to call the linguistic turn. The linguistic turn. The turn into borrowing broadly from the concepts of language and discourse and finding in them some of the crucial concepts and theories with which to reconceptualize the arena of ideology and culture. I don't want to talk about the linguistic turn in detail here. In the final lecture, when I'm talking about cultural studies as a reconstituted terrain, I will return to the question of linguistic turn. But what I want to say now is something about Althusser. I've written recently about Althusser. My encounter with Althusser is almost as problematic as my encounter with Thompson and Williams. And I'll tell you again in a more personal vein why that's so. Althusser burst across the heavens in English intellectual life. in what I would call a religious way. Suddenly, everybody was reading it, like the New Testament. Overnight, people became Althusserians. Now, in England, one of the signs of this is that everybody begins to speak a new language, which is called Franglais. It's not quite French, but it's not quite English either. it has to do with mimicking mimicking what French might sound like if the French spoke English you think I'm joking but I mean many many distinguished theoretical essays in English depend on puns which don't work in English which only work in French if you say for instance I mean the English for instance have never been able to explain without the crutch of French the entire thesis in Derrida's book on difference because of course they don't use difference in that way they don't know what it means the whole work of Stephen Heath turns on notions of the slippages of the signifiers etc which mimic the language of Barthes and Lacan. So one of the things that really made the turn into Althusser so abrasive for me was because I thought I'd never seen the obeisance of the English intellectual cader so horrendously reproduced. They seemed to me to be kind of crawling through the English chanth. If only they could live in Paris. Only they could have gone to Adeser's seminar, etc. And the spectacle of a whole culture, forgetting Raymond Williams, forgetting E.P. Thompson, unable to work from native roots and assimilate other ideas, you know, but just kind of taking ship and emigrating intellectually across the channel, I thought it was ruinous. The second thing is that Adeser was occupied by students in exactly that religious way. You had to be 101% Aldissanian. You couldn't question or take some ideas but be doubtful about others, etc. Now that's bad enough if all you were reading was for Marx, but if you were also reading, reading Capital, which is a Spinozian book if ever there was one, where you have to enter the whole machinery of the apparatus of full-blown structuralism in order to operate it at all, then it becomes very serious. I had extremely good, brilliant graduate students who were rendered utterly silent by reading Capital. First of all, they were reading Capital before they'd ever read Capital. Nobody read Capital, but they knew the arguments as to why Capital was wrong before they knew Capital itself. So they were post-Marxist first, and then Marxist afterwards. Althusserian Marxist. They only read that Marx through Althusser. But in addition to that, when you came to the full-blown structuralism of Althusserianism with its notion of theoretical practice, not only was there the economic and the political and the ideological, but there was a fourth practice called science, which only the intellectuals could occupy, which was an entirely autonomous realm, produced entirely by its own conceptual apparatus, which had nothing to do with reality, with certainly nothing to do with history. Isn't that gross thing about time and all that? History, history. Who wanted to be history? The distinction between history, historical, and historicism was never made by these disciples of Althusser. So they abolished the whole of history. not just historicism. Well, this notion that, as it were, the real was entirely constructed conceptually and did not exist anywhere. No real relations of any kind absolutely destroyed the capacity of some graduate students to put down words. They couldn't write a sentence because you had to know everything before you could write anything. And I really had graduate students silenced by it. They would write three sentences, but the sentences would contain, you know, something like, we can't really say really, or you can't say really. Yes, and so the things that you could possibly say were reduced to about three sentences, all of them sort of sounding like Althusser. So my first encounter with Althusser was really to say, this is, you know, horrendous, a horrendous distortion, a great, a great, you know, bifurcation, like people trying to walk on their heads to be an Althusser in that sense. But the fact is, of course, that if when one read Althusser critically, how else does one read a theoretical text but critically? When you read Althusser critically, when you understand both what is good and what is bad, what is really transformatory in Althusser's thought and what is really quite inadequate, etc. It has been very difficult for me to resist the importance of Althusser's thought. I think in that sense, I am a post-Althusserian, not in the sense that I was ever a fully paid-up, subscribing disciple of Althusser's, but in the sense that the way in which I think these questions are not the same after Althusser as they were before. Yes, it's in the shadow of Althusser. Althusserius has fallen across the path, and now whatever is my quarrel with Althusserius, and I have many quarrels with Althusserius, I know in that sense a full Althusserian, but afterwards I think these questions in a way which is deeply imprinted by the impact of Althusserius' thought. So I want to say some things about the Althusserian moment. Althusserius is working on the same problematic in Marxist theory that I identified before. Can you have a theory of ideology which is not reductionist, not economistic, not essentialist, which isn't tied to some great laws of history moving in an evolutionary way through history which will make everything come out right in the end, where everything will correspond to everything else? that is there, establishes the terms that if Marxism or its developments are to survive theoretically, they will have to produce a theory of the so-called superstructures, theory of ideology, culture, consciousness, etc., which is not essentialist, not reductionist, not economistic, and not teleological. doesn't have an end inscribed in its beginning doesn't believe in the ever unrolling laws of history as given from the beginning now i think that's an adequate starting point i think that is a criterion for adequate theorizing The second crucial move which Althusser makes is to lay the most serious critique on the notion of totality. See, even in spite of all the revisions which Williams and Thompson makes, I think that they are still thinking with totalities. They are still thinking with the notion of totalities. And they have a kind of notion of correspondence, of one totality being what Goldman called homologous to the other. Yes, they don't think any longer that one produces the other, but they think that they have the same kind of homologous shape as one another. Now, the most important thing in this respect about Althusser is that he abandons that conception of homology. The one does not correspond in that sense to another. There is no single or what he calls expressive totality. So he introduces the notion not just of totality, but of what he calls complex totalities, which always contain differences, differences which are ineradicable, which never go away. Therefore, he analyzes a historical moment, 1917, for example, as never simply produced by the base, but produced by the accumulation of different practices in one historical moment. That is the conception of over-determination. It's a notion which is borrowed from Freud, and what Freud says, the symptom, the psychoanalytic symptom, or the symbol in the dream, is never the product of one discourse. It is always the fusion or condensation of a number of different discourses or different causal factors, each of which has their own movement, their own temporality, their own modality, their own history. So one is not looking at one uniform law of history. One is looking at the different temporalities, the different histories, or what the French call the different durées, which each contribute to the over-determination, not now the determination, but the surplus determination of any conjuncture. Any conjuncture is therefore, conjuncture, event, text is therefore never the product of one set of forces only, reflected on another level, of what is happening in the economy, reflected through language in the work. It is the result of the accumulation, often of contradictory and discontinuous forces, which produce that thing that you might call the event, which is never, of course, one event. Within it is always a series of events. You have to recognize the differences within what appears to be a totality. And the totality, if it's moving, a moving totality, which all historical events are, is never closed. Never closed. That notion, therefore, of the break with totality, of the break with determination in some linear causal form, the notion that breaks or interrupts the idea of a single history and introduces the notion of histories, of the different histories, The notion of a conjuncture, which is the coming together of different forces, where the different forces are not so merged that they all produce just one event. They produce a thing that we choose to call discouratively an event, but which itself is the bringing together of discordant or often contradictory elements. So that when you, as it were, look later on in the historical process at what happens to that event, you see that some of the things you thought were merged begin to pull out again, begin to disentangle themselves. 1917 is not one event. and you know one of the most wonderful things about the point where alteser clinches the argument about over-determination contradiction is that it is done with a wonderful quote from lenin And so he shouts, he sends the torpedo underneath all of those orthodox Marxist critics who are lining up for him to say, ah, here you have departed from Marxist notion of determination. He quotes directly from Lenin, who says, if you want to understand 1917, there's no point in Russia, the revolution in Russia, there's no point simply going to the mode of production in Russia. Because at the same time, you have to account for the deep structures of economic life. You have to account for the more immediate changes in the Russian capitalism. You have to account for the historical legacy of the immediate political events. You have to account for simple contingencies like the fact that the food wasn't getting through to the troops in the front. That was also one of the things which produces this so-called single event we call the revolution. which of course happens across two moments, which is separated by nine months from one and the other, which has two different social forces in power and a period of dual power. The more you look at it, the more differentiated it is, the more you have to recognize difference, contradiction. Yes, you see, that tendency to disentangle unities into their contradictory forms and to break with the notion of the unrolling of history and to see history as moving in a discontinuous way by rupture, by reversal, by inversion, by ironic repetition, as much as by linear, slow, linear, you know, progressive upward movement. That is a profound interruption. That is what I call the Althusserian interruption. And if you occupy that terrain, I don't mind how you come to it. There are many other ways in Althusser to come to it. You can come to it through Levi-Strauss, you can come to it through Barth, or you can come to it through Lacan. But once you occupy that terrain, it is the end of the age of innocence in cultural studies. You can't forget Williams and Thompson, but you can never again be a Thompsonian. You will never again be a Thompsonian. And I will never again be a Thompsonian, which is enough to create rage and fury in Edward Thompson. And about people like me, the entire book, Poverty of Theory, was explicitly directed. It's not the case because it's directed against what I would call Altasarian disciples. It's directed against the epigone of Altasar. With that, I shared everything he said. and indeed, long before the poverty of theory was written. Certainly, the Center for Cultural Studies in Birmingham was never Althusserian in the sort of first sense, in the disciple religious sense, never. It was Althusserian in this second sense I'm talking about now. Yes, it was influenced in the way in which it thought about culture by the break with totality and with determination and so on, by taking on the ideas of rupture, histories, different temporalities, over-determination, conjuncture. It was influenced by those thinking, but it was never Althusserian in the kind of biblical sense. So that is one of the reasons why when four or five years later, in the poverty of theory, Thompson came not only to attack Althusser, but to attack everybody that he called Althusserian, including the people at the center, like me, got extremely angry, bud. And if you want to know the point at which I became angry, it's in a book like this, not that one, but in that series, which is called People's History and Socialist Theory, and it's called In Defense of Theory. In Defense of Theory. Okay, that's just a little bit of autobiography. So one exists in the shadow of the Althusserian interruption. Okay, now what I want to say a little bit more specifically is what does Althusser do in positive? That's what he breaks with. Those are the concepts of his break. But what does he positively give us as a way of conceptualizing the domain of ideology? Because he writes about ideology rather more than he writes about culture. Now here there's a problem with Althusser because he gives us at least three ways of conceptualizing ideology. First of all, he talks in full marks of ideologies as systems of representation. Systems of representation. Remember I said yesterday when I spoke about the empire? The way in which the pomp, a ceremony of the bonnet, restates the empire. That is exactly the question of an idea. The real, real life, whatever it is, only achieves what we might call, only comes into culture at all. It only becomes intelligible through the process of the means of representation. It only comes into culture through the activity of symbolization. And the activity of symbolization requires the use of the means of representation, language, whatever it might be, which represents, which gives meaning to the real by representing it. Now, the notion of systems of representation. In that phrase, Altasier is, of course, drawing on the whole of what earlier on I called the linguistic term. Aldoussere himself borrows enormously from Levi Strauss. It's not been fully recognized, the debt. Aldoussere has two principal, overwhelming debts. One is to Levi, three really. One is to Levi Strauss, one is to Gramsci, and one is to Lacan. Those are Aldoussere's three principal intellectual debts at different phases of his life. Systems of representation, that notion that ideology must be thought semiotically. It had to do with the production of meaning, and that meaning was not just something that was already in the world, but it was something that was given to the world in the practice of representation. That in culture, one therefore didn't find the meanings already existing in the world reflected in culture, but that it was in culture which constituted the world as meaningful. That if one person, as it were, hits another person, what is going on there is not given in the fact that one thing meets the other. The meaning of that is only given in the discursive ways in which you make sense of that. So you can make sense of that by saying he she hit him and I can make sense of that by saying show in his pig and you can make sense of that by saying how extraordinarily bold of her what does it mean it means intrinsically it doesn't mean anything it means all of those things and none of them the meaning is not fixed already in the real world and the language is not a mirror which simply reflects what is already constituted out there. The culture, the ideology has a constitutive effect on making the world intelligible. If you say that what is distinctive in human or social practice is that it requires intelligible action not just action which is, you know, like banging the knee. Your knee doesn't think when it jerks. it has no meaning the meaning is given in medical discourse medical discourse says it means you're still alive it's the conjunction of the act as interpreted through the theory of the muscle and etc that's what gives the meaning to the act the act itself has no meaning the world in that sense does not come already full of meanings which we kind of try to find out we use the various forms of intelligibility to represent things as meaningful in different ways. Now that reversal, you see what that reversal does, because it puts ideology as constitutive of the world. Not the only thing, not the only thing. Some Althusserians would read it to say there's nothing but ideology. That's not what Althusser said, but what he did say is that you can't think of the word, the real, as constituted, except also in and with and through discourse. So discourse, the notion of language in its broad sense, and of representation, and of language as the culture or ideology as the modes of representation, and therefore ideologies as the different maps of intelligibility, the different forms of sense in which a culture makes sense of what is happening to it. That notion is caught in Aldoussa's notion of a system of representations. He says about it, systems of representations can consist of many different things, of ideas, of concepts, of images, of myths, of rituals. So he broadens what a system of representations is. It's not just a written language. It's not just speech. Yes, it's anything that is used to stand for anything else. But it has the notion that what happens in the mind, in the head, in collective culture, is the finding of something that can be exchanged as a sign, which refers to something outside that is not a sign. And without that relationship, that which is not yet signifying, which is made to signify through the intervention of a system or means of signification, that is what I call the semiotic conception of cultural ideology. It's not the same thing as semiotic, formal semiotics. That's an attempt to develop a specific methodology from it, which never came to very much. Barth nearly brought it off and then he abandoned it. So formal semiotics, It's not a question of whether you're a formal semiologist or not. It is whether you think culture as arising and operating in the domain of the semiotic. Now, we don't use that term anymore, but the term that we do use is the term discursive. And that is what, for me, discursive means. I know it means something more specific. If you're in a Foucauldian operation, I will end by talking a little bit about that. But in the broad sense, when I say, All culture is discursive. Or all ideology is discursive. I don't simply mean that it works with language in the narrower sense. I mean that it functions. I understand it as functioning in this problematic of the means by which things are made to represent, are made intelligible through the intervention of systems of representation. So the idea of systems of representation, which I would say elaborates in four marks, is for me very important indeed. That's also where he talks about an imaginary relation. Ideology is an imaginary relation. The imaginary relation in which men live their real conditions of existence. Now, I'm trying to think of an example. Yes, let me think of it as an example in something that I said yesterday or the day before yesterday, which uses that idea. I talked about the romance of empire. Remember? I talked about the empire as the white man's burden. Now, the old way of thinking that would be to say the imperial relationship is really, is really, of course, the economic dominance of Britain over the rest of the world, exploiting the rest of the world. so the white man's burden is of course just a rationalization an excuse, a myth which they make up to fool the world what Althusser reminds us is that if you use the semiotic conception that the ruling class or ruling dominant force actually experiences, that is to say makes the relationship of exploitation intelligible to itself in these imaginary forms So imaginary is no longer a form of false consciousness that you can get away. If you said to the British, but what you are doing is, you know, naked exploitation, and they believed you, they would stop. They can only go on because they really, really, really, really live their relation to their imperial situation in the imaginary relation of the white man's bird. They really do. They really do. They really, really believe it. It's not a form of false consciousness which we can stand outside and just, you know, pluck the top off, yes, and say, oh, this is just a kind of, it's a kind of conspiratorial cheat. Gramsci was wonderful about conceiving culture as simply forms of conspiratorial cheating. What he said, you know, that way that Marxists sometimes have of being able to see through everybody else's illusion except their own. False consciousness is really one of the last refuges of the Marxist scoundrel. It's one of the last refuges of the Marxist scoundrel because I have never, ever heard a Marxist critic who himself or herself confessed to being false consciousness. False consciousness is only somebody else. The masses are in false consciousness. The television viewers are in false consciousness. The unions are in false consciousness. Everybody out there is false consciousness. But the Marxist suddenly has pure intelligibility. He or she sees right through everybody as his illusion and pierces the real truth. The real truth. Nobody ever said, pornography corrupts me. Not even Mrs. Whitehouse. She says it corrupts my daughter. Everybody else is corrupted by it. Nobody ever says, advertising affects me. They say it takes in the masses. It's the religion of the masses, the opium of the masses. But somehow I am excluded from the false consciousness. I don't mean by this to say, that as if everybody truly perceives quite the reverse. What I'm saying is actually that everybody in their ordinary thinking is always inside ideology. Because insofar as the word is meaningful to us, We all occupy systems of intelligibility. Now, we need forms of scientific theorizing, of analysis, of deconstruction, in order, as it were, to build and test and make more adequate the forms of ideology we exist in. We also need a little bit of humility, which is to recognize the limitations, the blindnesses, the weaknesses, the stopping points in our own understanding of the world. In that sense, we are all inside the semiotic. To be human is to be inside the semiotic. We deal and traffic in meanings all the time, some of them we don't even understand. Modern postmodernism is attracted by the notion that we just throw so many meanings up in the air that the adly seems to be any. But actually, all that means is that the degree of the production of the semiotic is five times as fast as it was last year. It doesn't mean we're outside of meaning. It means we're absolutely overwhelmed by them. Overwhelmed by them. so we are inside our commitment to the semiotic is as deep and as unalterable as our commitment to material life we couldn't exist for a moment without drawing breath we couldn't exist for three days without feeding ourselves out of the much despised nature we don't think of ourselves as natural creatures at all but unless you feed the machine and in the same way in the same way we would not be our species if we did not try all the time to make a meaning out of what is happening to us. In that sense, Gramsci is absolutely correct. Everybody is an intellectual because nobody lives without some conception of the world. It may be very humble, very rudimentary, very practical, etc. There are specialized people whose job it is to think, but the notion that you could be human and not think have no meaning, just live life like the automaton. Life sometimes feels automatic in this way. But of course what Gramsci reminds us is that it feels like that because of the whole huge semiotic process by which things are habitualized, by which things are sedimented into common sense. It's not that it's automatic, but it's so automatic we don't even recognize that it's a meaning. That doesn't mean that we're outside of the semiotic. It means the semiotic is so deep in us that it's almost, it's achieved the kind of invisibility of the biological. It's almost become biological in the sense that it's like the air we breathe. You breathe air, you drink water, and you take in meaning, or you give them out. One is not secondary to the other. So that's the notion of imaginary relations which Althusser has. But he has two other formulations in the arena of the ideological which are tricky. The essay which he gives devotes most attention to this is the essay in Lenin philosophy and other essays, which is the one on the ideological state apparatuses. And that ideological state apparatuses essay has the status in Althusser of the German ideology for Marx. It's very important. It contains many crucial formulations, and it's very problematic, very problematic. Now, the great thing that is an advance for me in the Ideological State Apparatuses essay is Aldoussaire's notion that ideology is not just systems of representation, not just languages, but is a practice that culture and ideology are material. that is to say that if you're analyzing a language or a discourse you have to look not just at the sign systems but you have to look of course at the apparatuses that produce the sign systems and you have to look at the way in which the signs and the meanings inform the actions the practices you have to look at the ideological dimension of human practice and you have a which prayer takes it's all that thing together and you see what's important about that that it begins to break down the distinction between idea and thing yes it establishes the materiality of language we talk about language as if it's diaphanous as if it has no substance because there is no language without what Raymond Williams calls its material registration there is no language in writing without those little marks that you make even if it's only marks on a screen and there is no speech language without the sound without the utterance there is no speech so although language isn't tied up with isn't given in some way by its material form it always takes a material form material in that sense and the notion of systems of representation is deepened by this Althusserian notion of systems of representation which are also material. Takes, shifts the notion of ideology and culture away from the simple notion of ideas and links it with practice. That's, I think, very positive. But as you know, at the same time, I'll just say in the first part of that essay, tries to garb himself like Napoleon Bonaparte, like Louis Bonaparte, for a second time, in orthodox Marxist clothes. What is the function of ideology? The function of ideology is to reproduce the relations of social relations of production. Sounds fine, sounds great, sounds just like capital, and is open to exactly the same problems. What is the ideological, which only has the function of reproducing the dominant relations of production? Isn't that teleological? The end is already written into the beginning. What is ideology? It is the thing which reproduces capitalism effectively. That is a functionalism. That is functionalism. It has the function of reproducing capitalism successfully. And the whole of the Adidasarian interruption, which is to break up that notion of necessary laws, functional laws of history, are now reintroduced again. I mean, I don't want to just make that too great, too grand. When the communist militants in Adesir's party branch, not great intellectuals, you know, his friendly members in the party branch read the Isaiah's essay, they wrote to him and said, well, we are teachers, and there we are struggling away to try to change something, and you tell us that all we are doing is reproducing the social relations of production. What happened to the class struggle? What happened to ideological struggle? What happened to the heroic labor of the militant? And Alta says, oh, yes, I forgot that. And he rushes away and writes a footnote. You know, he says, this does not forget the great struggle, etc. But it's not in the theory. It doesn't even say to rep... Well, it has a wonderful sentence about this reproduction being a teeth-gritting harmony. But nevertheless, it happens. Capitalism always produces capitalist ideology. That is exactly to restore what we are trying to change, the notion that there is a homology between what happens in the base and what happens in ideology. So in a backwards way on, Althusser comes right back in to the problems from which he's trying to escape. So I don't like the first half of the ISA's essay one bit, although I like the points about the materiality of ideology. But the formulation that ideology reproduces the ideological relations, social relations, of capital seems to me deeply flawed formulation. However, as you know, the third part of the essay, I say, takes an entirely different terrain. Entirely different terrain. I'll just say as psychoanalyst, he's Lacan. And Lacan has an increasing importance for the way in which Audisere comes to formulate the questions of ideology. Because, of course, what structuralism had done, what structuralism had done in Levi-Strauss, etc., is to abolish what is called the category of the subject. You see, there is a unified conception of the social subject in Williams and Thompson. The class is a unified subject, which is a totality, which gives rise to certain forms of consciousness. What Levi-Strauss says is that that subject is formed by the discourse. The language pre-exists the subject. We are in discourse, in the semiotic. We don't produce the semiotic as if we're out of ourselves. So it displaces the centrality of the Cartesian subject. And now just there is Reading Capital, attempts to do without any human subjects at all. He says people and classes are simply the bearers of social relations. Don't worry about who is inside this thing, provided you have some chaps there or some people there. That's all you need. What is moving are the relations of capital and labor, and you need some actual laborers to keep it out. But it's not labor as people or capitalists as people who produce capital. That is the inversion that takes place in structuralism. Now, that de-centering of the subject is one of the very important things that the structuralist interruption brings. Very important to this place. That is why structuralism is an anti-humanism. It doesn't mean that it's opposed to humanistic feelings. It doesn't mean that it doesn't believe in human society and the creativity of human beings. It means you cannot think the world in terms of thinking it as the product of a single integrated subject. You can't think of the world as I think, therefore I am. Yes, that is not the case. And it's not the case because Marx, for one thing, said it was not the case. He said men make history, but on the basis of anterior conditions which they did not make. as men make history they locate themselves in an already going system of production then they they transform what they inherit so they make something to it but they don't make it you couldn't there isn't somebody who's born today and said I think I'll create capitalism tomorrow how about creating capitalism they can't do that any more than they could say I think I'll have a language tomorrow you can't do that you already are in a language and I'll just say has from Lacan this wonderful phrase about the degree to which the newborn baby is already spoken for long before it even appears when it's in there people are still feeling it and saying well now if it's Marina well then it'll be so and so but if it's not, if it's Tommaso well that's different it already has a number of provisional identities it's not going to be just anybody going to be born here, in this house, in this family, in this class, in this neighborhood, in this region, to this language, not that language. It's going to come as an unformed thing who babbles every sound that there is in the English language and can't speak a language. And it's going to learn to speak a language by forgetting nine-tenths of the sounds it can produce. Because, of course, the language is not all the sounds, It's only the selection of particular sounds that belong to Chinese or Italian or French. And that is the process by which we become social individuals. The interrelationship between the forming subject in the midst of social relations. So the idea that ideology comes out of the head, that the great thinkers, the Goldman idea as it were, the great thinkers speak some philosophy, which is the essence, the truth. of that particular, we are the enunciators of ideologies, is displaced by structuralism. But what happens to Althusser at the end is he realizes that it's all very well to have displaced the human creative subject as a homogenous thing from the center of culture. That's all right. But what has happened is that we have abolished it altogether. We now have no conception of the subject at all. And there must be a conception of the subject. Why must there be a conception of the subject? Because there's no point thinking about ideology or culture unless you think about what its impact is, what its effect is for how people behave. That's a thing that you would conceivably be interested in. Why would be interested in, you know, systems of signification that nobody uses? Well, who is this thing, person, class, group, that is being affected by ideology or culture. If you don't want to theorize it as an already integrated subject who then speaks, you want to theorize it in some other way, you have to have a conception of this space of subjectivity. Now, it's not only Lacan who points back to the missing piece in structuralism. It is very centrally feminism. Feminist theory which understands the structured nature of consciousness, that consciousness is formed historically, formed socially, formed psychoanalytically, formed in the very way in which gender is, in which men and women are gendered. It's formed. But they understand the need for theorizing the place of the subject. And what Altausser does in the second part of the ISA's essay is to begin to use some of those notions from Freud, from Lacan. Do you see why one moves to the psychoanalytic at that point? You move to the psychoanalytic because, of course, psychoanalysis has always had that de-centered notion of the subject. The center of psychoanalysis has never been the subject whose consciousness or experience you could take without questioning it. Because, of course, people's consciousness is already formed on the basis of all that they have forgotten, of the unconscious. So psychoanalysis has always had, Freud has always had, a decentered conception of the subject. What's more, Freud has always had the notion that the subject doesn't just pop out with a biological subject, that it is the result of a whole set of processes, that it's a very long time before us, any of us, can recognize that mixture of things, conscious, unconscious, drives that are unresolved, and call ourselves I. The result of a very long series of processes that form the subject in that sense. So, in rethinking the idea of the de-centered subject of culture and ideology, I'll just say, reaches through Lacan for Freud, for the psychoanalytic concept, at the same time as feminism comes to terms with some of the anti-feminist elements in Freudian thought and reappropriates Freud for a new conception of what subjectivity is about. Now, that is a very important moment in the reconceptualization of the ideological and cultural field. Very important moment. and you will have heard my trying to use that idea throughout the last four lectures when I talked about how do the discourses of imperialism create the imperial subject and I don't make the mistake of thinking that because it creates the imperial subject the English individual subjects are therefore forever and necessarily biologically imperialist I see the way in which they are constituted as an imperial subject. They've gone through certain processes. They make sense of the world within certain sets of discursive relations which make them recognize themselves. That is the speculary that is in Lacan. Recognize themselves in the imaginary, in the social imaginary as the subjects of a great imperial nation. So, I mean, that is the reason which I think I didn't make clear enough, which I think engendered the question that I was asked yesterday. Well, you know, I seem to be, as it were, running down the English continuously. Is it because I think they're just kind of like that, born like that and will forevermore be like that? Well, sometimes I think that, but not theoretical. I don't think that conceptually. Conceptually, I think, it's always possible to constitute the English in another way. Indeed, there never is one way. The subject is always fragmentary. There are always other discursive positionalities. There's nobody who is, you know, as it were, unquestioningly and 101% racist. It's not odd that racist people make exceptions, large exceptions, for other people. For instance, when I taught in a secondary school in South London in 1958, which is one of the early moments when racism breaks through in English politics, the kids in my classroom who had picked up the discourse of their parents would say, well, we don't like all these blacks in Britain because they're taking our jobs and they make too much noise at night because they have parties, etc. And, of course, they steal our women. And I said, you mean me? No, not you. Them. Eh? Not you? Of course not you, because that's another discourse. I, the person who teaches them, who they liked, etc., I'm the familiar. So, we're in Brixton. I turn to the back of the class where there are rows, three rows of perfectly black boys. And I say, do you mean them? No, not them. Of course not. They live round about. I mean them over there. Yes, over in Notting Hill, over on the other side of London is them. So, the fact that they're black and I'm black and they're white and I have the job, I'm teaching. Yes, they don't know whether I have the women or not, but I'm teaching, certainly. They can see it and they surmise the rest, etc. It doesn't have anything to do with it. It's not the real, it's the discourses, the fragmentary discourses, in which towards me they're non-racist and towards me in Notting Hill they're racist. I mean, that's how I got involved in it, because of course, in 1958, I used to come out of the schoolroom and take the tube and go over to Notting Hill and be involved in escorting women and children home from school, from Notting Hill, through the racist crowds that surrounded Notting Hill Gate Station to their homes. And some of the boys in my school used to take the tube and go among the crowds that would shout at the people who were coming on the tube. So, you know, who is the real? Who are the real boys? And who is the real me? I changed. I took a tube and I changed. Yes, I stopped being the person that they all knew, their teacher, and I started being one of them who is stealing our jobs. So the notion that I am the same, well, I'm the same, and that my genes are the same, but I'm not constructed. I'm not the same subject. In terms of the subject of the discourse of racism, I had moved from one positionality to another. So if I'm analyzing the semiotics of racism, I have to analyze it as two discourses, at least, as those people who think of themselves as well-integrated young white boys who have two discourses in their heads, who are two subjects, one racist, one anti-racist, and who construct me in the positionality of the racist and non-racist teacher. So that conception just expands the discursive conception of ideology and culture. It just blows it apart and introduces the whole long set of discourses which flow from beginning to think, the questions of subjectivity and of positionality, not as fixed, not as the real, not as the real or secured by the real, but as constructed in culture, constructed in ideology, as a function of the discursive effects of ideology. Okay, I'm going to stop there. I haven't taken the story fully through. Yes, I want to pick this up at the end of next week when I talk about cultural studies as a reconstituted terrain. That's the next, as it were, theoretical input. Yes, there I'm going to talk about Laclau, and I'm going to talk about Gramsci, and I'm going to talk about Foucault, and I'm going to talk about the post-structuralists, etc. Between now and then, I will be going back to a more concrete discourse, like the last four lectures, but now very much more from the beginning of the 20th century to the contemporary period. And I will be using some of the concepts I've just talked about and using some new concepts to describe what I think is the changing cultural situation in Britain. And then at the end, in the 10th lecture, I'll try and reflect back on some of the concepts that I've used in the next four lectures. Okay. I don't know that there is any direct influence. Yes? Do people know Voloshinov's book, Marxism and the Philosophy Language? No? It's a very important book. More important because, though nobody is absolutely certain, it's, I suppose, 85, 90% certain that Voloshinov is a pen name of Baktins. Yes, and therefore, if one knows that, it begins to take on a much larger significance. Because otherwise, it's very strange to know who Voloshinov is. He kind of comes out of Russian formalism, Russian linguistics. We know that he's said to have disappeared into the Stalinist camps. It's a history which neither quite begins nor ends. But anyhow, whatever the biographical question, Voloshinov's book, Marxist and Philosophers' Language, is extremely important. Now, as far as I know, Althusser does not quote it. Yes? Directly. So there is no direct influence of that kind. But I think that there are very great similarities between some of the ways in which Althusser thinks the notion of ideology and Voloshinov. In this sense, that Voloshinov is one of the few Marxist theorists of language who understand Saussure. Yes, he doesn't entirely agree with Saussure, but he understands Saussure, and his thinking has been influenced by Saussure's theory of the sign. Now, one of the important points that, therefore, that Voloshinov makes is that, in fact, ideology is precisely semiotic. It is that it operates in the construction of sense through discourse, the making of sense through discourse. So that's one way in which Voloshinov, though he doesn't seem to come from the French structuralist tradition at all, is clearly working on very similar terrain. A second way in which he seems to me to be working on similar terrain is that he does not believe that, as it were, the meaning of any particular element in language is given once and for all outside language in something we call the real. So he doesn't use the idea that language is a kind of reflection of a pre-existing meaning or pre-existing reality. Thirdly, he uses exactly the semiotic notion to suggest that, as it were, individual terms or concepts or words can be differently positioned in different discourses. So the question is, yes, what are the discursive articulations which you give to a concert? And he sees the nature of ideological struggle or of cultural transformation as depending precisely on this struggle to articulate and re-articulate concepts within different discursive formations. Now, that is therefore, do you see how close that is to a non-reductionist, non-teleological, semiotic conception of the ideological? It doesn't use the same language as the French structuralist, but the conceptual framework is very similar. And Laclau, who learns, who is one of the figures I want to deal with towards the end, because he pulls together Althusser, the Althusserian critique, Gramsci, Foucault, and Derrida. Laclau's position depends very much on Voloshinov's conception of multi-accentuality. It's that a word, a concept, has different accents, that there's never one meaning which is fixed. Yes, but meaning is, as it were in that sense, dispersed, discursive. So I think there are a lot of similarities between Voloshinov and the general positions that I'm trying to talk about. Although there isn't any direct evidence that the French, you know, had read Voloshinov and kind of borrowed him directly. They know, of course, Bakhtin. And so they may very well know, many be familiar with many of those ideas. They're familiar with the French-Russian formalists. They're familiar with the Czech linguistic school. And they're familiar with the kind of writing of Russian linguistic theorists who occupy much of the same terrain. So there are common roots, although there are no specific influences, as far as I can tell. No, I'm It's a good question, of course It's a big question Big question But the reason why I stopped I paused Was because I suddenly As you put it so sharply I suddenly heard it in a new way, which I never heard it before. See, nobody would say, can we get out of this bind of breathing? Will socialism end breathing, the necessity to breathe? Or, can I stop eating now? I don't know that we can, but of course it's not quite a question like that, since these are forms of mystification. To some extent, ideology doesn't give us the truth. Well, what I would say is this. I think now that there is no final escape from ideology. There's no final escape from ideology. By final, what I mean is, I don't mean to say that we can't improve our ideologies. Yes, because I think there are all sorts of ways. I think science is not another thing, but is the attempt to make ideologies more systematic, more rigorous, to improve the truth value of ideologies. I think science never yields the truth, big capital T. But I don't think that therefore all ideologies have the same truth value. If you want to get to, you know, down the road, as it were, you better use a map rather than this week's astrological chart. On the other hand, if you want to know whether tonight is a good night to take a girl out, a map doesn't help, you know. So there are different forms of knowledge for different kinds of activity. So the final escape from ideology into science or truth, I don't believe in. But I believe in the possibility of operating on ideology to clarify, to make it more scientific, etc. What I don't believe is that there will come a moment when prehistory ends, and when we look at the world and instantly recognize its truth. Yes, in that sense, when we don't need the semiotic, the systems of representation to grasp what is there. What we need, of course, to improve the truth value of ideologies is exactly not just looking at the world, but quite the reverse. We have to go to the truth via the better construction of concepts. So it's a funny paradox. But whereas experience tells us, if you stare hard at it, you know, and forget all your ideas, just look at it, real life, somehow the real truth will emerge from it. And actually I think a better truth, because I don't believe in the real truth, a better truth only emerges when you go far away from it, when you distance yourself from it. That is what I meant in the argument with Thompson about the necessity of theory. You need theory in order to break the circle of recognitions which ideology always constructs. But, even when you have broken and created a scientific theory, Marxism, or revised Marxism, or endlessly post-Marxist Marxism, or whatever, whatever is the system of truth, even when you get it, we will never directly experience the world in that way. So we will always have to translate that, those scientific perceptions, into the languages of ordinary, you know, practical knowledge. and that will always mean giving it an ideological value so I think there will be, there is in fact a great question about precisely what the appropriate ideology of a socialist society is and we don't really see the problem if you pretend it doesn't need any ideology as if we're going to just look at the economy and it's going to tell us what to produce, it's rubbish it's nonsense, you couldn't conceivably live it like that because as Marx told us long ago these relations do not show themselves on the surface that's what he said you have to go behind them or penetrate them you can't look at the stars and see how the universe works you need the theory of astronomy and you need an absolutely gigantic telescope yes you need an astronomy a whole science to explain the truth of the movement of the stars otherwise you look up there and for one thing, they don't look like they're moving at all. They look as if they're perfectly stationary, little things of light that shine out. So I don't think there's any final escape from ideology, but I don't think that that plunges us into an inevitable relativism where your ideology is as good as mine and who cares what mystified things we say to one another. We all always have to be working on the clarification, improvement, the great making adequate of our ideological presupposition. But I don't think any longer that there is an escape from the so-called prehistory of ideology. But that's just my position. I mean, I know that there are a lot of problems with that position because, you know, it sounds as if you're kind of constantly in the prison of inadequate thinking. And I suppose I think we are. I think all thinking is one-sided. Yes, and I don't know. I mean, I haven't encountered the form of common form of thought, which I thought did not have some one-sidedness to it. Even the great things that tell us great truths have a bit that they're one-sided. No form of thought is perfectly rounded. It's like, you know, one of those so-called round Italian loaves. You know the ones that kind of collapse on one side? Yes, it looks as if it's going to... And it's never, even Marx, exactly what I was trying to say earlier on about the German ideology. Yes, it's a wonderful, important text, but it's inadequate, incomplete text. It's wrong about some very important thing, just as it's right about something. So I've come to live. It's a very contended point that Altersdair makes. You know, he makes the point. The ideology has no history, he said. what he means by that is that there are different ideologies but the so-called history of ideology which began one day and will end one day there probably is no history to ideology in that sense suppose it depends at what level of abstraction you're talking yes, I mean there are lots, Kolkosastro has lots of problems at a more specific level of how to analyze things etc. etc. But at the most general theoretical level I would agree with you that the basic problem is the problem based on the superstructure. And I think that all the major theorists and theories in cultural studies have in one sense or another addressed themselves to, tried to modify or tried to conceive of alternative ways of conceptualizing the relationship between, as it were, the domain of ideas, culture, consciousness, ideology, whatever you call it, all of that language, and other social relations. The question, I suppose, perhaps that is a slightly misleading way of putting it. You see, Bay superstructure is not so much the core problem, it is already an answer to the problem. The problem is, of course, how to understand the relationship between different kinds of practice. Now what? It's the importance is then that the theoretical power, explanatory power, of Marx's answer that this relationship, these relationships, must be thought in the model of a base and superstructure. So it's then wrestling with the consequences of that particular answer to the question of how practices are related to one another. How culture relates with other things. That I would say, that's the central problem. Whether it's autonomous of them, reflective of them, helps to shape them, interacts with them, however you think that. And then Marx and Engels say, it's related in the relationship of base and infrastructure. That's an answer. Now that gives us a very powerful way of thinking it and that's an instrument which then reveals a lot, but which has a lot of problems. Now then, what I've been describing to you is how cultural studies has wrestled with that problem and the answer and tried to find alternative answers or more adequate answers or other ways of answering the question. Question two, I think the term ideology has really changed dramatically. It used to mean only those well-developed discourses, like particular religions or particular political theories or particular philosophies, which were idealist or gave a systematically false account of it. Then we would say, oh, that is ideological. But in the way in which I have been describing it, I use ideology in a much looser sense. I use ideology virtually identical with the notion of the semiotic. For me, the ideological is the domain of meaning and sense and intelligibility. Now that's different from speaking about ideologies. Ideologies for me is a narrow term. And ideologies are the specific discourses, the particular sets that operate in the field of ideology. So I would distinguish between different discursive sets in ideologies. But I would say they all function on the field of the ideological. And that is to use ideology in a much more descriptive way. Now, therefore, common sense is, for me, ideological, though it's not well-structured, it's not philosophical, it's not conceptual. Well, you see, yes, but it is a language operating in discourse. I think it's all, in that sense, ideological. However, I mean, it's important to say that though I no longer use the term ideology to equal sort of false, a false or distorted account of the truth, and you see why I don't say that, because I think the question of the truth is very problematic, just as problematic as the question of ideology. It's no more secure than the question of ideology. So I don't talk about ideology as opposed to truth, or ideology as opposed to science. I don't want to use just a descriptive notion of ideology because of what you said, because although ideologies are not distinguished by the fact that they're distorted, they are always linked to power. There is no way in which an ideological discourse can work in a power vacuum. To use it is to enter in the configuration of meanings which are articulated to particular social positions or social groups. I will come on to say something about that when I talk about Foucault. Every knowledge is inscribed by power. Every ideology occurs in the domain, in the field of relationships of power. so ideology isn't for me a neutral phrase but it's a more openly descriptive phrase than say you know political scientists political scientists call liberalism communism socialism they are ideologies do you see their systems of ideas their doctrines their big C's or Catholicism Protestantism Puritanism are particular religious ideologies but I think kind of you know what do you think of that movie last night? I think that's an ideological question. What else is it? I mean, it's in the domain of meanings. What meaning did you get out of it? What meanings did you construct in it? You know, it's not what is it but occurring as an exchange of language occurring in the domain of the discursive. and the intelligibility has to do with who understands it, who made it who produced that discourse why are we at the receiving end of the discourse but not at the production end of it why did somebody else produce it where is it produced why is it that that discourse is installed in the apparatus called Hollywood do you see what I mean you can't it appears to be just an everyday remark but it is ideological in both the senses I'm talking about it both touches the question of meaning and discourse and the question of power not power in the simple way does Hollywood inject us with nasty meanings not that but questions of power nonetheless the question doesn't float in a powerless void you couldn't say it doesn't matter where it comes from that's not true so I don't want a powerless conception of ideology but I want a much broader, looser one which certainly covers practical common sense which covers everyday calculation which covers the conversations of ordinary families going about their ordinary business whatever, whenever social beings exchange with one another the terms in which they figure out how does it work? What is going on? What is going on here? Yes, that is ideologic. That's an ideological operation. What is going on here? Where am I in it? What does it have to do with me? What should I do about this? Why is that like that? Why are those people doing that and I am not? Although any question like that is an ideological question for me. I use the terms very interchangeable. Do you see the difference? But ideologies is not culture. Because by ideologies, I want to identify the specific discourses which operate in the terrain of culture. But ideology, the instance or the arena, the terrain of the ideological, is for me no different from that of the culture. I don't think system and totality are the same. You see, I think totality is a wrapped up system. It is a system which is autonomous from beginning to end. I don't think that that's what Althusser means by system, although I know that there are some parts of his work where he does seem to go back to the idea of totality. But I mean, the system, the way he can, is your communication with your village group that you need? Well, it guarantees it, but hold on, a system means more things than that, because system means the relationship between two terms, and it also means that no one element signifies on its own. It has to be in a relation with some other element to signify. Once you have two terms, there is a systematic relation between them, though it may not be closed. So this is an open-ended system. You can have open-ended systems, which are therefore not totalities. Yes, a totality, I think, is wrapped up and autonomous. It's self-generating. It's closed at both ends. But I think you can have the notion of system. However, I don't think you can use the semiotic model at all without the notion of system. Yes, because what you are bound to be talking about are the different articulations. And an articulation must have some system or pattern of relations between that and that, even if that is purely contingent, even if it only occurs once. It's system in the sense of sets of relations, set. But it's not necessarily systems in the sense of a closed and self-generating system, which is a totality. I don't know how to say it, but I don't share it. No, I think that is how I think post-structuralism sometimes talks about how to say it. And I accept the criticism. I think, for instance, in the ISA's essay, where he talks about reproducing the social relations of production. Now, that is what I call a closed system. Yes, because that's a system that has to reproduce itself, including in ideology. And here the very definition of ideology is that it's functional to the system because it always does it. Now that is closed. In the I Says Essay it's not possible to ever see how the system generates ideas which don't reproduce the reproduction of capital. So that's what I would call a totality. At that point I think the post-structuralists are quite right. Alster slips back into his own notion of totality. but I think in full marks where he's talking about over-determination and where the relations are not fixed they are contingent to each conjuncture system there I don't give the weight of totality what I see there is more just the reminder of socio that the sign is always the sign of a relation referent yes and that to which it refers yes and of course you can take that in many different ways etc but that is I think an insight on which even post-structuralism still operates so even where they criticize what I would call the the tendency to relapse into totalities of his own kind in outer space and I think reading Capital for instance is I think Edward Thompson's correct, basically, about reading capital. I think it is a Spinozian system. I think it is a self-sustaining system. It's a kind of machine, self-generating machine. But I don't think that just the phrase systems of representation necessarily means that. System for me there is a looser term. It means set, configuration, formation. Something that means it consists of more than one term on its own. That's all. That you need, you know, you need some sets of systems. But they can be like Barthes mythologies, yes, which are infinitely open. You can have put them together by bricolage. Yes, there are systems in that very loose sense. The loose sense in which, for instance, you might say every sentence is a system. But you can make many infinite numbers of sentences. So I don't close it up in that early stage of Althusser. So I don't, as it were, abandon Altasir entirely to the side of the older discourses of totality. I think Altasir genuinely, for me, breaks with that older conception of totality. Though I think there are strong pulls in his work back towards it at certain points. Doesn't really attract also the idea of the evil support. In a way, this poor is rather evil support. The real evil. You think it does, you're saying? I think it does. I don't see why you think it does. Why do you think it does? Because it's more or less. That's a question that Rosetta asked me the other day. It's the same question. But I know that this is the secret. I don't deny, therefore, the fantastic transformations that are taking place in the speed at which those things take place. Of course, in that sense, the meaning systems are much more proliferated and it's very difficult to have any linear conceptions of time. Yes, and it looks as if all the layers of time are all simultaneous. But I have to say to Boudreaux that that is a metaphor. That is a metaphor. It must be a metaphor. unless you literally do not understand any more anything you see there is meaning there is no meaning without a code now unless you go back and generate for me a theory of how there can be a meaning without a code i have to say to you of course history is entering a new epoch when there are millions of codes, no codes has dominance, and you can produce a new code at the touch of a technology. That's a different epoch. But it's not the end of meaning. In mind, you can be this new stuff. Yeah, I mean, it depends where you put the weight. I don't feel protected any longer because I don't think there has ever been the meaning. So I don't feel protected by that anymore. I feel it has always been much more contingent than we used to give the account of it as. So I don't feel protected in that way, but I feel... Yes, well, I mean, I think the criticism is just. Yes, I think the criticism is just, but I think it is not just a question of how one feels about that. Yes, I think it is a theoretical question. I think it has to do with with the question of whether philosophically and theoretically one can, as it were, give an account of the sign without meaning. And I don't know what it is, and Baudrillard does not produce one. He does not produce one. So I take all that he says as a metaphor. He's talking about the speeding up of the system. He's talking about the disintegration of the system. He's talking about the pluralism of the system. He's talking about the end of the great stratagems and the great discourses. But then what he helps us to see is that those great discourses occupied a tiny period of historical time. The notion of linear history is about 300 years old. We know who started it. Defico practically invented it. Before that, time and history were conceptualized in quite different ways. And he reminds us about those great discontinuities between the different conceptions of history. It's only that last closure where he says not only will history from now on be different, which I believe it will, where he says it doesn't exist anymore. At that point, philosophically, I don't know that he's proved this case. I think he's taken a kind of leap. Yes, I worry at that moment because, as I think I said before, but I think you weren't here, so I'll say it again. Yes, it happened at the end of an evening. The reason I don't is because it is so screamingly what I understand by ideology. It's exactly what Marx said about ideology. That moment when those who perceive a new stage of history affirm, history ends with us. That's what he said about Adam Smith, you see. Adam Smith had great profound insight into the new system of capitalism. The ideological thing was that he thought that that is what nature is, that is the natural system. So my argument about postmodernism is not the argument about the immense shifts and ruptures which it quite rightly points to and sensitizes us to, yes, which ought to give us a sense of moving into deeply unfamiliar terrain, contingent terrain where new paradigms are arising every day. I feel that absolutely right. It's only the point at which it says, and this is not a historical rupture with the whole episteme of one notion of history and the birth of another, where it says this is the end of history. At that point, I'd say, Baudrillard, you know, just think of who has claimed to be the end of history. Just think of this. Listen, look at the world and look at who is claiming that history ends with them. I can't believe history ends with Baudrillard. I really cannot believe it. Baudrillard takes that position, I think, to its fullest point. So he allows me to quarrel with him simply because he, I think, I mean, see, I think Dulles does not. Yes, and even Lyotard does not. But I think Baudrillard does go almost to the point of the, not the progressive collapse of implosion of the sign, but the collapse of signification. There's all the difference in the world between the implosion of the sign and the collapse of signification. So it's just that last twist that makes me feel that there is something ideological about the postmodernist reading. I was thinking about the way it can be. Yes. You know, wickedism, just a sweet sweet treat that we can give. There's something new that is impossible to think. Yes, yes. Yes, yes. Well, I think I also mentioned it because somebody asked me. No, somebody asked me whether you were here and you weren't. And it's because I said that in a funny way, I think the postmodernist argument has restored the centrality of Adorno. And you were here. And it's exactly in that way. Yes, I think Adorno is coming back into the center of the debate because precisely through the notion of nihilism, yes, of the moment of absolute refusal. And of course, through the notion of the, you know, I mean, through the progressive, as it were, disenchantment with the Enlightenment, with rationalism, yes, etc., Adorno turns out to have anticipated many of those themes very profoundly. And what I would say about that is that it may even be that to go through the moment of the construction of new episteme, one goes through the eye of the storm of nothing. You have almost to be the as if of nothingness before you can think anything in a new, much more contingent world. And I'm convinced absolutely with postmodernism that the world we are entering will be, you know, a world which is much more contingent, in which contingency and difference will be the principle rather than sameness, homology, totality, repetition, etc. So in that sense, I buy a great deal of the argument. And of course, one of the reasons why I talk about Althusser as making such a profound interruption for me is that though he doesn't talk about it in those terms, he does interrupt exactly those old ideas. He interrupts the teleology, the great sweep of history. He interrupts the universal laws of history that guarantee us. He interrupts the last instance, which grounds or ties meaning. He interrupts the warrant, the guarantee that things will come right in the end. So, Al Jusserl is profound for me in inaugurating that break with finality, and therefore in introducing weak thought into cultural studies. So, it's only, I think, at the final kind of, you know, the point where the thought is, I think, not just weak but non-existent or declares itself to be unnecessary, that I see a curious kind of return of the question that you asked me. I think if this is the end of meaning, it is almost the end of ideology. Yes, and the real is just the real. Everything is really what it seems. There's no inside. So in a funny way, I think they too believe in the totality of the sign has kind of blown the system. It's like such a powerful charge that has exploded the system and one can really appropriate the real just by... Everything has become the sign. It's kind of Janus side of the idea of the end of ideology. The end, I suppose this would be the conception, everything is ideology. Everything is inside the sign. Nothing at all is outside it. But neither of those kind of conclusive moments do I quite by yet. But I know that it's an ongoing argument. It's not an answer. It's a provisional position. Another question? Yes. Sure. Well, I'd like to come back to Cisans and Berlish. Yes. And I wonder if you could spend a few words on the concept of structuring that it throws. Yes. And in relation to the core of them all to reduce phenomenology, cultural phenomenology into a network. Structure. and if this concept could be used or has been used in studying not only differences or the similarities between ethnological cultures, but also to study Silla culture. Yeah. Did you hear the question? The question is about the Levi-Strauss notion. Yes, of being able to reduce the great variety of the surface forms of a culture to, as it were, the laws. Yes, the laws of relation and combination, combination and variation, which Levi Strauss called the structure. Levi Strauss has the notion of a deep structure, which generates a number of variant forms. Well, now, it has been used, of course, very fruitfully in ethnology. Levi Strauss' own study of myths is exactly that, where he shows you how myths from different cultures, which have never had any actual influence on one another, have the same deep structure because they use the same notions of logical relationship. The second thing to say is that this notion of Levi Strauss is deeply ingrained in French social thought. It is basically the notion of Durkheim. The notion, that is to say, that what is scientific about the social sciences do not lie at the surface phenomena. You have first of all to reduce the surface phenomena to the structural laws before it can become scientific. And therefore, cultural science must operate on at the level of the code, of the laws, of the combinatory, not at the level of the individual parole. In that sense, each cultural form is regarded as the relation to the structure of langue and parole. Yes, the parole are the utterances. Works are no more than the utterances of individual speakers. And what is important are the rules of grammar, the grammar of the culture. Now, this is a very fruitful conception in many ways. Levi-Strauss has applied it to specific cultures, to the study of myths, and it has been applied very fruitfully to the study of within cultures. I suppose, to some degree, Goldman is a transformation of that. The Gonsman, insofar as Goleman is a structuralist, he is looking at the homologies between different things up there, which are generated by the same set. It's a slightly different take. It's more historicized than Levi-Strauss's is. It's not so synchronic, but nevertheless, it has something of the same feature. And, of course, Nando's early work is structuralist in that sense. It is an attempt to develop a kind of structuralism on the model, on the Levi-Straussian model. Now, I suppose also Barthes work is like that. It's Roland Barthes work. But there's an interesting break in Barthes. It's a break at the between Sistens de la Morde, which tries to describe fashion in exactly that way. Yes, you don't look at fashion, of course, changes from day to day. But there are certain rules. Yes, there's the grammar of fashion which accounts for the changes. So system of a mod is in that old Levi-Straussian form. That's but mark one. And SZ is not. SZ begins to say, each work has its own system. So SZ gives you a series of codes, but it never says you go and use those same codes for somebody else. That works for Saracen, but if you're working on Middlemarch, you need to make up your own codes. So the codes are beginning to proliferate when you get to Bath. And I suppose that using the notion of laws of invariance, of combination is alive in cultural studies now more as a kind of metaphor than as a specific methodology. I think all of us use that notion of, well, I use it in terms of ideology. I think about ideology as partly given at the level of the deep rules. I think that the kind of grammar of particular discourses. And that if you read Locke and Mill, you're reading, as it were, you know, two different variants of the deep structure of what I would call the liberal grammar. But I don't use it in that frozen, synchronic, Levi-Straussian way any longer. Yes? So I don't know that I would any longer think that it's possible to develop a kind of formal methodology, which you could just pick up apply to, particularly within one culture or within one writer, yes, in quite that way. And I suppose it has to do a little bit with the argument about the further undermining of the notion of system, yes, that Levi-Strauss treats those as relatively closed systems. Yes, what is, see, what is beautiful about the Levi-Strauss-Saussure's notion is it's so wonderful for culture, so wonderful for culture when it first emerged, because look at the beauty of it. It has, it accounts for why culture is infinite. So your sense that, you know, there are always new things in culture, always new, and yet it also says there is something which remains the same, which can be studied scientifically. So for the first time, through the linguistic model, there emerged the dream of the sciences of culture. It made culture scientific. But the trouble is that it also made culture the product of a set of invariant rules. And I think what that tends to generate are a series of homological totalities. So it's open exactly to my critique about being too close, The sets that generate are too closed. But I think, I suppose, in a broader sense, I've never lost what I would call the sensibility of the Caesarian model. I've lost the methodology of it, but never the sensibility of it. In the same way, I've never been a formal semiotician, but I've never lost the sense of the semiotic. So I use that as it informs the broad model of my thinking, though I would never dream of, you know, kind of taking five texts and trying to deduce from that what the combinatory that generates them is, which a lot of people did try to do at one stage. But I wouldn't do that now. But, of course, to lose that is to lose the hope of the scientific. I knew you were a great... I knew that's why you asked me the question. yes it is to enter in this domain that we've been talking about the domain of the endlessly sliding signifier of the endlessly contingent history of the history that is ever that is either over determined or under determined but is never properly determined it's where what is determining never entirely covers what is then determined just as what is being represented never covers what is a representation. There is never that promise of adequacy between the different levels. Now, of course, modern post-structuralism sometimes reads that to say there's no relation at all. There's just the endlessly proliferating signs. And I don't believe that either. But I don't believe any longer that there's a system of adequation adequacy. I think what is represented? The means of representation, language, discourse. And what has been represented? That there's no return back from the representation to the real. You can't say that is the same as that. It's because you have now constituted what is represented in the arena of the discursion. And that is open to language, and you can always say it the opposite way around. So the thing remains fixed, but the representation remains different. So once you enter the discursive, the dream of closure, I think, is gone forever. A dream of a final closure is gone. Not the reality of provisional closures. Provisional closures are there. Strategic cuts, criticism, and theory are strategic. Yes, they cut. they take the wager of the cut for what that yields it yields insights it yields genuine knowledge what it doesn't yield is the truth it tells you something it tells you something but it doesn't yield the final truth and that in a sense in which I think I was being invited earlier on to feel comfortable that doesn't make me feel comfortable it doesn't make me feel comfortable But I think it is more adequate to how culture and ideology operate. I think we were always wrong to think that it could be scientifized in a rather positivistic way. I think it's not. It's a funny recognition that, you know, because that is what ordinary people, non-intellectual, has always thought. It's intellectuals who had the dream that we could be really scientific about culture. We could freeze it, you know, stop it, etc. People who, you know, who live culture in a more unconscious way always knew that, you know, that it was, well, that was this year's style and there was the next year's style. That was the medieval age and that is the modern and there will be another modern and another modern. They always knew that the intellectuals would fool them with yet another model, you know. It's us who hoped that we would consolidate our scholarly reputations by finding the model. Then full stop, then we would work it and produce hundreds of analyses which would generate closed systems. But the idea of that system, though it was, I think, wrong in Lévi-Strauss, was magical in its explanatory power. Do you see the point that I'm trying to make? Because you say a thing is wrong, It doesn't mean you drop it over the side. Without it, we gained enormously from beginning to think culture-semiotically in that way. So it was a huge step forward. But the final position was not right. My general theoretical position is that one can almost always learn something new and important from an important theorist, but never everything. Never everything. So I always adopt the slightly sceptical or deconstructivist mode towards the great theory. And that's not a great theoretical position. It's just a kind of survival strategy. It's not to be caught out by the next book, which is going to tell you something you didn't think of yesterday. So I leave the window open for the new, for the owl of nerve of tomorrow to fly in. Because otherwise one becomes like Cazobon, you know, at the end of Middlemarch. One knows everything and understands nothing. It's a weekend, folks. Heh heh heh

This is the sixth lecture in the series. We are past the halfway point. We've gone down to the end and we are beginning to turn back for the straight, as they say in racing. And I want to talk today about what I call the crises of the British state and the origins of the present crisis in the period 1880 to 1920. And this lecture and discussion relates to the previous three or four lectures. I'm, in a sense, drawing the story that I've been trying to tell by looking at liberalism, at the recomposition of popular conservatism, and the influence of race and monarchy and imperial themes in British culture. I'm trying to draw these together in what seems to me a crisis, which is a profound recomposition of English society, politics, culture, and the state, which takes place in the period between 1880 and the mid-1920s. I want to call this crisis as deep and as irreversible as that which takes place in English society between the 1790s and the 1820s. And indeed, since the 1790s to the 1820s is a period which has been identified with a remarkable book, very influential in English cultural studies by Edward Thompson, on the making of the English working class. I want to stress that one of the things that happens, in my view, in this period is the remaking of the English working class. the remaking of the English re-e class, which takes place in this period. And just as I think the trends which develop in English society in the 1790s, the birth of English radicalism, the impact of the French Revolution and of Jacobinism, and what I tried to describe as the recoil, the reversal of English liberalism back into its more respectable paths in the face of the French Revolution. All that is the story about 1790 to 1820. So I think in the period 1880 to the 1920s, there is created in Britain the political, social and cultural forms which dominate English society from that period until now. The crisis of the new right and what is going on in England since the mid-1970s is in my view the end, one end point in a crisis of British society which begins in the 1880s. That period has a major shift in the middle of it around the war. 1945, the Labour government, the beginning of the welfare state is a major important turn, but it doesn't interrupt the long basis that is laid down for English politics, culture and society and the nature of the state in that period. So I want to describe that crisis, the crisis of the English state and of English culture in the period 180 to 1920, and what the result of that was for setting the terms of the present crisis. Now let me very rapidly just establish why it is proper to call this period a crisis of English society at all. The word crisis is a difficult one, and sometimes we use it too easily. Everything becomes a crisis. But I think this really is a crisis. And it's a crisis partly because it is not one, but several crises. Crises of different kinds. Not all having the same origin, but crises which accumulate in this historical moment. They come together in this conjuncture. so I don't want to try to trace it as if there is an origin a crisis and a resolution yes I want to see the different lines and indeed the different histories which accumulate in this period which precipitate a profound crisis of English society now let me just give you very quickly what seemed to me the main dimensions of the crisis before I talk about some aspects in greater detail This is the end of the period of Britain's dominance as a commercial and industrial nation. Britain was the workshop of the world, the first capitalist industrial nation on earth, and in the hundred years between the Industrial Revolution and now, she was unrivaled in commercial and maritime power. But in this period, Britain begins to be overtaken in commercial, in industrial, in economic life, first by Germany, then by Japan, then by the United States. So it's a period of intensified competition between the great nations, and the nations which are industrializing later begin to overtake Britain that industrializes first. Some of the problems of the unevenness of English development arise from the early start which Britain has. The very fact that she is the first industrial nation means that it is more difficult for Britain to enter the second industrial revolution, which happens in this period. It's because the pattern is set. The countries that industrialize later have some of the benefit of understanding what had happened before, and they industrialize in a different way. So although Britain is the first nation in the first industrial revolution, she is one of the weakest industrial nations in the second industrial revolution, which begins around this period. And though I'm not trying to deal in any detail at all with economic life, I want to say that as compared with other industrializing nations, Britain finds it extremely difficult to become a fully fledged monopoly capitalist economy. very difficult. The revolution of Fordism, which is one of the main ways in which the new rhythms of modern industrial life, rapidly modernized societies like Japan and the United States, are very uneven in Britain. Some parts of the economy do move ahead into monopoly capital. Other parts remain located in a much older structure of industry. Britain, therefore, is very slow in making the transition to monopoly capitalism. And one of the things that I want to stress for you is that the period of imperialism, which I described last week, is both the summit of English power and the beginning of its decline. Imperialism is a sign of decline, of decline, not only of triumph. It is because she is scrambling against Germany and scrambling against the French and against the Belgians that the religion of empire shoots up to a kind of summit in the period before and after the First World War. The third dimension is what I call the crisis of the British state. In the mid-19th century, which is the period of liberalism, by that I mean not the majority of the liberal party, I mean liberalism with a small l, a period in which even the conservatives are kinds of liberals, when liberalism is a kind of hegemonic political ideology. The conception of the British state is formed, a state which has an important but minimal role, a minimal role. This is the era of laissez-faire. And the conception is that economic life, that the material growth of British society is based, of course, in the production of wealth and commerce and trade. Those are the main rhythms which are shaming English society. And the state plays an important role but must not intervene too deeply in these basic fundamental economic rhythms of life. Now, it's in this period, in the period 1880 to 1920, for the first time, that laissez-faire and free trade seem to be inadequate ways for maintaining the economic stability and production of English life. And for the first time, from all quarters, from the left and the right, people begin to talk about the need for a new conception of the state. A new conception of the state. Larger, more interventionist, more directive, with greater social authority. And one of the things I'm going to talk a lot about, beginning to intervene in civil society, not just in political and economic life, but in civil society, in education, in the family, in the welfare, in feeding, in sanitation, in health, in population. These new arenas become the sites of state activity for the first time in this period. That is to say, it's the period when, of the crisis and collapse of classical English liberalism of the 19th century kind, Gladstone is the last of the great liberals. And it's the period of a transition to a new form of state and society, which I call collectivism. Collectivism. And I will talk more about collectivism in a moment. Yes, but the birth of what we call the big state, of the big interventionist state, of the state that has a responsibility for the welfare of society as well as for the political representation of the classes, a state which has a responsibility to all the citizens, that is to say, because after all, this state is being formed in the era of the creation of mass democracy. Britain becomes a collectivist state at the same moment as it becomes a mass democracy. And the two things, collectivism and mass democracy, are phenomena which are very closely related, as I will try to show you. Well, another main shift in this period is that it's a shift in the upheaval of the forms of political representation. The old Liberal Party breaks apart and collapses. The Liberal Party had stabilized the center of English politics, but in this period it breaks apart, partly over the question of Ireland, partly over the question of imperialism. It breaks apart, and this is the period that Dangerfield quite rightly calls the strange death of liberal England. Now, let me remind you that in this period, in so far as the emerging... ...of the Liberal Party, they had no representation of their own. There was no working class, independent working class party. The Liberal Party was a complex formation, with establishment liberalism on the one side and liberal radicalism on the other. And the working class was, as Marx said once, the tail of the Liberal Party, the radical tail end of the Liberal Party. Now, just think what I'm saying, yes? This is the Liberal Party which manages to represent within one formation, on the one hand, the emerging industrial and urban working classes, and on the other hand, the landed gentry, the Whig gentry. So it's a huge formation. And inside liberalism, therefore, are many contradictions and different discourses, but you can see that politically it stabilized English society for half a century. This period, this stable form, splits apart. So, it's also the period of the formation of the first autonomous mass working class party in England. This is the period of the formation of the Labour Party. This is the period when English politics ceases to be the competition between conservative and liberals and becomes the competition between a new kind of conservatism and the Labour Party. Conservative Labour is a shift in the nature, in the fulcrum of English political life. Because you remember what I said about conservatism last week, that this is the period when conservatism is remade, when popular conservatism is established, when the Conservative Party makes itself for the first time a popular party, a party that could appeal to the new enfranchised working classes. It borrows the language of patriotism. It borrows the language of popular imperialism, of jingoism. It borrows the language of nation. It wraps itself in the Union Jack, and it re-emerges as a party of popular conservatism. And so now we have struggling, competing for working class allegiance two major political formations, popular conservatism and popular labourism. These are the two parties of the English working class. The two parties of the English working class. And it's in this period that politics, English politics, takes, assumes this new shape. Well, not only that, but I want to say that it is a period when the classes of English society are deeply and profoundly restructured. The upper class is restructured. The middle classes are restructured. What we call the new lower middle classes emerge for the first time. And I will argue the working class itself is also recomposed, recomposed, recomposed in this period, and actually becomes at least two working classes, the respectable working class and the rough working class, a major division in English society between those two echelons. So, it's a period when the class formations are completely reordered, reorganized. And most important of all from the point of view of my lectures, it is the period of a new kind of class culture. A new set of class cultures. Not only the working class, but a new middle class culture as well, as I will try to describe. And since I'm trying to tell this story from the point of view of the formation of modern English culture, I will tell the story in terms, I will spend a lot of detail on the emergence of these new class cultures. But I want to just spend a moment on a theoretical aside. Because I've talked about the recomposition of class. The recomposition of class is one of the most theoretically important conceptions in cultural studies. Because the way in which people analyze class formations in relation to culture is almost always to treat class formations, first of all, as if they are homogenous, as if they are internally undifferentiated. just one thing if everybody within the class believes one thing or thinks one thing or has one set of habits when of course class identities in English society have always been contradictory and complex there have always been alternative class identities which I'm going to speak about I'm going to speak about the change in working class culture in this period as the emergence of alternative class identities. But then it's sometimes believed that only the working classes recompose that the ruling classes and the middle classes are not recomposed. But this is the period of the recomposition of the ruling classes, the ruling elites of English society. It is the emergence of the new plutocracy. The new plutocracy. And that new plutocracy at the top of English society has, derives its money from an entirely different place from that of the entrepreneurs who made Britain an industrial capitalist society. Quite different. They don't have any stake at all in the factory system. Their money is in the city. They are financiers. They live off the clipping of shares. They are the coupon class. the coupon class. They are stockholders, they're shareholders, their companies are financial companies, and they are principally involved in the export of capital to the empire. They can make five times as much money by sending the money, the capital, out of England, investing in gold, in trade, in the opium trade, in tea plantation, by sending it abroad five times as much. can they increase their capital as investing in British industry at home. This is the period when the British ruling class stops investing in the industrialization of British society. That is why Britain cannot make it properly into monopoly capital, because, of course, that means the reorganization of economic life. It means new technologies. It means a new organization of factory systems. It means the joint stock company. It means new forms of production and new disciplines at work. And that requires capital, capital, capital. But the British capital is draining away through the operation of the city and the financiers overseas. So this is a new plutocracy. It's the super rich. The super rich of empire. There are the imperial gentlemen. These are the imperial gentlemen. Yes, you asked me to talk about the... These are the imperial gentlemen with their rolled umbrellas. They go into the city. They watch the stock market. They make London the absolute financial center of the world. They make sterling an international currency. Meanwhile, the British industrial economy declines. So, the refashioning of the leading element, the leading echelon in the ruling class is just as important as the emergence of a new respectable echelon in the working class. So, theoretically, what I'm trying to show you is that we can't speak of classes in some, like, lumps. Yes, like, as if they're undifferentiated and uncontradictory lumps of humankind. All with one single ideology. And above all, we cannot speak of classes as if they are fixed historically. They are themselves recomposed, refashioned, restructured. One of the main problems in English society now in the 1980s is that the working class and the popular classes have been restructured again. And so profoundly restructured that nobody can even recognize them. See, they don't come on with cloth caps. They don't look like Engels' description in the condition of the working class. And therefore, there can't be a working class because they need to dress up. They need to stage themselves theatrically like we expect the class to be. And if they don't stage themselves like that, we think they've disappeared from history. So we are dealing with the profound recomposition of classes in this period. Okay, now I want to look at some aspects of the crisis that affect the formation of English culture a little bit more deeply. First of all, I talk about aspects around the crisis of liberalism. I try to describe in my second lecture, which is called The Long March of Liberalism, I try to describe how, importantly, conceptions of the state and civil society, conceptions of the individual and the linking between the discourses of the individual, liberty, property, and patriarchy formed. That's what I call the terrain, the terrain of middle class liberalism. Now, in this period, these durable conceptions, this common sense of mid-century middle class English liberalism is recomposed, is reconstituted. They no longer, those forms of liberalism no longer seem to the English to be adequate to take them into the 20th century. They don't seem to be re-industrializing the country. They don't seem to be modernizing the society. They are treated as beginning to fragment and break up. And in this period, liberalism itself is redefined. We have the emergence of what is called the new liberals, the new liberals. And the new liberals have a new conception of the state. They say the state must take on a much expanded role, much expanded role, if we are to have a proper sense of citizenship and they believe the state must represent the community as a whole and must be much more interventionist. Without the new liberals, there would never have been the immense period which initiates the welfare state in England between 1906 and 1911, the so-called reforming liberal government of 1906 to 1911, which introduces for the first time social insurance, health, sickness, prevention against sickness, school meals, milk for children. Yes, the beginnings of the welfare state is a result of the last reforming liberal government in which new liberal ideas have come to part. The old liberal ideas would never have conceived of the state playing such an interventionist role. It believed individuals should be left to look after their own. In this period, the state acknowledges, And it's one of the things that happens is the revival of a new kind of liberalism, which has links, much stronger links, to what we call in modern times social democracy. Believes in the welfare state. It believes in reformism. It believes in mass representation. It believes in a greater role for the state. And the new liberals are the Hammonds, Hobhouse, philosophers like Green. T.H. Green, etc. They articulate a transformation of liberalism which enables it to become the doctrine of a greater role for the state in civil society. So one of the things that the crisis of liberalism brings about is a shift in the balance between state and civil society. It recomposes is the balance between state and civil society, giving a much greater weight to the state in the equation between the two. Okay, another dimension that I've mentioned before, but I want to elaborate on a little bit, is the crisis of political representation. You see, the old political party system was recognized as a system with a limited franchise. Only some people could have direct rights of political representation. The rest, large numbers of the urban poor, had to be represented through what was called the political classes. The political classes. There were the political and the non-political classes. many of the non-political classes were not directly represented in power at all. Now this is the period when, from all directions, this period, this system of the limited democracy, begins to be assailed, attacked. First of all in industrial life, with the rise of the new unionism. Then with the attack on the franchise, which in two movements, in the 1880s and then eventually, around the time of the First World War, abolishes the limitations and introduces adult male suffrage. And then the third is, of course, the huge development of the suffrage movement and the claims of women to political rights. So you can see the forms of representation, political representation, are being rapidly changed and transformed in this period. And now, I want to say that this is not only a transformation of the old form, the breakdown of the old form, but the emergence of new political forms without which you cannot understand the 1970s and 80s. Because this is when popular conservatism is born. This is when laborism emerges for the first time. This is the period of the birth of Fabianism, of Fabianism, as well as the new liberalism. It's also the only time when syndicalism has a real life in English working class politics. It's the period of the socialist revival, of English socialism. It's the period around and before the First World War and after of English Marxism. Yes, so the new political ideologies, which since then have contended for mastery on the political stage in England, emerge in this period. This is the period of their formation. I described before what popular conservatism looked like. Now we have to add to that that there are new social movements. I described to you the development of what I call social imperialism. Social imperialism, let me remind you, was a doctrine which appealed both to right and left. Joseph Chamberlain was a social imperialist, but so was Hindman, who was the secretary of the Social Democratic Federation, one of the main Marxist sects in England. One of the main Marxist groupings in England was also an imperialist. Socialist, Marxist, imperialist. So, social imperialism was not a movement confined to the upper classes. Yes, it was one which had deep resonances and which was designed to appeal to a cross-class. Yes, here, that's an important point I'm making, the emergence of cross-class political and social movements. The suffragettes is exactly the same kind. Yes, one part of suffrage of the feminist movement is articulated through one branch of the family, through one branch of the family to the left. and another part of suffragism is articulated through another branch of the same family to liberalism. Makes its main attack on liberalism and indeed ends up with a kind of inverted nationalism, kind of inverted social imperialism. So here is the feminist movement which is linked to the left and the right. Here is popular imperialism linked to the left and the right, and here is what I want to call collectivism, also linked to the left and the right. Because there is an argument for collectivism from both the left and the right, which I will elaborate on in a moment. The point I want to make here is simply the emergence of the discourses, the ideologies, and the formation of modern British politics. Modern British politics. forms up in this period. If you want to say you can't understand English working class politics without understanding the exact complex nature of the Labour Party, this is when it is formed. If you say that the leading intellectual ideas of English socialism, which is Fabianism, this is when Fabianism emerges. So all the central discourses of English political life, They don't remain the same, of course. They've changed over 50 years, 70 years. But this is when, this is the period of their formation. Okay, I want to add to that, just add to that, that what is taking place then is not just a change in the mechanics, in the mechanisms of political representation. Not just that, though that is important. Not just new political alignments, which are important, Every time there's a major crisis of this kind, there are new political alignments. You know, I had the Gramsci quote, but you don't really want me to quote it, do you? You want me to quote it? Okay, I'll quote it. At a certain point in their historical lives, it's you, not mine, your person, not mine, social classes become detached from their traditional parties. That's the break of liberalism. In other words, the traditional parties in that organizational form, with the particular men who constitute, represent, and lead them, are no longer recognized by their class or their fractions of classes as its expression. When such crises occur, the immediate situation becomes delicate and dangerous. And I tried to say it last time when I was talking about imperialism, the rise of these imperial men who thought they could make their reputations abroad and come home and be the little Caesars of English politics. Milner, Lloyd George, Chamberlain, all thought of themselves not as democratic politicians but as pro-consuls. Pro-consuls. They thought they would bypass democracy, which took a very long time to do something. They thought England had to be taken by what Chamberlain called the scruff of the neck. Yes, they wanted a strong figure to take it by the scruff of the neck. So Gramsci is perfectly right. These are delicate and dangerous times for democracy. Delicate and dangerous times. Because the field is open for violent solutions, for the activities of unknown forces represented by charismatic men of destiny. And there were around this period in English politics such charismatic men of destiny. F.E. Smith and Carson went to Ulster, which is a kind of fantasy land of English reactionary politics. It has always been and is now the dream world of English reactionary politics. You can't actually raise an army to march on Westminster in England, but you can do it in Ulster. As soon as you cross the Irish Channel, you can go absolutely berserk, totally berserk. And these serious politicians left their clubs in downtown London and went over to Ireland and started marching up and down with rifles, wooden rifles. in case Parliament should be so stupid as to give Ireland away to the Republic. So don't mistake it. This is the period. Democracy comes out of it. But the notion that it is a nice, slow, gentle English process with everybody saying, well, have the vote. Come in and have the vote. Not at all. sections, sections of the new English ruling classes, convinced that Britain either makes it by a huge dynamic effort or will fail to make it, knows that a new center of authority has to be constituted and that laissez-faire and free trade and individualism is not strong enough to do it. It has to be rooted in the state, in the state. and one must, as it were, rule from the state. And Joseph Chamberlain and Lloyd George are representative characters of this transition. Both of them are radical liberals in their youth. Both of them end up as deeply conservative politicians. One is a high imperialist and the other is a kind of dictator during the period of the war. And this is what happens. What happens when liberalism fragments is the polarization of English political life and the expansion of the domain of politics. The expansion of the domain of politics. Okay, I want to talk a little bit more now about collectivism. About collectivism. I want to preface this by reminding you that every crisis is also a moment of recomposition. We think about crises as something breaking apart or breaking down. But when things break down, they're also being recomposed. They don't remain like that. They are recomposed. So every crisis, that is another Gramscian point, and I won't bother to repeat the quotation for you. The moment of destruction is also a moment of restoration. So this crisis is also a moment when new unities, new configurations, new formations are arising. And one of the central ones for my story is what I want to call the collectivisms. Now, I call it that because there are several collectivisms. There's not one, but several. There is the collectivism of the social imperialists. They believe in the strong state, in the imperial state in Britain, not just being great, but being great because it is the center of an empire. evolved the discourses of empire and of nation and of monarchy, which I tried to describe to you last week. But that is a collectivist conception of the state, where the state is thought of as representing, no longer in the old liberal way, as simply representing single lone individuals and their families, but now representing collective social interests. That is part of the state. The state must represent collective social interests. And the state must play a larger role because it needs to harmonize these different interests within a structure of power. Now, for the first time, when everybody has the vote, men and women, everybody is a citizen of the state. So the state is, for the first time, the universal state. The British state was never universal before this. This is the moment of the universal state. This is the moment of mass democracy. When everybody has a vote, if you're 21, eventually, by 1920, simply as a result of being an adult and British. Born British and an adult, you have a vote. So the state now, there are no political classes and the people outside of political society who are represented by them. No longer. Everybody is a citizen. So the state has to now encompass in its policies. It has to have a policy for every social interest. And the reconciliation, the establishment of a compromise or balance of forces between these different interests is now the job of the state. It can't be left to the market and to parliament. The state now has to play a role in providing the forms in which the compromises and negotiations and trade-offs between the different social interests can be arrived at. So it is a period of the expansion of the social intervention of the state, of the state in civil society. And I tried to describe to you last week, let me just remind you, this is the period when the state has an interest in the health of the population, in the sanitation of the streets, in the building and lighting of cities, in the removal of slums. It has a role in the preservation of the family, in motherhood, in keeping mothers at home, in providing for the health of the working class, in giving them school milk and school meals, in providing a way in which working men and working women can retire on a pension, the beginning of a pension, the creation of the welfare state, the size and rate of the population itself becomes an object of state intervention. There are, I tried to describe to you before, five select committees and royal commissions on population. The only time before this when the population was a question of state and public intervention is of course in the period of in a much earlier period. It's a period when people think they're going to be overrun by the poor. The period of Malthusianism. Now the opposite. Now they're not enough Englishmen for the empire. The birth rate is falling and the state has to do something about it. It's a period when the state becomes involved once again in the threat of contagious diseases, in the huge attack which is mounted against specifically sexual disease in the Navy, in the Army, in the family, when for the first time what we call social work, it's the origin of English social work, of professionalized workers whose object is to look after the family and make sure that people have a good home and to get the children off the streets and into the youth clubs or into the scouts or into the guides or into the brigades, to get them off the street. It's now a job for the state. In the same period, of course, it's the period of the expansion of English education, when the state recognizes that it has a duty to establish free elementary education for everyone. So, I can't describe the expansion of state activities into civil society, which I want to emphasize to you is the creation of new sites, new social sites, today in the rhetoric of the new right which I will be talking about tomorrow we talk as if civil society was always the same and only sort of in the 1970s did the state suddenly begin to intervene in places that used to be free of the state it's not true, it's not true these new sites of social intervention come to be established in this period now that is an aspect of collectivism and it's what I call collectivism from above. Collectivism from above. In order to modernize the state and to create the conditions of social reproduction for an imperial society, the dominant classes in England lose their commitment to laissez-faire liberalism and the laissez-faire conceptions of the state and society and begin to move in a collectivist direction. And, of course, the First World War doubles, speeds up, accelerates that movement. Because in order to fight the first total war, you need the state. Lloyd George, for the first time, directs industry. He directs labor. He tells labor when to produce, when not to produce. He establishes a ministry of munitions. Those things, the idea of the state running the war factories and telling people whether they can hire labor or not, was unthinkable until this period. This is the period when the modern British state is being created. Now, another aspect of collectivism is intellectual. Intellectual. This is the period of what I want to call the organic state intellectuals. The organic state intellectuals. They are young men, not all of them, many of them, middle class, decent middle class homes. They don't come from the upper classes. But they have imbibed the gospel of the new collectivist state. And they move in to the new echelons of the state. And they create there for the first time the bureaucracies of the modern state. Llewellyn Smith. Llewellyn Smith is a wonderful figure. Because he went to help. So he was a young radical. but he's also taken by the idea of service to the working class. So in the next period, he establishes one of the settlement houses in the East End. Middle class philanthropists went to the East End and set up houses where the working class could learn to be more well behaved and disciplined and washed and so on. So given a home in the settlement house. Llewellyn Smith then enters the civil service and becomes one of the crucial civil, new kinds of civil servants in the Ministry of Trade. The third, William Beveridge. This is the period when Beveridge emerges. You know, you may know Beveridge's name because in 1945, after the war, Beveridge, William Beveridge, was the architect of the new welfare state. In 1945, he launched the welfare idea of the welfare state in the Second World War. And so nowadays, people think of Beveridge as a humanitarian reformer. In this period, Beveridge is preoccupied with the question of how to organize labor. He is the creator of the labor exchange. And his belief is that the problem is that labor is not properly organized and that trade unions provide one of the deepest blocks against moving the working class around to find jobs. So these new men, these are the new men of the English bureaucracy, the new state bureaucracies, not in defense, that's old, not in the colonies, that's old. This is in welfare, in labor, in health, in education. Yes, the new ministries staffed up by these new collectivists. This is when the ideal of the disinterested English civil servant who serves either political master equally, because really he does not serve the conservatives or even Labour. He serves the state and the nation. So you don't need to change him when a new government comes in. You don't change these men. They remain stable. They serve everybody. You realize that the same senior civil servant, the permanent secretary to the cabinet, who is the Prime Minister's deepest, closest advisor in the English Civil Service, does not change when the government changes. The same man sits, who has just heard all the plots, all the cabinet plots of the Conservatives, serves the next government because these are the disinterested states. So what you are seeing, another aspect of collectivism, is the elaboration of the idea of the neutral state the neutral state the state that is above politics and of these state intellectuals these civil servants as no longer at the pull of one party faction or another but as the men of the nation the men of the nation morant makes a new elementary school system for all children and beveridge establishes labour exchanges for all of labour And Llewellyn Smith introduces the whole notion of industrial bargaining, of bringing the trade unions and the bosses in to the Ministry of Labour to discuss with a neutral chairperson, a neutral arbiter, what is called in England industrial arbitration, born in this period. One of the main architects of it is Llewellyn Smith. One of the key figures who thinks about it is Lloyd George. So another aspect of collectivism is this expansion of the state, of the bureaucracies of the state, what we call social work, professional social work, the idea of middle class people whose job it is to attend to working class problems, help them to deal with life, to organize their life. probation officers family case workers community workers, youth workers this is the birth of their profession they did not exist in England before ok so collectivism is being established by many different impulses but one I haven't talked about yet and now I want to talk about the collectivism of the left because one of the most one of the people, one of the groupings that most has this conception of the new kind of state are the Fabians. Sidney Webb, who is one of the founders of the Fabian Society, one of the main architects of the English Labour Party, wrote the constitution of the British Labour Party. Sidney Webb and his wife, Beatrice Webb, The two leading intellectuals of English middle class socialism are deeply collectivists. They are not liberals. They hate liberalism. They hate individualism. They want a more regulated, more disciplined, more organized life. I mean, you know, it's the slightly scandalous story that when Sidney and Birchis Webb finally made their heroic visit to the Soviet Union In the 1930s, they thought it was wonderful. They thought it was terrific. That's just what socialism should be. Of course, the life of the ordinary people were improving. But the idea that the life of ordinary people, that ordinary people should govern their own lives, that was anathema to the world. They must be run by experts, by the middle classes, by people who really understood. and they would create the working class would stir up a little trouble they would shake the railings but then you needed people who really understood the science of government that's what Sidney Webb was into the science of government and administration Sidney Webb was a socialist Bentham he could administer and bureaucratize anything in the world he was a new kind of collectivist utilitarian. And he believed in, not in democracy. You want to read Beatrice Webb, you know, on democracy. She thought it was a joke. A joke. You want to read Beatrice Webb on the horny-handed new trade unionists who were socialists they had to have to dinner parties, but, you know, she could hardly bear to see them because they were so uncivilized. But gradually, gradually she thought more dinner parties of the right kind associating with the right sort of people they would be civilized they too would be civilized and there is formed well I don't know how to describe it honestly it's the basic rhythm of English laborism the basic rhythm of structure of English laborism it's not anti-working class but it's administering the working class in power. That the people who should really run for power, run the government, run the civil service, etc., must be not the old ruling class. It's not a conservative philosophy. It's not a conservative philosophy. They must be new men like Sidney Webb. But they must be men who understood how to organize complex managerial systems, run big ministries, run big bureaucracies, Run the government of London, which Sidney Webb ran for a time. Have new projects for education, etc. They're men of vision, but men of administration and bureaucracy. And the Labour movement is to create the political conditions in which this leadership of the working class should come to power. Everybody should vote for Labour. But Labour must look like Clamackley. It mustn't look like working men off the shop floor. This is the basic rhythm, and Fabianism comes to be the dominant ideology of English laborism, of English socialism. And it also is a collectivism or a statism of the left. So, one of the things that I'm arguing is that in this period emerges what I want to call the collectivisms. and the collectivism is not one single thing it's an impulse towards new state forms and new civil society forms which I call collectivism of the left, of the right, of the reformist left of the new liberals everybody is pressing as it were in the collectivist direction okay I want to turn from that now to talk about two other features first of all very rapidly just about what I call the political containment the political containment see the period 1880 to 1926 if I could give you the date the period of the general strike is a period of relatively rising industrial unrest. There are two major periods of deep unemployment. In the wake of the Great Depression, the 1870s to the 1880s, you know the period when Booth undertakes his investigations into the London Pool. Yes, it's a crucial period. You know why Booth went? Because Hindman said, there have never been such poor people in all of England. And Booth said, it's not true. Not true. I will investigate what the poor are like and tell you. And what he came back was to say, Hindman is right. He's never been so right. So there's deep unemployment. Unemployment improves in the 1890s. But then again, just before and immediately after the war, are real crises of the depth of unemployment. And the unemployment is like modern unemployment. It's not just that Britain is suffering from commercial competition. It's also that the nature of industrial work and organization is changing. British industry is being restructured. Old, the old skills of the working class are being re-skilled. And lots of people are thrown out of work simply because their skills will never again be needed. This is what we call structural unemployment. Structural unemployment. Not unemployment as a result of a change in the terms of trade, but a change in the structure of the British economy. So the depth of structural unemployment before and after the war. And in this period, there emerges, first, I'm telling the story very quickly because you probably know it, first of all, the change in the nature of English trade unionism, the beginning of the formation of the general unions instead of the old craft unions, of unions which came out of the earliest structure of industry. Now people talk about in the gas workers and the boilermakers. They talk about unions which, as it were, try to cut across the different sectors or levels of industry. So it's an upsurge in the new forms of industrial representation. It's the formation of a radical trade union English politics around what is called the Triple Alliance, bringing together the miners with the railway men, with the transport workers, etc. It's the formation of a real cadre of radical, radical trade unions for a period of time. It's the birth of the languages of English Marxism, the Social Democratic Federation, William Morris' organization, Hindman, etc., right up to 1917, when, as you know, the Russian Revolution happens, there is a wave of sympathy in certain sections of the English working class, and they are able to bring the docks to a halt and prevent Churchill from sending help to the white Russians. So there's a fund of sympathy. the English wearing class is not Marxist in its deep culture, but there are the Marxist groupings emerge in English socialist politics in this period for the first time. It's the period of the language of English syndicalism, of English syndicalism. That is to say, in this period, as in Italy, in Turin, in Germany, in the revolution immediately after the First World War. And in France, in the huge birth of syndicalism, this is the proletarian moment. This is the proletarian moment. This is the moment of the proletariat. The other period, the proletariat doesn't exist now and it didn't exist before, but this is the time when it existed. This is the time when, as the new rhythms of the Second Industrial Revolution begin to form, The upper echelon, the highly skilled sectors of the labor force recognize in themselves that they are the class of production. They are the class of production. That if capital was swept away and the bureaucracy was swept away, they know how the factories run. This is a moment of supreme confidence in the proletarian sections of the English workers. It's a period, you know, of what is called Red Clydeside, where in Scotland they form what are called little Soviets. Little Soviets. They do so in Wales as well. Little communities that declare themselves independent of the British state altogether, where they read only Marx, Lenin, Hegel, etc., the continental philosophers, self-education, classes, night classes in modern Marxism. This is the formation of English Marxism. as a mass political force. And the language of syndicalism, the language of, yes, the high proletarian moment, is surfaces for a time and constitutes one of the great threats to the stability of English life. It is the period when the Liberal Party breaking up, the working class begins to talk about forming an autonomous party, the Labour Party, breaking with the Liberals and forming their own by a margum of the trade unions and the other movements in the working class of forming the english labour body now i have to tell you that on the eve of the first world war and in the period immediately after the first world war Britain was closer to a revolution than it has ever been since the 1790s. Closer, in my view. Closer even than Chartism. This is the moment when it's just a tip-off as to whether these forces are not going to make, remake English socialism as a revolutionary force. And the people at the top of the society conceive of the greatest threat, the greatest threat. So one of the other elements in collectivism is the use of the state in monitoring what is happening to the working class. This is the beginning. If you read Keith Middlemast's book, The Politics of Industrial Society, you will read the degree to which there are intelligence forces within, not in the police, but in the state itself, keeping touch with the syndicalist leaders, trying to find out what is being decided in the Triple Alliance. Intelligence, the intelligence about subversion. Intelligence about subversion. Now, at that point in time, If you stopped in about 1912 or 1913 and said, what will English socialism be like? You would not have been able to tell. It could have been Fabian. It could have been syndicalist. It could have been Marxist. It could have been an anarchist. The languages of socialism proliferate. There are all varieties. So when we look back, we talk now as if there was some inevitability that English socialism should assume the form it did. It was up for grabs in this period, up for grabs, up for grabs. But what is important is what happens to it. What happens to it? First of all, the vote is conceded. And that is one of the major things. In spite of all the struggles, first of all to men and then to women, The state is willing to expand itself rather than have a confrontation between the excluded elements of labor and the rest and the state itself. That's one of the main things that happens. The second thing that happens is, of course, the split that is brought about by the First World War, which I described to you before. When the labor movement has to choose between its identification with the international working class and the identification with the nation and enters the war behind the nation. Choses to fight Britain versus Germany. And at that point, the languages, the discourses of nation and people override those of class solidarity. So those tensions that are always in English society between those different discourses of class and nation are resolved on the side of nation and people rather than on class and struggle. It's a very important moment. And the third element is what is called the constitutionalizing of the Labour Party. The constitutionalizing of the Labour Party. Labour has two minority governments, both in the 1920s. It doesn't win a majority, but it has two minority governments. And the leaders of English society say to one another, what is important is that Labour can take political power in the society, without the society collapsing. Do you understand that? We must find a way of regularizing and constitutionalizing Labour as another party of the crown. Then the Labour Party becomes what is called Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. Her Majesty's Loyal Opposition. If at that point the Conservatives had stood out and said, never a Labour Party, never a Labour Party, then Labour would have taken a much more antagonistic view to the state. But this is the period when the Labour leaders are invited in. They're invited in. Everybody throws dinner parties for them. They're brought in the first representatives. They lend Keir Hardie a top hat. That's because they say he's a leader of Labour. He's a parliamentarian. He's one of the first independently elected MPs he must appear as an english gentleman of course he must not appear as a rough and scruffy worker with a cloth cap and a tweed coat he must appear like us he is one of us we don't agree with him of course he stands for labour and we stand for capital but that's not the point this is an orderly enough society for Labour to rule, Conservatives to rule, the regular rotation of the parties is normalized. And in that moment, the moment when Labour becomes the constitutional party of Her Majesty the Queen, when Her Majesty can call on Malcolm, on the leader of the Labour Party, equivalent with the leader of the Liberal or Conservative Party, Labour is inside the pale. inside the pale you know what the pale is? the fort, the fortress Labour is not now outside knocking on the door it's inside different but inside and the nation is large enough to include it large enough to include it it doesn't have to fight to keep it out and that is the constitutionalising of the Labour Party together with the national the unity around nation and state and the reforms which go on in that period welfare state, the expansion of education etc help to bring the working class inside the pale I want now to turn to the last section of the story and it's called the remaking of the class cultures of the cultures. I've been describing the political and the social, the transformations of the state, the economic underpinnings, but now I want to talk about this same story in cultural terms. Eric Hobsbawm has argued that if you read Richard Hoggart's book, The Uses of Literacy, he talks about the traditional working class the way of life of the traditional working class this is when the traditional working class way of life is formed up now not before this not before this not before this this is when for the first time working class culture becomes what we now think of as traditional. So the mechanism that I talked about to you last week, the invention of tradition, also works with respect to the working class. The working class is invented as a traditional social force now, at this time, in the 1890s, 1920s, and I'm going to describe it to you. But first of all, I want to say to you that the English middle classes, what we now think of as traditional, respectable English middle-class life is also remade in this period. See, this is the period when, you know, the... This is the period when... How can I conjure it up? If you think of Dickens, Dickens is the best example, you know, of the older middle class. Yes, of the, you know, of gentility. Gentility is an aspiration for the English middle class and of utilitarianism. The gospel of utilitarianism and of a certain kind of respectability of the English middle classes. But gradually, those patterns of the English middle class begin to be disturbed and broken up. And one begins to see the formation of new class formations. New class formations. One of the most important new class formations is that of the new lower middle classes. The clerks, the teachers, the people in local government. You see how they depend on the expansion of the state. Yes, the expansion of elementary education creates a new echelon of middle class people who are not the captains of industry. They're not entrepreneurs. They are people, the law professionals, the black-coated workers, the shopkeepers. Remember, this is the period when you're beginning to get the development of mass shopping. It's the construction of mass shops, of shops which are selling cheap goods for the lower middle classes and the working class. Well, the shopkeeper is now no longer just working a little corner shop, the shopkeepers beginning to work in some of the larger, yes, new grocery stores, which emerge in this period. So there are new kinds of middle class people who are mediating between the aspiration of the older English middle classes and the working class. The remaking of the English middle class. The English middle classes in this period undergo three waves of social anxiety. Three waves of social anxiety. One is around the time of Chartism. You know what social anxiety is? It's when a whole group, social group, begins to get the fear that it is going to be murdered in its bed by somebody. In the 1840s and 50s, the English middle classes thought they were going to be murdered in their bed by Chartists. Yes, by chartists, basically. In the 1860s and 70s, the English middle classes think they are going to be murdered in their beds by the unemployed. Yes, by the unemployed and the poor. In the 1880s and 90s, they believe they're going to be murdered in their beds by the criminal. By the criminal. By crime. The society is obsessed by the rise of urban crime. Of urban crime. High unemployment, social industrial unrest, the fear of property, the spread of socialist ideas, etc. But especially the new element, one of the new elements, is crime. Well, the middle castes in this period develop a civilizing mission, not to the colonies, but to the colonies in England. It's England that they think has to be civilized by missionary work. And I described to you last week some of the missionary efforts, the scout movement, the religious movement, the evangelical movement, etc. They want to create a physical and institutional environment for the remoralization of the working class. The only way to stop them attacking people in their beds is to provide, to create a moralized and disciplined working class. So they set about that in material terms. Improve their housing. Clear up the slums. Remove the warrens where crime and the criminal and the pickpockets could escape and nobody could follow them. Improve the street lighting. Improve the police. Let in the air. Let's improve the health of the working class. So the working class will no longer infect people with epidemics, etc. It's to improve the human and social environment. This is the period of the planned city and improvements of parts of London and of acts of parliament which are taken to allow people to inspect the houses of the poor and to clear slums. A period of slum clearance and the building of new dwellings for the working classes happens in this period. but at the same time it's also a stern attempt to moralize the working class to make them more temperate less prone to drink to improve their habits to make them more presentable and to make them in fact respectable make them respectable now the fact is that this great civilizing mission of the philanthropic middle classes to the working class in this period is not very successful. They do not succeed in making the English working class Christian. Nobody ever does. Not deeply. It is not, on the whole, a deeply religious working class. You have to go outside of the heartland of England, into the dissenting areas, into the border areas, into Wales, etc., to find where Methodism and the dissenting sects made a deep imprint on the modern English working class. But in the cities, the English working class does not take on the evangelical message. Nor do they become temperate. Nor do they become temperate. There's a huge movement throughout the 19th century to try to abolish drink. It's because it's thought, if only you can make the working classes sober, you will make them disciplined. And that doesn't come off either. Partly because some of the people who are most into brewing, making English ale, English drink, are Tory landlords. So there is an unbreakable alliance between popular conservatism and drink, which is unbreakable. Unbreakable. You have to go to the local, which is run by a Tory landlord. You know, you've seen him because you've seen pictures of him. Yes, large, jolly, with, yes, red cheeks and the tankard of ale. Yes, and old Britain, old Britannia, not socialism, you know, not Marx up there. Old Britannia and the Queen and a few coronation mugs. And then the local pub is reproducing the class structure of English society. In the saloon are the respectable English middle classes. And in the open part of the pub, that is where the working class goes to drink. They are as regular there as an English gentleman at his club. It is the English working man's club. Now, as you know, in this period, the pub in the previous period had been the center of radical ideas. It had been the center of the organization of the friendly societies. It had been where the chartists would go and preach. It was a center of radical and artisan subversion. In this period, the pub is tamed. The pub is tamed. It ceases to be a political center and becomes a center of entertainment. A center of entertainment. It is what is called the local. And the English middle working class stops being intemperate. That is to say, it stops drinking too much and begins to drink in a regular, disciplined, sober way. Between half past five and half past ten in the evening, three and a half pints, not too much, not too little. If you get drunk regularly, you must be Irish. The English know exactly how to drink just enough, just enough. So they don't become temperate, but they don't become drunkards either. The sober habit of steady, regular drink at the local. This is the period when the English gravitate into the working class family home. Working class family home. When the mother becomes very important because she looks after the home. she looks after the home she's the center of domestic life and when the better off working class men respectable working men conceive that one of the main signs of their respectability is their capacity to keep their wives at home keep their wives at home like a proper English gentleman does so this is the articulation of the modern English sense of the separate spheres. In the home, of course, mother rules. That's her terrain. She is the queen of that haven. Outside, of course, the Englishman goes to the local to escape her or to escape a mother-in-law or the screaming brats, etc., the children. That rhythm, home life, the local, home life and the local, is established as one of the fundamental rhythms of English life. You listen to the English music hall. The English music hall is full of jokes about English marriage. Of course I love my wife. She is what you call the old Dutch. But you don't take her everywhere. You leave her at home and you go out for a bit of fun. Yes, the great categories of the English working class imaginary are structured in this period, home and life. It's the period of the seaside excursion. When what you do is you take one of the new cheap railways and you go to Brighton for the day. You can't have a week's holiday, but you go to Brighton for the day. You wouldn't dream of doing what the English middle classes and upper classes did, which was to hire a booth and change inside and emerge in your, you know, one piece. You wouldn't do that, but you would roll up the bottom of your trousers and paddle a little. So the places near London and near Manchester, Liverpool, Eastbourne, etc., become the day of the Sunday excursion. This is the days when the English working class invests like crazy in betting, when there's an absolute fanaticism for English horse racing for the first time. W.H. Auden once said that the English middle classes are too stingy to bet on the races, but that the race course is where the profligate upper classes meet the profligate working class, and the two of them, though one is in the stands and the other is down below, both of them are betting like crazy. Betting. So this is the era of the sporting paper. And it's also the era of the new popular press. So you don't aspire to teach yourself to master the long sentences and syntax of the middle class papers. There's a paper for you. You buy for a penny. It's a new shape like that. You can read it on the new commuter train because a lot of people are now separated work and home. They're living in the new suburbs of the big cities. And they're traveling into work in the daytime and out in the evening. And they're reading not the Guardian or the Observer or the Times or the Telegraph. They're reading the new sporting papers. They're reading the new papers which are written specifically, written down for them in the new demotic vocabulary of the newly educated classes. And the young people are doing the same. They're reading Penny Dreadfuls and the first cartoon papers. This is the creation of the sporting postcard. You must know the postcard that Orwell wrote about, the seaside postcard of the women with the big bottoms, little jokes. If you did manage to go to Blackpool, you had to send one dirty postcard home. And that is because English life is becoming structured Saturday night and Sunday morning and Monday. Monday to Friday is work. Sober, go to work, go to the local, go to bed early at night, etc. Then Saturday and Sunday is the splurge. You can go to the seacoast or you can go to the football. This is the period of the beginning of mass football as a spectacle. You can go to the seaside, you can go on an excursion. And then that is pleasure. and you're allowed to be rude on the weekend, but only respectable in the middle of the week. So you can send back a postcard to your family with a dirty joke, which you could not tell them at the dinner table. Respectable working man would not say that joke face to face in the family. But when it escapes out for a little play, pleasure, then it can say all sorts of things. So you get that rhythm of discipline and pleasure. Discipline and pleasure. Discipline and pleasure. The habits of cleanliness. The habits of order. The habits of blocking out work and entertainment. The rise of the non-political working class. Of trade unionists in top hats. Of what Lenin called the aristocracy of labor. It's the period of mass cycling and mass football and of the bank holiday and of seaside excursions and of the fish and chip shop. Last time, I think when I was talking about this same period from the perspective of race and imperialism, I said, remember that the most characteristic English drink is the cup of tea. The tea comes from India and the sugar comes from the West Indies. Well, now this is the period of the truly English fish and chip shop. It doesn't go back to the 1850s and 40s. There are no fish and chip shops. There are eel pie shops. There are other things that the earlier working class had as part of their own culture and custom, but the idea of the fish and chip shop, yes, as a late night stopover, this is when it happens. This is when it happens. In short, alongside the threat of syndicalism, socialism, and the proletarian moment, is the remaking the remaking of the respect of a working class the remaking of the English respect of a working class now that is something that's happening inside the popular classes, I say working class remember that that includes many elements that now in any strict sense we would call lower middle class, so I'm using class in a rather general way. The remaking of the respectable English popular classes. The English popular classes. Really much more accurate that. But at the same time let me remind you that it's also a period of what in that book which some of you may know Geoffrey Pearson calls the period of respectable fears. Of respectable fears. what I mean by that is that people in English society in the middle and upper classes begin for the first time to have the fear of national decline that if something isn't done if the state doesn't arise if we don't England doesn't pick herself up by the scruff of the neck that the country will decline And they see the signs of that decline everywhere. In the fact that they can't win the Boe War. In the fact that the English working class is suffering from malnutrition and disease. They see it in the breakdown of family and work which they fear is going on. And they see it especially in youth. In youth. The terms that we now think of for rebellious youth are coined in this period. Juvenile, delinquency, hooligan are words of the 1870s, 80s and 90s. They don't exist before. There's no such thing as juvenile delinquency before this. For the first time, juvenile delinquency starts to be studied and remedies to it start to be looked for in the family, in organizing youth clubs and so on. So alongside the political threat of strikes and the trade unions and syndicalism and women's emancipation and the Labour Party is also the threat of youth, of young people running wild. Now, I don't have time to, I don't want to spend a long time in summoning this up. I just want to quote one passage from Geoffrey Pearson, which will conjure it up for you so that I can come to a conclusion. It's a quotation from my friend Baden-Powell, from Baden-Powell, who formed the English Scout Movement that I described before. This is how he's describing English youth. Let me remind you that the date is 1890. 90, not 1970, or 1960, or 1950. Yeah? Okay. Thousands of boys and young men, pale, narrow-chested, hunch-shouldered, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting, all of them learning to be hysterical as they groan or cheer in unison with their neighbors at the football game, the worst sound of all being the hysterical scream of laughter that greets any little trip or fall of any player. One wonders whether this can be the same nation which gained for itself the reputation of being a stolid, pipe-sucking manhood, unmoved by panic or excitement, and reliable in the tightest of places. In the tightest of places. There occurs in this period what one has to call a moral panic. A moral panic. A moral panic is the very specific form of collective social response. It's what occurs in the period of rapid social change. When a whole society feels that it has lost its bearings, that so much of what it has taken to be taken for granted has changed, when the landscape of relationships between powerful and the powerless shift, when the whole universe seems to break up, especially when there is a threat of decline, of new forces on the horizon, of new political and social forces demanding rights, demanding a right for themselves, new kinds of women, and new trade unionists, and new political doctrines, and new party formations. There comes to appear to respectable England the fear of the decline of the whole nation, that the whole thing might just break up. And whenever in English society there is a moral panic of that kind, and there is one in 1950, the 1950s and 60s is a period of moral panic of exactly the same sort. And there is one going on in Britain right now, right now, a moral panic of this kind. Whenever that happens, the languages of where the fears, where the threat comes from, become interchangeable. is a threat. Anything is a threat. Young people, old people, any change is a kind of helping to discipline the interior landscape of English men and women. The idea is, of course, that the state administers and regulates society and the family puts inside, it interiorizes the disciplines and regulations which form an orderly population. And so in all ways, in periods of moral panic in Britain, there is a view that society is collapsing because the state, the family is collapsing. That is to say, because there is no longer a well-constituted source or center of authority. And one of the places that you look for riot in discipline, a lack of deference, a lack of a sense of proper authority is youth. So those discourses of breakdown, breakdown of society, collapse of the family, loss of authority, and the crisis of youth become a more or less permanent discourse of respectable fears, respectable anxieties. And you can hear it, I'm going to tell you tomorrow, about a modern version of that discourse in Thatcherism. but you can hear it and see it prominently displayed in the 1880s, 90s and 20s. Well, I want to end with this point. Let me try to sum up in this way. It would be quite wrong to say that the English working classes or the popular classes were simply always constitutionally or naturally reactionary. That is not so. Certainly not so. There are strong, radical, syndicalist, socialist traditions in the English Labour movement. This is a period when they almost, I say it was Britain was closer to revolution, so they almost actually break through. But they don't. They are contained. They are contained. The containment is one which forces reform on British society. So at the end of this period, after the 1880s and the 1920s, Britain is totally transformed. The government, the state, the size of the ministries, the intervention of the state, the economy, the political parties, they are just, Britain is reformed, reformed. So these forces do have an impact in forcing Britain through into its modern shape. But at the very same moment as it's forced into its modern shape, a kind of containment, a kind of containment goes on. Now I want you to be very careful about containment. Containment is a very different idea from the idea of the incorporation of the working class or the incorporation of popular traditions. That never happens in England. It doesn't even happen in the 1950s. The idea that the English popular classes refashion themselves in some bourgeois way is not the right way of describing what happens. It is more accurate to say that what the formation that emerges from this period is the formation of a deeply autonomous, separate, distinctive, but corporate class culture. corporate popular class culture. Not a highly politicized one. This is the culture of the respectable working class. The respectable working class. Below the respectable working class there is, there remains the poor, the disorganized, those who have been de-skilled, those who don't have a legitimate occupation, those who are out of work. Yes, a vast, which is called in the 1890s, the residuum. The residuum. And indeed, English social policy from there until the present operates on the distinction between the deserving poor. The deserving poor. You only give charity and then you only give the welfare state to the deserving poor. Below that is a poor you can't reach. Yes? The poor that is given away to crime, hedonism, pleasure yes that is unregenerate that cannot be recuperated into what is called disciplined civilized life that residuum has to be dealt with by force you have to police it you have to marshal it organize it, order it about etc. but you can divide the working class between its unrespectable or its rough and its respectable elements and you can begin there begin to emerge which harness this respectable working class formation into the English nation as a whole. It's the formation of what I want to call traditionalism. This is the formation. Now, at last I can speak of it, conclude with it. This is the formation of English traditionalism, of the discourses of English traditionalism. I say discourses because there's a different variant for each of the different social strata. So it's not the working classes, traditionalists, and other classes are not. Traditionalism fans out across, it becomes a cross-class consensus. And there's a version, a variant, which allows working class people to remain working class. They don't bemuse themselves that they've become something else. They don't imagine themselves to be middle class. They know perfectly well where they are, where they live, what their limits are. They don't want to become another culture, but they are a dependent formation. They are a dependent formation, a formation within a larger one. That dependent formation can be very tough indeed, very tough. It can be rebellious, can be anti-police. It's tough on its rights. If you walk into the wrong part of a pub, if you walk into a working class area, and you walk into the wrong part of an English pub, the working class part, and you look middle class, they will tell you, they will make it so uncomfortable that within five minutes you are out of there and into the more respectable part. So it's a dense formation, deeply dense. Around it is the English formation of the labor movement, of laborism, of the English working class, etc. So it's a separate and distinct formation, but it is not a hegemonic formation. It never conceives of remaking England in its image. It is remade in the image, or it has to be dependent on some other formage. Now, one has to understand the nature of corporatism, of a corporate class, the depths and complexities of a corporate class culture, the corporate cultures of the powerless in England, before one can understand the formation of traditionalist discourses. I would identify the traditional discourse as being organized around four concepts. Four concepts. First of all, respectability. Respectability. That is to say, the English respectable working man has to have a small but decent standard of living. He has to have self-respect. His self-respect depends on his having his own job. His own job. So I want to say that work is at the center of the idea of respectability. You aren't respectable without your own occupation. A man without occupation is not respectable. And therefore, to fall into unemployment or to fall into poverty is not only to not to have the material wherewithal of life, it is to lose your self-respect. Lose your self-respect. Because other people cannot respect you. So, self-respect depends on a conformity to certain standards. You know how to conform to certain standards. Though you may not set the standards, but you know how to conform to them. So respectability becomes a class, a value, which is important across the middle and working classes. Secondly, I've made the point already, I won't elaborate it, work, the second element is work. But you must think about work not only as what you do or where you get your living, and a respectable man has to have a living. may be very modest, very modest, but he has to have a regular living. You have to think about work not just in those terms, but in relation to two other things. First of all, in relation to masculinity. The image of work, the image of the respectable working man is the image of a respectable working man. Respectable working man. So the image of masculinity is one of the things that stabilizes the whole existence of work. You have to take a pride in your work, a pride in your craft, a pride in your skill, and that is what, as it were, stabilizes men. And secondly, of the distinction between work and play. Work and play. It is through the calculus of work that the respectable English working class develops that rhythm for which you can only pay yourself off with pleasure once you have really worked. No pleasure is to be gained without working hard. This is one of the central core English values. It took the English through the 1939 to 1945 war. It is why the English are best with their backs to the wall. With their backs to the wall. Because they understand that if you face up to it now, pleasure later. Pleasure later. Work now, pleasure later. and one of the ways I will say tomorrow in which Mrs. Thatcher revives this discourse is to say in the 1960s and 70s you thought life was play so you enjoyed yourself, you had permissiveness everybody was having sex with everybody else you dressed up, you paraded, you had wild music and now you pay for it the calculus of work hard go away You have to pay for 20 years of pleasure with a few hard years of me. A few hard years of me. In that sense, English masochism is a deep cultural value which is solidified by the commitment to work. That's why the English working class hates what is called the scrounger. The person who doesn't work collects the dole, the welfare state, and, you know, goes to the Costa Brava. He is also collecting the dole in periods of unemployment, but he is saving it up because he knows it's a rainy day. Yes, you don't go out and spend it. It's the spendthrift working class, the pleasurable working class. So, let me not get the pleasure. The next central value is the notion of discipline. Of discipline. Now, discipline is not, you know, The fascist discipline is not the police marching up and down. As you know, we only now have an armed police. But it is the idea of a self-regulating society and of a disciplined psyche. Of the disciplined psyche. Yes, of people who have self-discipline. The English are a disciplined society because they are self-disciplined, first of all. So they aren't held in place only by the state and by the police and by somebody watching over them. They have internalized the disciplines. So the disciplines are inside them as well as outside them. Well, that is why the fourth key value is the family. Because it is the family that internalizes or interjects the values of authority, discipline, regularity and order. That's why the English are terrified when they imagine the family is breaking down. Because if the family breaks down, then what is the mechanism which will internalize the disciplines that are required for an orderly corporate life? If the family breaks down. Because the family is that which aligns the anarchic impulses of sexuality with the regular rhythms of ordinary domestic family life. it tames sexuality in marriage and it tames marriage and women in the home and if that is stable in the family then society will reproduce itself as an orderly and disciplined structure and when it seems to be going crazy out there it's because something has gone wrong in the alignment of sexuality and discipline of the sexual and the social Something has gone wrong with the interjecting mechanisms of the family. So around these elements, middle class, working class, lower middle class, cross-class discourses of traditionalism, all of them different, but all stemming from this central core or network of values. and it's that core sense of values generating different specific aspects of traditionalism which creates what I want to call English traditionalism. English traditionalism. Discussion as well as questions. It's a very good question because of course the English sense of irony is as distinctive as anything else in the English and I would say that it's created by two different things. One is by a long period of stability. Yes, I don't think you can afford to take yourself so ironically if you aren't, you know, if you haven't been stable for a very long time. Societies that are not stable have a humor, of course, but they have a more nervous humor. Yes, they have the irony of the Polish or the Hungarians, which is a wonderfully rich irony, but not that self-deprecating irony of the English. So I think a long period of stability. And the second, I think, is an absolute confidence. Yes, I think only if you are absolutely certain that really you are what was once called the lords of humankind, yes, can you afford to say, oh, we are not. anything very great. It's a sign, a token of the degree of confidence that they can be self-deprecating. They can make jokes at themselves, not quite taking themselves seriously. But it's an irony which at the same time as it appears to give away something, holds it. So it keeps that sense of superiority. It doesn't undermine it. When an Englishman tells you a joke about the English, it doesn't reduce the English. It makes... Yes, so that... I mean, for instance, I'd say, you know, I remind you of a whole series of jokes, yes, about how the English don't change when they go abroad. Yes, so you know the joke, for instance, about the man who was stuck on an island, shipwrecked on an island and he alone was there and then another boat was shipwrecked and somebody finally rescued himself by coming along holding clutching a big barrel etc and he and he landed and he he sat tiny island he sat at one end and the man who was there sat at the other end well eventually after months later a steamship was passing and saw them and came and they said well we are glad to rescue the two of you. And the first one said, I'm afraid I don't know him. We have not been introduced. We have not been introduced and you don't fraternize in somebody to whom we have not been introduced. Now, that sounds like a joke, you know, the stiff upper English, you know, upper lips Englishman who can't even bring himself to introduce himself to a shipwreck, a fellow shipwreck. But don't you see that it reflects in an indirect way, it reflects back on the English who are unchangeable. Nothing shakes them. Shipwreck, destruction, near death. They preserve their habits. Unshaken. Everybody else would have given it up. One would have eaten the other. No. Except lightly roasted. I mean, you'd have to prepare him in the proper way before you... Everything must be done properly. Yes, and the English will be proper. It's exactly like the joke about, you know, the people in the middle of the worst of a monsoon in India, dressing for dinner. Temperature 115, people falling about, having huge people with fans to keep them cool, but everybody is in color and tie. Purple, yes, but properly dressed. Now, on the one hand, it's a joke. You know, it makes the English person a sort of caricature. On the other hand, what it says, unshakable. Unshakeable. Nothing ever shakes him. So, it's very double-sided English irony. And I think that although it looks as if it works so as to deflate the English, it actually secretly recuperates the English. It's a form of superiority, not a sense of inferior. It's a form of superiority expressed as a sense of inferiority. So it looks as if they're being humble, but actually they take great pride in their own unchangeability. Well, here's one thing. When this photo economic deploy, I couldn't avoid painting of Martin Juhn here from Kuhl, very primarily from her. Yes. You know, Lisa said that economic English economic differentiation is caused by the popular English ITT world, the Inns. And we did images of a country and see him so. Well, what's your personal opinion about it? I know that some, for example, historian Opco, think that in which reparation time from the economic, from the capital, is of the peak in nature. Well, but then what about the sobering culture of Pat? It's a very complex question. Yes, and I don't know that I think that any of the people who have contributed to it have given anything like a definitive answer. It is true that since the English landed classes, Well, first of all, the English landed classes themselves create agrarian capitalism. So, that mixture between capitalism and the older feudal classes is there from the very beginning. Secondly, it is true that the English bourgeoisie, in the classic sense, the industrial bourgeoisie, entrepreneurs, etc., when linked with trade, are frowned upon by English gentle society. So that the English middle classes, having made their money, were always thinking of how to become accepted into English society. And the first thing you did was to retire to a village. You had to go to a village and take on the life of the English idol the landed aristocracy. And if possible, buy yourself a title or after the sale of titles, you know, persuade one of the prime ministers to give you a non-hereditary title. And so here is an industrial class which makes England agrarian capitalists and then makes the first industrial revolution. So I don't think that, I mean, here is another argument. The other argument is the Anderson-Nairn argument against Thompson. That this bourgeoisie never really became bourgeois. And I don't believe that that's so. In relation to that earlier period, I favor Thompson's argument rather than Anderson and Nairn. But when it comes to the period I'm talking about now, the second Industrial Revolution, that is the period when it seems to me Anderson and Nair begin to have some validity. And I try to suggest to you that one of the things that happens with imperialism is precisely that there is the creation of those institutions, the city, finance, banking, insurance, trade, etc., which look outwards, not towards industry and industrial modernization. And that at the same time, there is the rise of this new upper middle class, the new rich, who are into shares and finance and trade rather than industrialization. So I think the beginning of the long industrial decline of Britain, I would locate it more in the failure to move into the second industrial revolution than the first. Yes, I think it is more at this stage when Britain, at the summit of her commercial power, is unable to remake the second, the leap into the second Industrial Revolution. Now, it's quite true that one factor in that may be a lot of habits of thought formed in the earlier period, you know, when Britain had no rivals. So how to deal with a period when suddenly, in steel production and in trade, she's being overtaken by these new societies, how to measure up, I think that is a problem. So I think there is a decline in the industrial spirit. But I don't know that I would trace it all the way back to the formation of the English bourgeoisie. I would talk about the backward entry of Britain into the phase of monopoly capitalism. So you stress the economic factor? Well, I stress the economic factor, but that's only a useful way of giving it a handle. Yes, because all that I've been describing, yes, is exactly, is the failure to create a modern culture. Yes, is the emergence of new forms of society, but forms which are partly traditionalist. Or the formation of new forms of social life in a traditionalist mode. So that they're 20th century, but traditionalist. Yes, so it's the formation of a culture, it's the formation of social relations, It's not just the economic. The economic is a useful way of pinpointing, since you asked the question about the industrial spirit and industrialization. Yes. I want to ask you something about fear. About fear, yes. Besides Jim Rine, the Lincolnsy, fear, besides the Unbeam crime, is it possible to speak about another kind of, another sort of fear? I mean the fear of the irrational, the fear of the residuum of a brisom, residuum of exudivating in science. Binti's madness, the criminal madness. I think to the town, Darton, by the night, and the crew, we met criminal hiding himself in a blank corner. And I feel to Jekyll and Hyde. Yes, look, when I talked about respectable fears and identified the juvenile and the hooligan and crime, I identified that only because it has such a long reverberation. Yes, in English culture, we can still hear it going on, etc. But I was trying to suggest to you that in this period, respectable English society is beset by fears of all kinds. And that what I call a moral panic, it really is the accumulation almost of nameless fears. You name one only because it's part of a larger pattern. So it recedes into the darkness where you can't put your finger on it. You don't know where it is. So yes, it's the fear of the unknown. It's the fear of the irrational. It's the fear of the uncivilized. Yes, that because religion and work had never reached the outer, least civilized of the people that they were, they'd never been touched by, you know, the disciplines that would draw them into rational behavior. So it is a fear of the darkness. It's a fear of the city. Increasingly the city becomes a place which people do not know. That is a consequence even of the separation of work and home. The very formation of middle class areas of residence and of the suburbs and of people who go into the city and leave it in the evening means that those people who are living in the inner cities are unknown. People don't know how they live any longer. They don't live cheek by jowl with them. In the 18th century, you know, respectable London had to walk the same pavements. They were shoved off the pavements by the rough bullies. But no, they don't go down there at all. And so it's a fear of what is not known. Then, of course, it's a fear of subversion. Because down there, it is conceived, is germinating all these funny ideas. You know, socialism and anarchy and revolution. And you can see that in Conrad. And you see that in Henry James. The Princess Casamassima is exactly about the fear of the unknown. And it's a fear also of the irrational in a more intellectual sense. It's a more intellectual sense. After all, this is the period of the birth of a large number of irrationalist movements. Yes, of spiritualism. of the toying with spiritualism of an interest in the exotic it's a period when a lot of people who are socialists are also members of some sect theosophists for instance a lot of feminists are theosophists they're strange combinations of rational and irrational philosophies and it's a period when as you know people are playing with the idea of black magic yes there again you can get it in the novels and it's not only in England I mean the uh the uh yes the theories I don't know whether you know well the Bostonians you know Henry James is Bostonian yes the idea of of mesmerism yes of the of the girl who is possessed by a father who can also make her speak things it's a I mean you know people are are dabbling in the occult it's the rise of the occult around this struggle to stabilize the rational state. The state will become bureaucratic and regular and administered and orderly and it will inspect more things, inspect the poor, inspect the delinquents, inspect the families but there is also, that is a kind of movement against the fear of the occult and the irrational. So this is, these are some of the great tensions yes, of the known and the unknown which arise in this period, which I think are the product of a deep kind of social crisis, of national decline. And so I don't want you to think that the delinquency is only one example, yes, of one area where this is spoken about in terms of young people running riot, earning too much, dressing up in uniforms of their own, no longer under parental control, walking and parading about the streets, smoking too many cigarettes, going to football matches. I read you that passage and talk about that only because it's so modern. It could have been written in the Daily Mail the day before yesterday. In fact, I'm not surprised that it would have been written. I would not be at all surprised to produce me the Daily Mail with exactly those images. But those are only some of the respectable fears. It's a fearful society. Britain enters the 20th century as a society fearing national decline. And I think it has gone on fearing national decline. Tomorrow when I talk in my lecture about race, I want to talk about English racism as the product of the fear of national decline. Yes, because I think it has more to do with the fear of national decline than it has to do with a belief in the pure race. It's articulated against the fear, the background of the fear of a great society, a great country, a great nation, which is great no longer in the old way. Not in this period. Not yet. Not yet. That comes a little later. But in this period, one of the things that happens is an intense period when they think they might be killed in their beds by Jews. so there is a whole fear which develops in the 1890s about those working class Jews who are coming into London fleeing the pogroms especially in Russia and Poland they come into the East End yes they go into the small trades in the East End the clothing trade etc they are many of them radicals because they are in a sense they come from their own radical artisan culture. And before long, there are newspaper articles, there are the social imperialists talking about the fear of Jewish immigration. It's a Jewish immigration. And before the 1890s ends, there are two great, one select committee and one royal commission, which ends in the passage of the Aliens Act. And the Aliens Act gives the state the right to expel without appeal Jews who are vagrants, unemployed, hooligans, or anarchists. So, although the idea of there are not enough blacks around yet to become the nemesis of these fears, the fears that are collected together are not yet identified in the folk devil of the black, but they identify in the folk devil of the Jew. Well, the Irish had been folk devils from before. Yes, the Irish have never been anything but folk devil. The Irish are the folk devil of what I was just talking about before. Yes, they are uncivilized. If you want to talk about the respectable English working man, and then the Navi who gets drunk, who is a Catholic, who can't look after his family, who has 15 children and doesn't know what to do with them, who wanders the streets and wanders from place to place looking for work. He's living in the lodging houses. He is an Irishman. And the word hooligan is, of course, Irish. A hoolie is an Irishman. So if you want to talk about the rough marauding, the man who has a fight, the drunken, brawling working class, they're hooligans. Yes, they're Irish by adoption. Yes, so the Irish, I mean, you know, it is very early in the mid-19th century when the Irish are drawn like blacks are drawn now. The Irish are drawn, yes, like Lambroso would have drawn them. They're drawn as quasi-apes. If you see the drawings, many popular drawings and cartoons of Irish railway navvies in the mid-19th century, they look like racist cartoons of blacks. They're not blackened, but they're shaded. It's because they're thought to come from a darker race, another tribe. And they are seen as subhuman. So there have been a succession of such folk devils. You get no moral panic without a folk devil. when you get these swirling anxieties of a society coming apart at the seams in all sorts of different ways, then you must be able to pin it on something. The family is breaking down. Or youth is running wild. Or the foreigners are here. These are the classic instances. The classic explanations for the breakdown of Indian society. The family is breaking down. Or people no longer respect the police. Or they come from somewhere else. we are being overrun by an alien horde, or what Mrs. Thatcher calls an alien wedge. An alien wedge. And expanding, because as you know, the alien wedge, whether Jews or the Irish or blacks, breed faster than anybody else. So our birth rate is three times as fast as the English. So the English, who have restricted their reproduction in the family soberly to 2.5 children, and a mortgage, yes, or everything is reproduced, yes, if you can go to the hospital and be delivered at one and the same time of your full complement, 2.5, a mortgage, a small car, etc., yes, like that. Well, now, you know, what about the Jews with their extended family networks looking after their children on and on and on into the whole of Russia and Poland and Germany? You don't know when they will stop coming in. And the Irish, well, the Irish, I mean, are so poor and they don't have anything to eat back there except Irish potatoes. And so when they really get driven by hunger, they come in rowing boats and coracles across the Irish Sea and start to swarm into the English cities. The metaphors of swarm, of being overrun, of a tide, these metaphors of natural disaster, of flood, and of earthquake, and also the metaphors of disease, of contagion, yes, of cholera, of the plague. All of these, these are the discourses of the moral panic. And every now and again, it crystallizes into a folk devil of one kind. In this period, the Jews, and in the period I talk about tomorrow, the blacks. The period I've been dealing with is when that sense of community is created. Yes, to be destroyed in the 50s. That's why I said this is the formation of the traditional working class, which people like Hoggart then in the 50s writes about as under threat from the mass media. Later on, people would say from the breakup of the old working class housing estates or the people in the East End would say from the breakdown of the working class family. Yes, that is what happens later. This is the period because then you see the formation of what I call a corporate class has very deep roots in a locality. It doesn't believe that it is the subject of the nation but it believes it is the subject of Bermondsey or Poplar or Manchester or Moss Side. It has a lot of local roots. It has its own local football club. It has its own local pub, its own local association. So it's very deeply, it has a deep sense of territoriality. And a certain cohesion, therefore. Yes, of course, people live in the same place for a long period of time. They're familiar with one another. And they establish some of the real, genuine, communal links and bonds which knitted the structure together. So what I've been trying to describe is a caste culture which is deeply cohesive and which really is sustaining in that sense, but which nevertheless is not capable of remaking the whole notion of the nation. The nation is never remade in the image of that community. It's a local community. And since you can't speak for the nation, you can speak for your little part of it, for Manchester or for Sheffield or for Glasgow. and a lot of traditions local traditions songs about Glasgow etc cluster around those localities so I think this is the formation of the traditional working class and the 50s and the 60s and the 70s has been the breakup of that traditional structure yes that then it remains the same until the 1950s I don't think so. But do you also think that the working class, the traditional working class, was... Yes, you see, I think it was partly remade by all the discourses that I was talking about. Yes, by collectivism, by the languages of socialism, by the languages of liberalism. Yes, it's... I don't... What I would not say, though, is that you could conceive of a kind of pure working class which is only instrumentally refashioned by the discourse of another class. I think you have to see the way in which those discourses do get a root inside the working class itself. They have authentic resonance inside the working class. Certain structures and identities of the working class are authentically moving that way. So they're not just the objects of ideologies directed at them, propaganda directed at them. But partly, of course, the discourses come from outside them, of course. One can't forget the intense efforts of the English middle classes in waves from the 1790s onwards to moralize them, educate them, regulate them, discipline them, make them orderly, make them temperate, make them Christian. They're the subject of great campaigns. But those campaigns, I don't think, ever totally remoralize the working class. So when Hogarth writes his book, he writes for those discourses. Not from inside the working class. Well, I think it depends on which half of the book you're talking about. I think the first half, which is a memory of his childhood and his grandmother and his grandmother's living room and working class leads is a recall of the traditional working class. But I think when you hear Hoggart talking about the jukebox and the new women's magazines, you hear the discourses that he thinks are remaking. And that is a discourse from outside. I think Hoggart has the classic scholarship boy split of the person who has made the move himself in his own biography from one position to the other and who is capable at the end of speaking about but not from inside the working class though with great sympathy profound sympathy he talks about he isn't simple minded about that refashioning that goes on in the 1950s but some parts of that language are very external that's when the quotation from to Tocqueville. I always think with Hoggart, it's always a bad sign when he starts to quote to Tocqueville. Because it's a sign when you stop living from inside the cultures of the class and he's beginning to hear the language about democracy. Tocqueville is a language about democracy and how awful it is and how demotic it is and how plebeian it can become and how what Hoggart calls the springs of action of the class can be slowly unwound by the media this is a different disc book I think the uses of literacy are two books two different books, the two arms of M in it and they're two different discourses which construct that book I may have overstated the case actually because actually In the period I'm describing, some working women began to go to pubs on their own. So the tradition of working class women in pubs is not entirely recent. But still, what I said about men being principally the people who regularly would go to the local, it was principally an activity for men. But there were a minority of working women who would go to the pub, because it ceased to be a center of political life and so on, and became a kind of entertainment. And so some working women would go. I think now it is true, but this is a result not of just of changes in the working class, but is the result of the impact of changes in the self-conceptions of women. What about the family now? Well, that is the $94 question. that's the $94 question what about the English family now well I won't talk about that when I talk about what I call I think it's the fifth fourth lecture this week when I talk about emergent social antagonism new antagonisms and new identities yes it's lecture 8 cultural differences and new emerging identities I will talk about One of the points of breakup and contradiction being the pluralization of the English family. Oh, yes, you can see. If you still go to the areas where the traditional English working class, though no longer as cohesive, still lives, of course, you will see the whole family there. Three generations sometimes. Grandfather, grandmother, still drinking, port, etc. Stout, and the adult men in their middle age, and the younger teenagers, and the young children. Sometimes four generations in pups. So that is still there. But only in those areas. Only in those areas. Yes. Only in those areas. Elsewhere, though you would still see a few families, you would see them more organized generationally. So you'd see working class people, but you would see them more in the identity of young people. Yes? Out together. Or middle class men. Yes? Together. Or drinking after the football match. Yes? So other identities, other working class identities from the kind of class identity organizes the way in which working class leisure now reflects itself in the public. But these are slow changes, you know, they're very slow. So you can still find, you know, areas of English society which look very much like the working class culture I've just defined. And indeed, the more rapidly it disappears, the higher is the nostalgia for it. So that now, the most successful soap opera is called EastEnders. And it is, of course, about the rapidly disappearing life of traditional working class life in East End. Also penetrated by new things. You are asking, yes, I'm anticipating my lecture because what I want to talk about, for instance, is an episode of East Enders, which would show you a traditional pub, a traditional working class, with a daughter who is a stripper, And a gay performer, male performer, pub performer. Now that is, that is what Mrs. Whitehouse calls the breakdown of the English family. The total destruction. It's not gone, not disappeared, but it's no longer, it has a spectrum now. That is what is the pluralization of English life. So even in the traditional areas, it doesn't look like the old sober, respectable working class any longer, though there are lots of those elements still left. The pub continues to be one of the microcosms of the changes of English popular culture, one of the real microcosms, very complex and always bringing together different. The pub is sometimes described as a kind of one-class phenomenon where its essence is that it is cross-class, that it mediates the different elements in the working class, etc. If you go into a country pub, the stable residence of the country pub will be, of course, the son of the old landlord, of the old lord of the manor, who regularly drinks there, and, of course, the shepherd. Both of them are fixed points of reference. One occupies a seat at one end of the popular bar with the darts and so on, and the other occupies a seat. When they both come in, each has his own mug. One has a kind of silver tankard, yes, and one has a kind of lead tankard. But nevertheless, the world belongs to both of them in that place. He would never dream of venturing into the snug. And the lord of the manor or his son would never dream of going into the public. But they would greet one another through the aperture. a division that is not a division, not a whole blank wall, but enough to know that there is a boundary, to mark a boundary. These are the intangible regularities of the inter-class, inter-class configuration of English culture. And one has to describe them as meeting places, not even as mediations, they're meeting places, they're confrontations, they're negotiations. Negotiations, all kinds of tiny and delicate social negotiations go on. When I first went to England, I would not go into a pub. I wouldn't go in because I felt as if I was treading on the cobwebs of English culture. And I thought, if I go in here, I will never know when I've done the wrong thing. And nobody will ever tell me. It's different if you go into a restaurant or a cafe or a bar. That's open house. You do what you like. There are customs and mores, but if you don't behave, so what? If you go to an English pub, it's intangible. You don't know what the culture is, but there is a clear set of regularities. Absolutely clear. Who is local and who is not? Who is local and who is not? Who belongs and who doesn't? So it's a wonderful configuration of how English life is, that kind of moving adaptation of cultures to one another within a culture which never becomes one. There's no one dominant English culture. And the one is not incorporated, swallowed up, or bourgeoisified. They remain distinct, but there are clear lines of power. Power, hierarchy, order, authority. They structure every interaction, every interaction. and it's that delicate, those delicate membrane, only now I would go in, you know, with more trepidation, I don't mind, I shut my eyes and go in and when you open them, nothing has happened, of course nothing would happen, you know, I mean you're tolerated, you're nice, they like to find people who are not the, you know they like, I'm sure you found yourself welcomed in, they like to chat to you and find out what Italy is like and so on, so my earlier feelings were quite wrong, nobody would have done anything to me It was my sensitivity, yes, as if I had walked across the searchlight. You know, the beam goes that way, and I felt I was a kind of intruding shadow, yes, in these intangible kind of lines of connection and breakage, rupture. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, many times that has happened, many times that has happened. And the important thing is that you wouldn't know why. Yes, because if you knew why, it would be different. Yes, because there would be clear rules. You can't do that in hair. And then if you did it, well, you're kicked out. But quite often in English post, people are kicked out and they stand on the pavement saying, but why? I don't understand what I did. Yes, I just went in and ordered a drink. Standing at the wrong place. Standing where somebody always stands. Every night at half past nine, he always comes in. And if you are there, of course, you know if you are not there, you don't know how you to know nothing says no plaque says this is tom space but there it is yes that is tom space and and and well half past nine a little space clears yes so that he can come in and yes and and he doesn't have to say what he wants they will bring him a stout and bitter yes of the most noxious guy brown and green and so and that's what he drinks foaming top and this sense of regularity he has a place there it's a place at the pub it's not a place at the top table it's not a place in government he's not the prime minister but he has a place which is an English place an English place, an English home an English local yes, yes very nice that because it is always in England the point of mediation there are no there are no upper class pubs there are no pubs that are exclusively belong to the upper class none yes there are clubs if you go to a pub you will find the different factions of English life in their place but together going to the city my friend if you really go into the heartland it's what I was describing before as the real heartland of the English gentleman. If you go into the Imperial Centre, well, then really you are asking for it. Especially at lunchtime. Especially at lunchtime. In the evenings, not so much because they're gone to their home. They've caught the 525 or the 533 from Waterloo or from Charing Cross or from London Bridge and gone to the suburbs. But if you go in at lunchtime, Yes, that is very much the gentleman's preserve. But in most places, most pubs, if you're going through the wrong door, you may not get served. But there's another door, yes, for the undressed. Yes, there's a door for the rough, where if you go around there and elbow your way, yes, through the sawdust, you can get served. Thank you.

Seminar 7: The Popular and Populism as Sites of Cultural Struggle

...war of attrition. The question is whether I collapse before you do. [laughter] Yes? It's a challenge. Or whether you run out of tapes before I finish speaking. [laughter]
Today I'm going to talk about the struggle for the popular and populism, or the popular and populism as sites of cultural struggle. And now that we're beginning to move towards the end of this series of lectures, I can build on some of the earlier arguments that I've made. So, I'm going to talk about the development of the New Right and of conservatism and of Thatcherism in the 1970s and 80s, but you will understand that I'm talking about that against the background of popular conservatism which I tried to describe last week: you won't take it as if Thatcherism comes from outer space. It comes against the background of those transformations by which conservatism became a popular political force at the end of the nineteenth century. I'm going to talk about the neoliberalism of modern conservatism, of the New Right, because the New Right includes, or incorporates, a large number of neoliberal elements. 
I can take for granted that you still remember the "long march of liberalism", which we began in the second lecture, and also that you remember the argument that I made that liberalism is not one thing, but is a number of different discourses, the elements of which can be articulated into different political discourses. Consequently, it's perfectly possible for a modern conservatism to incorporate elements of the liberal discourse, to build into itself elements which in a previous period was articulated to liberalism rather than to conservativism. So, I'm taking all that for granted. 
But I want to start with another of those great historical turning points in the development of English cultural identity, one of those historic compromises which mark out or periodize the emergence of modern English cultural identities, and that is with the turning point or settlement called "1945". Yesterday, I was talking about the previous great shift between the 1880s and the 1920s, in which I was arguing that the basic forms of modern English politics-the form of the modern English collectivist state, the basic political alignments and ideologies of contemporary politics-first began to take shape. It is the period of the remaking of English middle-class and working-class cultures. Now I want to talk about the period of the settlement of 1945. 
1945 clearly is the end of the war. It's the coming of Britain through the dark times of the war when Britain "stood alone" against fascism for a period. It's the period of the "victory over the dark forces", etc. You can imagine that it's a moment which is heroically constructed in the English imaginary. But I want to say to you that although it is a settlement of a kind-that is to say, a period when the terms on which the different social interests of Britain tacitly or silently agree to differ, to negotiate, a period when a basic set of negotiations come into existence, which last right into the 1970s-the moment of 1945 is a highly ambiguous historical moment. 
Why do I call it an ambiguous historical moment? Because there are at least two major discourses struggling to define what it is 1945 was about. One of the reasons why this question about the meaning of 1945 is so important, is that even now, in the 1980s, the English experience-the way people talk about how they experience their lives in England-is anchored to the war. There is "the past", that goes back to 1066. Then there is "the war", 1939 to 1945. And then there's "after the war". These are the great boxes, the great categories into which people organize their experience. They are the experiential categories of English imaginary life. If you were born before the war, you can tell stories about "coal in the bath" and the times when you didn't have a private lavatory in the house. That's in the past. Then there's the great heroic moment when the war pulled the English people together. A truly Orwellian moment. George Orwell said that the English are a very differentiated people, the classes hardly talk to one another except at moments of great crisis-like wars and depressions and so on, when the English are like a herd of cows, because they back into the same space and face the enemy and become, once again, reunited imaginatively as the great British nation. Well, 1939 to 1945, faced with what Winston Churchill used to call "Nah-sism", the great British nation pulled together. Gentry ladies took in cockney children as evacuees and looked after them while the Blitz was going on. Everybody ate the same rations for the first time in English life. The great coming together of English experiences forced under the special circumstances of the war. That's part of the mythology of the war-that the war created the great egalitarianism of England, when all the different classes and strata of society recognized that what divided them was less important than that they were part of the British, who were pulling together to defeat the dictators. 
Out of this emerged simultaneously two different myths about the war and 1945, and two different ways of constructing it. One myth can be given the name which Anthony Barnett, in his book about the Falklands War, calls "Churchillism". Churchillism has a relationship to Churchill, but it isn't just Churchill. It is what Winston Churchill came to symbolize. Churchill, as you know, was an old Liberal renegade who became an old Tory renegade, but who was the one part of the English ruling class who did not try to collaborate with the fascists in the 1920s, kept his hands clean during the collaboration with the fascists in the 1930s. Consequently, he could emerge from the corrupt part of the ruling class which was contaminated with the idea that they had toyed with making a deal with Hitler-sent Chamberlain to see whether they couldn't square him behind the backs of the Poles and the Czechs. Churchill had stood out saying, we must fight the dictators, we must fight fascism, we must arm rapidly, we must unite the British nation. He embodied the "spirit of Britain" in wartime, a spirit of national unity: Churchill is the bulldog, the cigar-smoking bulldog-if you can get your mind around that image-a cigar-smoking bulldog who defends the hutch of Britain against the invading enemy; who barks a warning "the fascists are coming", and then unites the nation against the enemy. 
This is the Churchill of speeches which ring in the history of English rhetoric-"never have so many, owed so much, to so few". This is a recognition of the Air Force, the RAF, where only a few Spitfires and Hurricanes stood between the Panzer divisions rolling across Europe and the dogged British. Of course, the French, as everybody knew, though they had built the huge Maginot Line, instantly collapsed, sold themselves out to the Germans, gave over Paris, started to open the champagne bottles, etc. Everybody knew the French were corrupt and would collaborate. The Belgians put up a stiff fight, but were swiftly overrun. And then only the British, as you might expect, from 1066 onward, recognized their destiny to defeat fascism. "We will fight on the beaches"-the famous speeches of Churchill, which rallied the nation. A tenacious individualist, Churchill is both representative of a charismatic figure of Englishness and at the same time he is his own person. There's nobody else like Churchill. And the myths multiply. He smoked 45 cigars a day. He drank at least a bottle and a half of brandy every day, was stewed to the eyeballs by 10 o'clock in the morning. Could follow the movement of the German divisions, while unable actually to focus on the map at all. These are the stories that concentrate the myth of Churchillism-the image of Britain at war. 
Churchill's political career is not so well known to other people. It's not so well known that Churchill was an old social imperialist, and then a Liberal before he joined the Conservative Party and became its leader. He only becomes leader of the Conservative Party when the old conservatives have been disgraced. He's one of the most active collaborators of Lloyd George in the reforming period of the Liberal government. And he has at least two great heroic pre-war moments. One when he sends British troops disastrously into the Dardanelles; and the other moment when he smoked out the anarchist enemy in the East End of London. I don't know whether you know that Churchill himself unearthed an anarchist plot in London. And in his black Homburg and his cigar and his long coat, he himself led the police into East London to discover Peter the Anarchist. Never quite found him, you know, but he knew that there were-even in those dark days-red conspiracies around. So, Churchill has a long history, long before he becomes the wartime leader, which is totally reconstructed, around which there are great silences and absences. A lot of people nowadays, when they read about Lloyd George and Churchill and the Liberal government, don't think it's Winston Churchill. They think it's somebody else. His uncle or his father, or somebody. It's the same Churchill. He lived on through three or four incarnations to lead the nation and pull it together. 
Now, one of the most important things about the Churchill leadership is, of course, that it was itself an alliance, because after all, it is Churchill who led the wartime coalition. It's Churchill who led the wartime government, which though identified with Churchill, of course included Clement Attlee and a whole number of Labour leaders. He had to forge an alliance with the leadership of the labour movement, with the socialists, with the next Labour government, in fact, and bring them into his government in order to unite the nation. You couldn't fight the war with a party government only. You had to fight it with a coalition, with a national coalition, a political bloc which would represent the nation as a whole. 
Now, one aspect of the war and the pre-war period is constructed within the discourses of Churchillism. So that when people talk about the war, that's what they mean-when the divisions of Britain were forgotten and the country was united, and everybody pulled together to defeat the dictator. That's the Churchillian definition of what 1945 is about. But there is, of course, another definition of the war, struggling for mastery against Churchillism, and we might call that labourism. There is a labourist interpretation of the war. And what that says is: the great British people were sensible enough to understand that although they needed somebody like Churchill to take them through the war, as soon as the war was finished, they ditched it. Which is true. In the immediate post-war election, to the astonishment of Churchill and the Conservatives and the Beaverbrook Press, etc., he was voted out of office. You've had your great moment, but now we're going to construct a new social order. We're never going to go back to the unemployment and depression of the 1930s. We're not going to go back to the old English ruling class that was having a conversation with Hitler. We're not going to go back to the discredited guilty men. We need a new sweep. And they voted Labour in 1945, the first time there is a majority Labour government in British politics. So, by this definition the war created the conditions of social egalitarianism in Britain: the equality which came out of the Blitz, and rationing, and utility dress, and evacuation, when everybody, regardless of high and low, had to shut off their lights at night in order not to attract the bombers, etc. It created the condition for a kind of wartime socialism or wartime egalitarianism. And once that was over, the ordinary British people, with their resistance to fascism and to the past, set about building a new social order which would never again take them into the depression and unemployment of the 1930s. 
Out of this, therefore, they constructed the first majority Labour government. And this majority Labour government built the welfare state. It undertook, for the first time, to have government intervention to maintain full employment. It established the employment of the majority of the working people of the society as a conscious aim of government strategy and policy. There had never been a government before which had said "we will intervene in the economy to try to put everybody to work as a consistent policy of economic strategy". Added to this commitment to full employment also the commitment to reconstructing British society within the terms of welfare capitalism-a capitalism which recognized that it had to build a welfare state, that people would not go back to working and to slaving night after night, day after day, without the supports of the welfare system, without the supports of mass education, without pensions, without unemployment benefits without the National Health Service, and the whole array of supports which were to maintain a more egalitarian distribution of social wealth between the different social classes. 
Okay, this is the second myth about the war-that the war produced the first authentic British social democracy. The fact is that the war produced no single clear-cut solution of either kind. The war assumed-what we are now accustomed to understand of all great English transformations-the form of a historic compromise. One of the major historic compromises was that Britain remained essentially a capitalist society, a capitalist economy. It remained deeply rooted, as Churchill had always wanted and as he worked very hard to create, in the period when he came back into office after 1951, Britain as one of the centrepieces of the emerging Atlantic Alliance in the period of the Cold War; Britain as one of the linchpins of the European construction of NATO. The great Atlanticist speeches of Britain, Europe, Western Europe, and North America, as the West, the free West, is also a discourse of Churchillism. So, the welfare state was indeed created, a Labour government did indeed take power, and Keynesian forms of economics did try to intervene in the economy to establish a public sector and to maintain full employment. But it was, as is usual in these great moments of English history, a trade-off. Something had to be given in order to win something, and the other side of the bargain that was struck was that Britain would remain part of the "free world". Britain would remain a free-world welfare capitalism. This mixture of welfarism and capitalism, would define the essential relations between competing and contradictory social interests and social forces in Britain in the period. 
So, when we talk about the terms of the settlement in 1945, it would be quite wrong to read what that settlement meant for English society and English politics and English culture, either in the terms of Churchillism, or in the terms of laborism. It wasn't the birth of a great new English socialism, as Orwell once thought it might be. Nor was it the birth of a great united Churchillian nation. It was neither of those two things. It was the negotiation which maintained many old and existing centres of power within the form of a new and rapidly changing, modernizing English society. That ambiguous formation is one over which the British have gone on struggling. They've gone on trying to construct 1945 in one or the other, in the terms of one or another of these myths. And that is still a contested terrain. 
But the war-in addition to being constructed in the terms of these alternative myths-remains such a powerful reservoir of national feeling and sentiment that it's impossible any longer to construct the image of Britain without attaching it to the dynamo of the war. So, whatever you want to do, whatever you want to do in England, if you want to preserve it, or you want to change it, or you want to drop it over into the North Sea, whatever you want to do to England, you have to say "we fought the war for that": we fought the war to create the welfare state, or, we fought the war to keep Britain safe for the Churchill family. Any of those things still have to plug in to the dynamo of the war, because the war is a great accumulated set of feelings and emotions, positive emotions towards the nation. It's like energy. You have to think of the war now as a battery-the battery of British identity. And anybody who wants to transmit a new message has to attach itself to this battery of the war. You have to struggle over the meaning of the war in order to harness popular identifications to your own political project. If you decide, as I said, to go to the South Atlantic, in the midst of winter, to save the sheep from the Argentinians, you still have to say "that's what we fought the war for, we fought the war for the sheep in the Falklands, and we are going there to defeat the Argentinian junta, which is a dictatorship just like Churchill fought against the Nazis". You have to make that articulation, you have to plug into that lake. Then people will say, "ah! Ah! Oh, that's what the Falklands is about". Zoom, zoom, the Spitfires take off, the arc lights start, everybody dons their gas masks and their ARPs, they hurry down to the shelters in their imagination. And before they know where they are, they're on board the ships going to the South Atlantic. To save Britain again. You have to plug in there, somehow, in order to be able to mobilize British sentiment, British energies, because the nation now includes the discourses of Britain at war. You want to conjure up an image of how Britain is to get through the difficult times of the 60s and 70s and 80s and 90s, you have to remind yourself "Britain got through the war! If we got through the war, we can get through anything, even Thatcherism!" So, this remains a steady, throbbing rhythm-the British in the 20th century now, is the British at war. This is the most heroic image they have left. They don't have the image of the empire, it's gone. And they don't have the image of global mastery of commerce and trade, because that's gone. And they're not the workshop of the world anymore. That's Japan. And they're not the great imperial nation anymore because that's the United States. So, there are not many identities left, but there is the identity of the country that stood out for democracy, liberalism and freedom against the dictators. Stood alone. Nobody else. It is still a kind of distillation, a kind of signifying distillation or figure of Britain that can survive the darkest hour-that's another Churchillian phrase, "our darkest hour"-well, since then, Britain has been more or less continuously in the dark. In the dark, therefore needing Churchillism with a desperation which would not have been recognized in 1942. 
Churchill does come back to power. He's ditched from power in the election of 1945; he returns in 1951; he has a last gasp. The story is-well, I won't tell it, but the story is well worth telling of Churchill's last ministry, when he is, as they say nowadays, practically gaga. He could hardly understand what was going on, he was put together by his physician, held together by string and tape. The grand old man came doddering into Parliament and people waved their order papers, etc. He was hardly a political figure of any consequence. Once he died, his physician told the story of how he had to put him together every day. You know the story of when the inner core of the Republican Party said to John Foster Dulles, "what are we going to do? Eisenhower is dead, or he might well die before we can have the next election" and Foster Dulles said, "that's simple, we'll stuff him and run him. Who will know? Who will know whether he's dead or alive?" When they went to Dorothy Parker and opened the door and said, "the president is dead", she said, "how can they tell? He's hardly been breathing for the last 15 years". So, for a long time, nobody could tell whether Churchill was actually dead or alive. But he did have a last gasp, during which he tried to abolish the welfare state and take back public industry, and buy back the sugar, and sell off the steel, etc., what he called the "bonfire of controls". Then, fortunately, he pegged out, and we had one of those great royal ritual occasions when Churchill was buried like he was the son of a queen. He was buried with the full royal ceremonial pomp of the kind that I described when I was trying to describe the monarchy. A thousand guns boomed, as he was pulled along, the queen walk behind his coffin. He was buried like royalty. He was assumed into royalty in that great ideological operation called the invention of tradition. Churchill was traditionalized. He was regalized symbolically. And there dawned after that, in the 60s, the era of social democracy. 
Now, I talk about the period of social democracy, not only because it's the period in which there are at least two Labour governments. It's in the middle of the 60s and in the middle of the 70s, that majority Labour governments with a broad social democratic consensus are at the helm. And it's the first time, and indeed some may think the only time in British history, when the Labour Party has seemed to be the natural party of government. Not the Conservatives, but the Labour Party and social democracy appear to be the natural party of government. I talk about the social democratic consensus of this period, but I don't mean by that, necessarily, that it only has to do with parties in power. Because even when Labour governments were not in power, social democracy was in power. The ideas of social democracy were the leading ideas of the 60s and the first part of the 70s. And conservatism only survived as a popular political formation by incorporating many of those social democratic ideas. Conservatism had to come to terms with the welfare state and accept it. Otherwise, it could not have been popular. It had to come to terms with the comprehensive school-which was essentially a social democratic and Labour idea-before anybody would even think of it as still in contention as a major political force. Conservatism had to reconcile itself to social democratic ideas and social democratic policies in order to remain a powerful political force. 
In that period there emerged a kind of agreement between those on the left and the right and the centre of British politics, that what unified them as ministers of the Crown, was greater than what divided them as politicians of left and right. This is the era of what is called consensus politics. Consensus politics was in that period actually given a name, which was the name of the two leaders on the two sides of the political spectrum who most understood the stabilizing potential of creating this consensus between right and left. Gateskill and Butler. And it was called Buttskillism-a kind of amalgam. Of course, the Tories and the Labour Party, argued with one another in Parliament, and they had different perspectives on how to run the society. But at bottom, they were agreed on a great number of things. The Education Act which created the Comprehensive School was the Butler Act. It was brought in by a Conservative education minister, and it was overseen by Conservatives who in a sense believed in it just as much as any of the Labour educational reformers. So, it's a period of the establishment of a kind of broad consensus politics. 
In that period, if you went to a Conservative Party conference, which is an annual congress of the Conservative Party, what you would have found was that a lot of people in the Conservative Party, or who considered themselves to be conservative folks, were outside the broad band of this consensus. And one of the costs of being a Conservative politician who subscribed to the consensus was that you had to go through a difficult two hours, in which in each debate you would allow these raging, wild folks to shout at you about how you weren't doing the right thing. And then you would quietly cool them out and restore the consensus. If you read Butler's diaries they're full of accounts-"My goodness, another Conservative Conference". Now, Butler would have to go and address the conservative conference. And what was he trying to do? In this new social democratic conservative spirit, he had to persuade the Conservative conference that they should not restore hanging. That, really, a civilized country could not go on hanging people. But that could only be done if he stood there and took the punishment, while, for two hours, large ladies in fur hats, and gentlemen in respectable suits, said "birch them! Hang them! Flog them! Restore the whip! Cut off their heads! Emasculate them!" etc. And Butler would then say "yes, of course, crime is rising, one must stiffen law and order. But these are civilized times". He would cool them out, return them to the backwoods. They would have their outing...
Conservative Party conferences were a sort of outing for the unrepressed reactionary aspects of conservatism. And one of the voices that would be heard was, "restore the market! Get rid of the public sector! Let people pay for health!" etc. "Yes, yes" would come the reply "but, you know, after all, the National Health Service is one of the great institutions of the modern world, people come from all over", and gradually whoever was the Minister of Health would cool them out, cooling out the reactionaries. I say that because by the time I come to the 1980s, I'm going to remind you that those voices that helped to reconstruct English conservatism in a Thatcherite mould did not emerge in 1970 only. They have been hanging around the fringes of the Conservative Party and Conservative Congress, they are the ladies in the flowered hats that have Conservative teas, etc. Conservative teas one day and restoring the birch on the other. That's their recipe for stiffening the British upper lip. And they were constantly pressing against this modernized conservatism, which they thought was practically indistinguishable from the Labour Party. These Butskellites were really social reformers, they weren't true-blood conservatives in the old style. So, you have to remember that right from the 1950s onwards, there has always been a section, a vocal section, of that conservative culture which did not accept the idea of consensus, never accepted the idea of the welfare state and full employment, and Keynesian strategies, and the National Health Service, and the Comprehensive School. But they were not in the ascendancy. It was not their hour. It was the hour of the Tory reformers and the social democrats. So, it's that combination of forces that constructed this era as a social democratic one. That is to say, the party struggles were fought out under the hegemony of a largely social democratic consensus, rather than something else. 
The social democratic consensus begins to wear thin by the end of the 1950s, which in Britain, like elsewhere in Western Europe and in North America, is a period of expansion, an expansion accompanied by the revival of capitalism, by the new consumer capitalism, the new consumer industries, etc. Well, that has an impact on British society, a very important impact in changing attitudes and changing relationships in the 1950s. But Britain does not really profit from that to become a very prosperous society. Economic policy in the 1950s and 60s is full of a very British disease which is called "Stop-Go". Every time the economy starts to expand, it is brought to a sharp, sudden halt because of a balance of payment crisis, or sudden inflation, or deflation, etc. So, the economy, though it's becoming a kind of consumer capitalist one, is nevertheless very weak in its deeper structure, and it never quite gains the momentum of really the modernizing thrust which takes other societies, like the restructuring West German economy. The West German economy is remade in this period by a renaissance of consumer capitalism. The British economy is never so remade the reasons for which I partly talked about yesterday. Okay, so the social democratic consensus, although it looks fairly hegemonic-it looks as if it is giving the leading ideas to English society-is really on increasingly shaky ground, and as we move into the 60s and into the early 70s, it begins to disintegrate and fragment under its internal contradictions. 
I don't want to spend a long time talking about the attempts which are made to stabilize the English social democratic consensus. Harold Wilson, who was the leader of the Labour Party in the 60s, is one of the main architects who attempts to put together a stabilization of social democracy. He tries to construct a whole new historical block around the idea of the white heat of the technological revolution and combining workers by hand and brain, a sort of alliance between productive labour and productive capital, against the stockholders and financiers of the city. But it never quite comes off. Increasingly, there are tensions within this social democratic consensus, and it's to some of the tensions and cross-cutting currents that I want to move quite quickly. 
One of the things about Harold Wilson's attempt to put together the "white heat of technological revolution" is that it was constructed in the rhetoric of a new kind of Puritanism: the Labour Party would lead productive industry, the industrious classes of England, middle- and working-classes of England, in a kind of fury of Puritan energy and effort, spoken of almost as the "New Puritanism". But while the New Puritanism was being constructed in the domains of the political, the new Hedonism was constructing itself in the domain of the cultural. This was the era of permissiveness, of English permissiveness. Harold Wilson looked forward to the construction of a modern technological Britain, but all he got was Swinging London. He tried to create the heroic captains of scientific industry and what he got was the Beatles-it wasn't the sound he was looking for it wasn't quite what he expected. As Harold Wilson was a great incorporating figure whatever was new that blipped on his screen he tried to represent as part of the great movement. So, he swallowed Swinging London; he swallowed the Beatles, and gave them an MBE! But it was very difficult after a time to present this as quite the heroic transformation of industrial Britain into a twentieth century economy, because that wasn't what was actually going on. 
So, one of the things which is dislocating the consensus of social democracy are all those forces let loose by the growth of modern popular culture, by modern youth cultures, by modern consumerism, etc., which don't take on English society from the front, but which remodel and remake and refashion them from below: changing, mediating, adapting, shifting very slowly, eroding the tough, strongly bounded relationships between class cultures. For instance, I mentioned Absolute Beginners, a wonderful early novel written by Colin McInnes. It's about London in the 50s and 60s, and one of the things that McInnes describes is going to a trendy party in London in the 1950s or early 1960s, where one of the features of being trendy was to no longer be a kind of upper-class dandy, or even a kind of very wealthy middle-class person, but was to speak in the broadest proletarian accents. The trendy thing was to be proletarian. In the 1960s, a whole generation of largely upper-class radical intellectuals learned to so inhibit the perfectly formed sentences that they had learned at Eton and Harrow, that they were unable to complete a sentence at all. If you had met Perry Anderson in 1960-"man... y'know...uh...um...ah...y'know"-this is Perry Anderson! Who knows about a thousand more words in English than I've ever heard of! Who had eaten through the long classical tradition and really could spin words which I think don't exist in English! But in the 60s, he couldn't speak it, because the style was to be demotic. If you had a really trendy party, you had to have some upper-class dandies, a few motorbike ruffs, some people from the pop world, some people from the advertising world-you had to mix it, mix it, and that was the world of the Absolute Beginners. Everybody was coming. So, the old class structures, you know where... [end of tape]
[beginning of tape]...society didn't inject consumerism into its own body. But as soon as the society began to take off, and people became attached to the notion of the money wage, trade union leaderships could not contain their own wildcats. The 1950s and 60s are full of shop stewards taking the class struggle into their own hands and really running as rapidly as they can to earn the biggest amount that they could squeeze out of their employers. They were not about to make the socialist revolution, but they were about to take them to the cleaners for more money. They were in a society that worked by more money, and what does somebody who never had more money want? More money. You can preach the problems of materialism later. You can only really take in the lessons of materialism when you've had so much money that you don't know what to do with it, and you're piling it up, saving it. This working class, this popular class, didn't have that kind of money. They had money to spend. And they wanted a lot of it, as much as they could get. And in that period, the disciplines and restraints of English Methodist trade unionism-the lodge, the trade union lodge, the trade union meeting, the secretary branch, the branch minutes, "Mr. Chairman", "brother", etc.-to young workers, that's not where things were at. So, social democracy loses hold of some of its main institutional base. The organized, orderly trade union workers, the young workers, young people, people who are on the make, in a society on the make, on the move, changing its contours rapidly, the image of social democracy does not take, does not bite, does not actually deal with or refer to the realities of social life. 
There are many other features of the breakup of social democracy that I could talk about. I've concentrated mainly on some of the cultural forces which serve to undermine it. But, I should remind you that centrally, in the social democratic story, is the failure to modernize British industry. The white-heat of technological revolution does not happen. Britain does not become one of the modern Japanese-style or American-style 20th-century capitalisms. It does not become that. It remains an older capitalism, beset by the old problems of empire, by the old problems of Sterling, as a universal currency, by finance, by the City, by City treasurers. It is governed by the Treasury rather than by an industrial policy. So, the historic task that social democracy set itself, to modernize the structure of British industry, to bring in the British economy into a kind of twentieth century modern American form, does not come off. So, it's not only the question of social relations or cultural relations, it is that social democracy fails in that central task of remodernizing and restructuring the British economy. And one of the things that happened increasingly as social democracy moves into the 1970s is that as it ceases to create that surplus of economic wealth, which keeps the welfare state alive, etc., social democracy itself starts cutting the welfare state. Long before Thatcher and the Conservatives cut the welfare state, Labour is obliged to cut the welfare state. 
Now, just let me say a word about one of the reasons why that is so, because it's central to our understanding of what social democracy is about. Social democracy never assumed the hegemonic position. So, it is not responsible for making wealth, for restructuring the economy, for creating a new set of social relations. It does not take English society and remake it in that way. It seeks to base itself in the old structures of the British economy that will generate surplus wealth. And what social democracy does is to tax that wealth and create a welfare state of it; or redistribute some of it back to the poor, or to the working class. So, the whole mechanism of the social democratic consensus depends on the success of capitalism. It has to make sure the old capitalism works first to produce the surplus, which can create what is called a humane capitalism, a welfare capitalism. 
Well, the more it fails to transform the economic and productive structure than to bring Britain into the twentieth century, the less there is a surplus. And when the surplus goes, then social democracy has to say "well, I'm afraid it's not very much to the welfare state today. We have to cut back on health prescriptions and on the health service and build fewer hospitals and less public housing" etc. So, it is obliged by its very dynamic to be the instrument which, in the first instance was going to take the working class into the future, but which comes increasingly to be the force which is disciplining the working class. Labour's own government in power is that which has to discipline the working class in order to survive. 
The 1970s is the period of social democracy in decline and disarray. The famous moment in the mid-70s when the oil price suddenly goes through the roof and when Britain is required to bring in the International Monetary Fund, like Brazil or Peru, or Turkey, to bring in the brokers-and the story of how they brought them in has only just been told: they brought in someone from the IMF, and in order not to alert the general public to the seriousness of the economic position, they didn't bring him into Whitehall or into Westminster, they put him in an English gentlemans tailor shop, in the back room. And in there, the various dignitaries of the Bank of England, the Treasury, etc., quietly went behind the suits and struck a deal-"How about a few million dollars? You know, get us off the hook." And no doubt, as he felt the gabardine and measured himself for another suit, he said, "well, two million if you cut the health service". The bargain was struck, by which the IMF took Britain, in its declining economic condition, off the hook. 
In this period-no longer Harold Wilson, Harold Wilson had retired from the fray-his successor, James Callaghan, made a very important speech, in which he said "we used to think we could buy ourselves out of troubles; we could create jobs in order to maintain full employment, whether we had productive industry or not; when there was increasing unemployment that the government could intervene to stimulate the economy". He was talking about Keynesian politics which is really the way in which social democracy could ease economic life. "Well," he said, "that dream is over". Now, I don't know which dream it was, whose end Callaghan thought he was announcing! He was announcing his own, the end of his own dream. What was he saying? Social democracy is finished. What is he saying? We are all monetary now-Keynes is dead, and the Keynesian policy, with its dream of creating a more egalitarian, more public, more social type of society, can't work in the way in which we thought it would. Callaghan had the illusion that he was going to stay on in power while this dream changed. But if you're going to become a monetary society, you better get yourself some monetary politician. You better get yourself some people who really believe in monetarism, to really construct the monetarist society. And in 1975, the Conservative Party found such a politician.
In a short interlude in 1970, Mr. Heath-between one Labour government and another-Mr. Heath led a Conservative government for a short, sharp time, four years, between 70 and 74, in which there were two absolutely horrendous strikes. A miners strike between 72 and 74, in which for a time Britain was on a three-day production system. As if, you know, Britain wasn't declining enough on the basis of working seven days a week! Heath actually tried to make us work mainly in the darkness, because the electricity shut down but for three days only. And actually, it's surprising that the figures of British productivity did not decline very much during this time, during the three-day week. The figures of the population rose. People were in bed earlier and for longer periods, and so the population figures took a slight upward turn, but productivity figures didn't respond very much to the treatment of the three-day week. Mr. Heath is a very interesting figure. Today, he is the best social democratic politician we have, though he still belongs to the Conservative Party. He rakes Mrs. Thatcher more effectively than any Labour politician. But in those days, Mr. Heath was an apostle of what he called the "dash for freedom", when he was going to reintroduce the disciplines of the free market to this encrusted Keynesian state. He was going to open up the Keynesian social democratic state to the competitive winds of the market. Mr. Heath had a number of very important figures around him in that government, in 1970-74. He had as Minister of Health, Enoch Powell, for a very short time. The break between Heath and Powell, and Powellism-which I described earlier on-was around the issue of race. But before that, and very shortly into his government, the possibility was that Mr. Powell would have still had high office. Heath had as one of his major intellectual mentors, Sir Keith Joseph. He had at the Ministry of Education a young, upcoming, bright lady who was put in charge especially of nursery education, Mrs. Thatcher. They were all in those days, Heathites, that is to say, they believed broadly in the social democratic consensus of a conservative type, a more market-styled social democracy. 
But in the period when the Heath government collapses as a result of the struggle with the miners, and the Labour government returns to power, in that period, a number of Conservatives undergo a Pauline conversion-they are struck on the road to Damascus. Suddenly, the light flashes in front of their eyes. They're on their knees. They see a vision. The vision is that Mr. Heath is just like the Labour party. He really believes in public ownership, he really believes in the National Health Service, he really believes in the old social democratic Keynesian ways. And what they see ahead of them on this road to Damascus is the long road to serfdom. You go down the road of Keynesian social democracy, and it winds a very long way through Budapest, etc., via Moscow, and ends up in the Urals. The end of British social democracy is Siberia. This is just the British way, the slow crab-like advance, to East European socialism. No, we can't go that way! Turn back! We have to reverse in our tracks, to go back to some other way! There must be some other way of organizing British society than the way of creeping socialism. And for the first time the idea of an alternative, a New Right, and in fact, it's the birth of Thatcherism. And some of the very same people who were involved in the Heath government and in Conservative government before that, along the consensus path, suddenly break with the whole idea of Conservative policy. 
This is the moment when they have to contest social democracy, and contest every feature of English social and cultural life which has developed in the wake, in the form, in the shape of social democratic ideas. They must contest it and take another path. That is the opening of Thatcherism. The first Thatcherite, the leading Thatcherite, is Sir Keith Joseph, not Mrs Thatcher. It is Sir Keith Joseph who is going to contend for the leadership of the Conservative Party against Heath. Now, today, Sir Keith Joseph is still around, he's the Minister of Education, he has made the most horrendous incursions in British education which have ever been seen, etc. But he's not the leader of the Conservative Party. It's not called "Josephism", it's called Thatcherism. The reason for that is that in the period of 1975, when the Conservative Party leadership elections are being contested, Sir Keith Joseph went on a long speaking tour to give the new gospel, the new gospel of monetarism, to the people. And he made a mistake. He made a speech in Birmingham-of all places-and the speech in Birmingham went like this: "Britain has been under an illusion that she could maintain full employment in the welfare state. She can't afford it any longer. What's more, the welfare state and the expansion of the social democratic state has made the British people feeble-morally feeble. They're only strong when they have to compete to survive. But when the state starts to feed them orange juice, gives free health service, pays out retirement pensions, looks after them from cradle to grave, the moral fibre of the British nation disintegrates." That's the hard stuff. "And one of the problems", he said, "with this weakening or enervated working class is too many children, large working-class families, and they can no longer even look after themselves". Well, this was just not acceptable to the audience in Birmingham [tape inaudible] He is talking about his audience in a way they find so alien and so insulting that his campaign is finished. And it's only when Sir Keith Joseph recognizes that he made such a botch of this popular campaign to create the New Conservatism that he retires, makes way and Mrs Thatcher steps into the breach. Now, the reason why I tell you that story, is because the emergence of the New Right is not simply a new political or cultural or economic doctrine. It is also this capacity to address those new doctrinal positions to the people in such a way as to win and draw their consent to this great shift in British politics. And the one thing that Sir Keith Joseph did not have was the popular touch. He could not speak the idioms of ordinary folks. He couldn't translate the doctrines of monetarism which he had read in Hayek, and read in Friedman, and the Chicago economists-he knew all that better than Mrs. Thatcher, but Mrs Thatcher was not an intellectual like that. She had read one Hayek book, The Road to Serfdom-as soon as you subject liberty, you immediately have Stalinism. She got those simple, very basic fundamental political thoughts there. But she was not a sophisticated monetarist, she didn't understand what supply-side economics was about or what Milton Friedman was about. She had to have it translated into simple terms. But that, of course, is the absolute magic of Thatcherism. Because though she didn't understand the doctrine very well, she knew how to address popular positionality, how to construct the politics of the New Right in terms of popular positionality. So instead of talking about the complexities of Keynesian economics, what she said is, "I'm a simple woman. I am a housewife like all the rest of you. And you know that if at the beginning of the week you go into the kitchen and you reach up for the piggy bank and there's nothing in it, you can't buy anything! You can't buy anything! Well, we must run the economy like we run the family. If you don't have any money, you can't have any jobs. You don't create extra jobs-which is what Keynesianism said-to pump demand up, that's rubbish! You're living on tick! You're living on credit! And no decent, ordinary person lives on credit. So, why don't we go back to the fundamental verities, the truths-not the truths of the experts and the economists and the intellectuals and the Treasury, and the Bank of England and the London Business School, not those experts-let's just trust the instincts, the ordinary good English instincts of an English housewife to run an economy. And then she would tell the story of her own upbringing in her father's corner shop in Grantham, where they didn't have very much. But it was a family which never was in credit. It never owed anything to anybody. Always paid its way: a repertoire of the full English petit bourgeois virtue was unrolled in the story of how Margaret Thatcher was formed in the corner shop; and then was translated to Oxford to become a chemist, a scholarship girl; and how these provide the instincts with which she can feel, not what the Labour aristocrats and the Fabians want to impose on the working class, but what the working class really wants, what ordinary people really want, what they really want. Now, what do the ordinary English people really want? 
Well, I've been trying last week to tell you what by now they may be persuaded they really want. They want freedom! So, they want the state taken off their backs. They want freedom. They're said to want competition! Because, after all, they want a stimulus delight. They want something moving. They want the market. They know how to buy and sell. That's how Britain made its greatness. It made its reputation in the nineteenth century by learning how to buy and sell. It didn't wait on the state to tell it when it could buy and when it could sell and so on. It wants to get back to the freedom. So, the discourses begin to develop in the New Right. Anti-statism. Individualism. The market. Money is the central value, the core value. If you want to create goods, you go out and get it. You don't tax the whole population, and then the state decides whether to build houses or to build roads. You give people the money that they've earned and then they decide whether they want to do something with it. You see that begins to undermine and unravel the entire structure behind the notion of the welfare state. Because the welfare state was the notion of the construction of a public and social set of supports. You can only have a welfare state, if you have a high taxation base. You can't create a welfare state unless somebody takes the wealth away and redistributes it to improve the social, physical, cultural, moral, health environment. If you're going to say, that everybody can decide; that I can decide what I want to role, and if I want to role it, I can buy a few pieces of it and if I don't want to role, don't tax me for it; if I want help, I can go to some private insurance scheme, I don't need a whole health service to service my needs. So, the religion of the market, begins to articulate itself on the back of this new conception of how society exists. 
There are certain, key elements in the discourses of Thatcherism, which are extremely important to understand. First, the idea of the "Rate Payer". The rates are the local taxes, taxes which are levied locally, and they also go to the maintenance of the environment, pay for irrigation, for the fire brigade service, the library services, etc.-the Local Rates. But the idea of the Rate Payer is that the Rates are a burden on the Rate Payer. And the Rate Payer is somebody who has to fork out from his pocket and who may not see where his money is going. It's given away to come family over the other side to build a flat for them. The religion of the Rate Payer, of giving back to people what they earn, of lowering taxation, so that the choice of where to spend is once more privatized. It's an individual, private decision, not a collective social decision, but a private decision. That is part of the whole mechanism of restoring the free market. 
Another aspect which runs through the inefficiencies and bureaucracies of English society, is the cry of what is called "value for money". The idea of value for money is that if you have a large bureaucracy, lots of people are sponging off the state, and you can't even see what it is that they're doing or why they are simply employed. "What are you doing? Surely you could do that job with much less people. You don't need so many secretaries. Have up. See how you get on. And have a more careful cost reckoning of what each person's productivity is. Try to stimulate productivity. At the extreme, if necessary, at the expense of making people unemployed. Now, Thatcherism had, almost at once, to negotiate the fact that once you set this new ethic in motion in English society, you are going to have hundreds of thousands of unemployed people. Very rapidly, British society generates more than three million who are unemployed. How is it that a society, which after the war commits itself to the idea of full employment for everybody, tolerates three and a half million people who are unemployed? Well, it's very difficult. But if you can convince people that their standard of living is undermined by inflation, and you can convince them that there is a choice either between increasing employment, or tackling inflation: that is to say, if you can put the attack against inflation higher than the problems of unemployment, people will tolerate and accept the level of unemployment if they see the level of inflation goes down. And that is what Thatcherism did-inflation had a more important target of attack than unemployment, that unemployment was of course, as they said, something which they don't like, they didn't create it, they don't want to see people unemployed. But if you have to have people unemployed in order to deal with inflation, well, that is the cost you must bear. And they managed to persuade people. So, the ideological task of establishing inflation as a more important element in the discourse than unemployment helped to structure people's willingness to tolerate unemployment, provided inflation was being resolved. 
In these many ways, Thatcherism forms up, shapes up as a new kind of political and cultural ideology. I want now to say just two things more about Thatcherism, which is not so directly concerned with the question of political ideology. Because one of the most important things about this new set of discourses, which sets out to reconstruct English culture and English society in the 1970s and the 80s, is that it is undoubtedly popular. By popular I don't mean that everybody suddenly became a Thatcherite in the 70s. But I do mean that that great popularity, that hegemony that had been associated with social democracy, that allowed me to call the 50s and 60s a period of the social democratic consensus, that the popularity of social democracy is broken in the mid-nineteen seventies. And that the popular allegiances begin to develop around Thatcherism. The idea, therefore, that Thatcherism was simply imposed on the English people from the English ruling class, or even worse, from the English petit bourgeoisie, because it has these petit bourgeois elements-people used to say, Thatcherism is the ideology of the lower middle-class. But, the lower middle-class are not only not a power, but they're hard to even see. They're practically off the face of the earth. In fact, Mrs. Thatcher's corner shop is no longer in Grantham! I can tell you-I couldn't find it any longer. It's been sold up and reconverted into modern flats. So, if this is a petit bourgeois ideology, it's not because it's the expression of the ascending petit bourgeois class. It may be a petit bourgeois ideology in the sense that some of its ideological elements seem to belong to what historically we thought of as the ideological configuration of the petit bourgeois classes, but it's not any longer attached to that petit bourgeois class. You might say, paradoxically, that it's the petit bourgeois class for big capital, because this is a strategy for modernizing Britain. Mrs Thatcher has the project, which Harold Wilson never had-she intends to modernize Britain, the very peculiar kind of modernization. This is modernization by two-steps backward, one-step forward. She is going to drive Britain back through the eye of the Victorian hero. Back through Victorianism. In the hope that Britain will then come forward again as a modern entrepreneurial market society into the twenty first century. This is a modernization by recidivism, by a backward trajectory. But nevertheless, the idea is that this ideology will nevertheless modernize Britain. You can imagine that this task of modernization is, as I predicted earlier on, latched into the battery of Churchillism and the war. For what is going to take us through these hard times of Thatcherism before we construct the new basis of a new prosperity? Well, of course, there will be hard times. We'll have to have our 1940s again. We'll have to face the enemy. Now the enemy is Keynesianism and the state and the welfare state. That's the enemy now. But the British will face it like they face the dictators. Back against the wall, stiff upper lip. They will face up to five, ten hard years' labour, in order to win the prize, which is genuine prosperity. Thatcherism makes a distinction between jobs and real jobs. Jobs are the jobs which the state creates. They're phony jobs, jobs which don't really exist. But if you really sack half the workforce and just keep the five people who produce something-those are what she calls real jobs. Now, what she said is, "I could create jobs overnight. I could put everybody to work. But those would be false jobs. They wouldn't be real jobs at all." Let us leave aside the fact that people would at least have a wage and so on. That doesn't matter. Those would be false jobs. And that would be just taking us back into the social democratic dream. "No," she says, "I'm made of sterner stuff. I believe the British can take it. They can take mass unemployment in order to create a few real jobs. Then our prosperity won't disappear in an economic storm. We will then have the real productive industry, which we have not had since the mid-nineteenth century." 
So, in that way, by using the imagery of Churchillism, of facing up to the dark future, of promising Britain only iron times, you'll have to eat iron rations, you'll have to bite on the bullet, you'll have to swallow the hard things, live on a crust- crust and water-you'll have to give up the ways of permissiveness, stop flitting around, stop having so many pleasures, stop indulging yourself, stop buying so many things, stop enjoying life for about ten years. Then you can really enjoy life. Then that would be real life, real pleasure. The others were phony pleasures. You only thought things were looking good, you know. And you did all sorts of things that undermined and weakened the moral fibre of the nation. You started to break up the family and splurge with sexuality. Everybody was on the pill, etc. And how can you restore, really maintain the heart, the moral fibre of the English nation? 
[...recording inaudible...] go back to the family, keep the home fires burning, keep the home fires burning until prosperity eventually comes. So, the idea that Mrs. Thatcher promises anybody an easy, immediate future, that is not how you make yourself popular in Britain. You don't promise an immediate prosperity, immediate pleasure. You say it's going to be long and hard. It's like the Pilgrim's Progress, you have to march all the way through a thousand torments and the hellfire and burning and spitting volcanoes and rushing streams. You have to face up to the ice and the fire. And then at the end of the road will be a few real jobs. A few real jobs. A little prosperity. But unless you go through the fire, you can't expect it. The social democratic way that we could have more, what they called in the 1950s, jam with it. Everything you had, have a slice of jam on top of it. A bit more money, a bit more pleasure, a bit more free spending. That life was going to go on expanding. The welfare state would expand. More hospitals, more buildings, more parks, more pleasure domes. But that was just a kind of dream. The British know that you can only get to it by the hard road. That is why it is popular to call herself the Iron Lady. I mean, where else, in what other culture can you imagine a popular late twentieth century politician trying to recommend herself to the masses, calling herself the Iron Lady? I mean, it sounds so hard, so abrasive, but that is what is popular about her, that she is abrasive. She is a conviction politician. She has a few simple truths, but they are the real truths, they're the truths of Victorian life, the truths of what she calls Victorian values. We ought to go back to Victorian values: respectability, drift, the family, women looking after the children, not running riot, guarding over their daughters, not putting them on the pill too soon. Go back to looking after the economy like you look after the household, the household budget, and the treasury, one and the same. In these ways, Thatcherism encountered popular positionality. Popular positionality. What is more, Thatcherism rooted itself in the actual contradictory experience of social democracy. See, it said to working people, did you really have it so good in the 1960s? Did you really think your children did the best out of the comprehensive school? Well... no. Do you really think that the health service was the best health service in the world when every time you wanted to go to the doctor, you had to put a whole morning aside and you had to queue up? ...No. Well, did you really think that the welfare state belonged to you when you were unemployed and you turned up at the Social Security and the people there treated you as if you had never paid taxes in your life? They treated you like a scrounger. ...No? Well, I don't know, madam, whether you really can draw any benefit. I'll have to come round and see whether you are still living with your husband at your registered address. And in two months' time, I might give you a bit of dole money. Well, that doesn't feel like your state. So, as well as creating an alternative, Thatcherism reminded the working class of the deep contradictoriness of the social democratic experience. And said, better than that is to have a touch of freedom. Better than having the welfare state directing you, whether you can go to hospital or not, that you have to wait five months or six months, in order to have your teeth attended to, and that you have to ask some bureaucrat when you want to move house or paint your door a different colour, or do anything in life: better than that is an old touch of good old British liberty. Good old British liberty. The rights and liberties of free-born English people will be restored by the Thatcherite idea. That is the end of the long march of liberalism: that is where the old discourse of liberalism, of freedom, of rights, of the individual person as a sovereign destiny, of the market as the guarantor of liberties, of the convergence between liberty and private property and the patriarchal family-these as the social units, the social cultural moral unities of the world, the only things you can trust-put your hands on-the family, property, business, the market, value for money-those are the things, the hard materialism, of early liberalism that are re-echoed in the universe of Thatcherite neoliberalism. And English conservatism in this period combines in Thatcherism, at one and the same moment, some of the most archaic of the themes of organic Toryism-nation, flag, people, monarchy, institution-with the religion and gospel of the market. Those two things you might think cannot coexist in the same ideological universe. The market after all is not a respecter of nation, the market goes wherever it can make a cheap bargain, so the idea of the nation and the market together may seem contradictory to you, but that is because you are still in the illusion that ideologies are unified things, that there has to be a unitary logic in ideology. 
But ideologies are not a unified logic of that kind, they are like a prism. They can reflect a wide range of contradictory differences, provided they can create a unifying theme which begins to make all the different identities refract and reflect together. They can hold together for a long time some of the most contradictory things. So, Thatcherism holds together the idea of the free market, and a strong state, and anti-statism, altogether in a great amalgam. And no one ever who occupies it ever thinks, "that side doesn't quite fit with this side". How come we are in an anti-statist society where the state has never been so interventionist? The British state today, not in the economic area, but in the educational area, in local government, has never been so interventionist. But it still represents itself as the summit of anti-statism. So, Thatcherism in that sense is a very contradictory set of discourses. It is not one discourse at all. It is-as I've been trying to talk about these questions throughout these lectures-it remains an articulation of different, sometimes highly contradictory discourses. But one of the ways in which, nevertheless, Thatcherism maintains its popularity, is to allow the different identities which are constructed in each of those discourses to appear, to reflect, or refract off one another, so that the woman who knows how to run her own household, look after the piggy bank, is the same person as the parent who is worried about the children; is the same person who is worried about prices at the supermarkets; is the very same person who has to go to the National Health Service and wait for the doctor. You see how these different identities, they all come together, but they're constructed as if they're one person. 
Just let me give you one last example of it because it's absolutely staggering. In the 1960s, educational radicals were in the business of trying to recruit parent power into the schools, because they imagined that if you could let the parent into the school, you would get a radicalization of English education. Thatcher is also for bringing the parents into the school.
[new tape, gap]
...teach them about Britain's greatness teach them the things that matter teach them something. Now, you can imagine those people who are sending their children to rather inadequate and overcrowded comprehensive schools, worrying whether their children are really doing so well, and at last, suddenly, they are summoned: "Why don't you just take your child out of this system altogether? Send him or her into a private school where they know how to teach them something? Buy the education you need, rather than allowing them to just take the education that the state chooses to give them." 
The point I want to make about becoming popular in this way, is that it is not true that the majority of the English people are essentially Thatcherite. Thatcherism is not imprinted in the English genetic system. The truth is, nothing is imprinted in the English genetic system. The English are like everybody else. They're not "naturally" or "essentially" anything: they are constructed by history. And they are constructed by history as a set of contradictory potential subjectivities. They can become-under different historical conditions, under different discursive conditions-a great number of different things. So, it's not that Thatcherism brought out the innate conservatism of the English working class. Thatcherism constructed the old social democratic working class as a Thatcherite working class. It reconstructed the social subjectivities, the cultural identities of the working class in a new way. The same people, the same folks at one time in the 1960s, saw themselves summoned by the language of the white heat of social democratic, technological, technocratic revolution, and in the 1980s found themselves best hailed, spoken to, addressed, summoned, interpolated by the discourses of modern Thatcherism. They're not Thatcherite, but they are constructed most effectively in the 1980s as Thatcherite subjects, subjects of the discourses of Thatcherism. Their culture, their consciousness, their awareness of life, how they're beginning to think in their practical, everyday realities-about their chances, the chances of their children, how best the society is organized-is dominated more by the imagery, the discourse, and the rhetoric, the connections forged in the discourses of Thatcherism, than by any other political, cultural, or social discourse on offer. That is the dominant discourse. It's not the only one. It's not the hegemonic one. It's bitterly contested. There are all kinds of things it can't do. It can't modernize Britain-it has de-industrialized it. It can't employ Britain-it has created mass unemployment. So, it has not solved the historic problems of Britain, which I've been trying to describe as "lying in wait" for a potential hegemonic politics. It's not done that, but at the moment it has constructed the majority of the English people in different positions, as understanding themselves best, as the subjectivities of a Thatcherite discourse. And that is how Thatcherism has maintained its political popularity, how it has constructed itself as a kind of populism-I'll talk about the theoretical conception of populism at the end in my final lecture-how Thatcherism has become a combination of a leading political force which grounds itself in its appeal to the people, what I've called in my own writings about Thatcherism, an authoritarian populism. 
[...break in tape...] conceal from you the fact that though there is a very particular British route, it is, of course, not only Britain that has taken this route. The collapse of Keynesianism, the collapse of social democratic corporatism in the 60s and 70s, and the return to market, or supply side economics, and to the dream of a market society, etc., is a familiar story in Western Europe, and in Reaganism. Each one brings some of these elements together in a different combination-they're not exactly the same-but there are, of course, certain features that are the same. I'm describing a history which is partly an international history, which happens to have taken a particular form and a particular course in the British context. 
[question - inaudible]
I'm going to talk about fragmentation tomorrow, because I'm talking about cultural difference, I'm talking about the emergence of a range of new identities. I'm going back, tomorrow, over some of the themes that I have already started to talk about in my lecture today- about the breakup that is going on underneath the surface, that, in spite of the fact that it looks tight and holding together and going in a particular direction, there are other tendencies at work in English society, which are bringing new kinds of antagonisms and alternative social identities to the surface. And there's a kind of fragmentation or pluralism going on in English society, which neither Thatcherism nor the old social democracy quite understand. I want to leave that aside for a moment. 
What kind of means? It's very difficult to talk about Thatcherism as if there was a kind of political formation which used the instruments of ideological propaganda, to make the society Thatcherite. And I don't mean to say that at all. In fact, what I have tried to suggest from the very beginning is that Thatcherism emerges against the background of what I've been talking about before. That Thatcherism as a political force could only work if it can link itself into these deeper cultural roots. Only if it can mobilize the old liberal discourse, and mobilize Victorianism, and mobilize liberalism, and mobilize the religion of patriotism and the flag. Only if it can ground itself in those popular interpolations, can it construct itself in a popular way. Of course, I don't mean to deny that when all of that takes a political form-when it coheres within a political party, and a government, and the political leader of the society, speaks in that way-that that is a real moment. It's what Gramsci would call the moment of Party. But the moment of Party doesn't create the cultural moment. The cultures have created the possibility of that moment of Party emerging. So, it's the other way around. And without this ability to ground itself in the discourses of English cultural identities, Thatcherism could not have made itself popular. So, another thing to say is that although it sounds rather homogeneous, remember my point about being contradictory. If you look at it hard, you see all sorts of things inside there, calling themselves Thatcherite, which hardly sleep in the same bed. So, it's a rather unstable formation. It's not as homogeneous as some of the things I said might sound. The other thing is to insist is that if in the construction of what I call the Thatcherite subject, a host of different sites are required, it can't be done through the political instance only. So it's done in the discourses about crime, about the nation; it's done in the discourses about the family, and patriarchy, and the position of women, and the lack of authority of children. All of those different sites in civil society are part of the sites on which this Thatcherite subject is constructed. In that sense, although Thatcherism has never been hegemonic in the true sense, it understands itself as a hegemonic project. That's to say it knows that it cannot win and reconstruct English society and culture from the political instance alone, or the economic instance. It knows it has to win morally. It has to win intellectually. It has to win in the discourses of practical everyday life. It has to win on what is called in English politics the non-political issues. In education, and in crime, and in law and order. These are some of the central discourses of Thatcherism. Law and order, which doesn't seem to have anything to do with politics at all. So it is constructed on a variety of different sites, actual social sites. I haven't spoken, for instance, about the importance of the popular press and of the media to the construction of Thatcherism. But they are very important, not because Thatcher owns them or Thatcher tells them what to say, but because they have responded to the climate. And gradually you can see the mass media, the popular press and the serious press in their different ways adapting to the Thatcherite climate. I haven't spoken about intellectual Thatcherism. Monetarism as an economic doctrine is elaborated by professors of economics, by the London Business School, by the research institutes, by the Treasury. There's a high-level discourse of Thatcherism, which doesn't touch these practical, popular discourses I've been talking about at all. So, Thatcherite has constructed itself as a hegemonic intellectual force as well. Keynesianism was the religion of the intellectuals, and so the intellectuals had to be taken on and dismantled. In the 1960s, the right used to say, "only the left has good ideas". Well, it's not true anymore: the bright young intellectuals, young writers, young publicists, young scholars, young researchers, don't feel at all embarrassed by saying that they're young neoliberals-what they would call young libertarians, by which they mean the liberty of the free market. They don't mean libertarianism in the 1960s. There is a place called the Libertarian Bookshop, which in the 1960s sold nothing but anarchism, free love, pot and how to make 50 pipes and how to-at the last desperate moment-to make a petrol ball. Now, the same people are in charge of the libertarian bookshop. It sells only Hayek, Friedman, it sells only stuff about the free market, it has entirely been re-appropriated by the right. And a new book has just appeared called The New Enlightenment. None of the contributors are over 25. They're young writers, young novelists, young scholars, young researchers, young journalists, young publicists, and all of them are neoliberal libertarians. They think the public sector, the national coal board, the nationalized railways, are fossils of a past. Modern industry is in a small scale technological computer firm. They inhabit a post-social democratic world. 
So, you have to understand this transformation that is going on in English political culture and in social life as constructed at the same moment, in a number of different areas, and at a number of different levels. There's a high-level discourse, and a popular discourse, a populist discourse, and a middle-brow discourse. There are Thatcherite discourses of different kinds appealing to different sectors of the population. So, it's not homogeneous, and it's not all coming from one source, and it's not all on the same level. But it's operating within the same kind of framework. The same ideas reappear in the different discourses. 
[question - inaudible on tape]
Ah...that would take about ten lectures. But very briefly, let me try and say simply that-and this is not what I think will happen, what I think will happen is a more dismal story-but what I think might happen if the best were to happen the ideal case were to come about, I think that the criticisms which are levelled by Thatcherism against the old style of social democratic statism are perfectly correct. Perfectly correct. The long influence and legacy of English Fabianism and English Labourism, which imagines that the state will do things for the people is not a deeply democratic conception. Not a democratic conception. So, although I oppose the politics of Thatcherism, I don't refuse the critique of statism which Thatcherism makes. I think the association of socialism in the Western world with the swollen bureaucracies of the state has been disastrous. I think it was disastrous for gentle Britain. I think it was disastrous for Stalinism. I think it's disastrous for Eastern Europe. I think it is a disaster. Marx talked about the liberation of society and the withering away of the state, not that the state would go on forever, getting bigger and bigger and bigger, and telling more and more and more people what to do, for more hours of every day. He may have been utopian about the withering away of the state, but at least he knew what a democratic conception of the future would be, and he knew that it was incommensurable with the idea of the permanent state. Now, I know it's a complicated question, because I know in some ways it is still inconceivable to know how you break with the exploitative and undemocratic aspects of capital and the market without the state. How do you break the regime of capital, without the counter-regime of the state? That's why the state gets into the argument at all. But the idea that once in, it should get bigger and bigger, take over more and more of the functions of social life, and that somehow we should call that socialist, or even-forget socialist-that we should call that the democratic ideal. I don't believe it. So, I believe there's an absolutely gigantic task ahead in order to conceive of what genuine forms of democratic social life really are like, of more autonomous, more independent, more different, more differentiated, more plural centres of real social autonomy. I don't know what kind of society that makes, and I don't know what kind of state that makes, but I know it is closer to the ideal of a more humane life than the notion of the great state. The state is what I call the old caretaker. And it has-well I nearly used a very obscene phrase-it has screwed us up as much as it has liberated us. Every time the state freed us for something, it screwed us round the back. It has just-you'll forgive the phrase-it has fucked us over. There are no good bureaucrats, there are just bureaucrats. That's not the people, the people of course, the bureaucrats as you very well know, are just like us, they run away from bureaucracy and say "I hate being in there, I hate it", but when they get in there, they occupy the identity of the bureaucrat. That is not a liberatory social identity. Bureaucracy has never freed anything-it doesn't free anything. So, I find it very difficult to understand what is the balance between market and state, for example. Now, I think we are really right at the beginning of trying to construct alternative social and political forms. I really don't know. For instance, I think that if it is possible to disassociate the construction of the market, in a more technical sense, from the accumulation of the inequalities of wealth, it is preferable to a giant bureaucracy that tries to run everything. But how you then create out of such a society the idea or the conception of the public-of public social space, for instance, which isn't yours or mine, which you don't look after because it's your front door, but you look after because, after all, we share a human and social environment-that notion of the social has tended in the past to require the state. The state represented the social interest, and the rest of us were confined to private, individual, egoistic wills. Well, so I'm at sea in terms of bringing before you a positive conception of the possible balance between new state forms and new forms of social life. The one thing I know is that any such more ideal form of democratic life will have rival and countervailing centres of real power and authority in civil society itself. The power will not be concentrated in the state. Decisions will not be concentrated in the state. And people, individuals, will not have their public identities only as citizens of the state. They will have many more cross-cutting allegiances to different centres of power. The pluralization of power goes along with the pluralization of subjectivities, and both of them require a less centralized, less dominant, less integrated organic state. But that's not an answer to the question. That's a kind of gesture. That's all I'm able to capable of at the moment...



1

Of British cultural life and British cultural identities. And in part it's something of a theoretical reflection on some of the things that I was saying yesterday and some of the arguments that I was making in the lecture on ethnicity and in some of the things I said in the talk on Monday. So I want to... Yesterday I was really trying to construct the thematic elements which helped to hold together Thatcherism as a cultural and political figure. Today I want to elaborate a little bit more on this question of the popular and on the process by which particular ideological discourses become popular. Think about that as a process. And I want to talk about, to make a number of, to cut in a number of ways into this question. What I'm really trying to describe is some tendencies in modern or contemporary British culture, which lead to the tendency of the fragmentation of some of the larger patterns and structures and configurations, which we have come to assume to be the sort of stable forms which English culture assumes. I think that process of semi-pluralization or fragmentation is happening in English culture, and I want to speak about it from a number of different directions. First of all, let me start with the argument I was making yesterday about the importance in the huge shift which takes place in English culture in the mid-1970s, which is very much associated with the development of the new right as a political formation, and with the emergence of Thatcherism as a set of contemporary political and social discourses. And let me remind you that I was talking about that yesterday, not just as something which has to do with the arena of politics in a narrow sense, it has to do with the cultural roots on which politics draws. Political discourses draw on the deeper roots of a particular cultural formation. So I was looking at Thatcherism partly in terms of its capacity to make itself popular among different sectors of the society, indeed among and across different classes, partly because it was able to ground itself in the structures of the national popular. It's only because the atorism could resonate its own popular political discourse with certain important structures in the categories of the national popular in England that it could so quickly become itself a popular political force. It becomes a popular political force not simply because it's successful in its propaganda, not because, as it were, it converts people in a self-conscious way, but because it assumes the disguise, as it were. It appears in the form, in forms with which they are already culturally and socially familiar. Though, of course, it mobilizes those meanings around a particular political project. The political project of Thatcherism, to speak in Gramscian terms, in its party sense, in its organizational sense. That moment is quite new, and I tried to suggest to you how new it is, how much of a break it is with the political developments which are set in train in the period of 1945 and afterwards. So its political formation is new, but its grounding in the terrain and structures of English national popular culture and cultural identities is not, in fact, new. Secondly, I want to suggest to you that Thatcherism not only then gets some of its resonance, its popular resonance, from this terrain in which it grounds itself, but that part of its project, its cultural project, is itself to become a kind of common sense. Thatcherism does not intend, as it were, to be a new and novel ideology. It wants to become taken for granted. It wants to disappear into just what people know. People's common sense should be Thatcherite. It should just take it for granted that if you want something, the private individual goes out and gets it, that you find it largely given in the market, that if you're interested in modern freedoms, that is guaranteed by the freedoms which arise from the laws of supply and demand, etc. It tries to naturalize itself in common sense. So, quite different from the way in which we think of many political ideologies as arising outside of common sense, and as it were trying to construct an entirely new conception of the world, the novelty of Thatcherism is to, as it were, transform the structures of common sense itself. It is to ground itself as a popular discourse. Now, this process can indeed only take place if it is possible for a new political discourse like that of the new right to draw in or integrate within its discursive framework elements which do not have a necessary belongingness to it. That is to say, Thatcherism has to be able to inflect meanings which have been pre-established in other political and cultural discourses, other social and moral discourses, and articulate those elements to itself. That is to say, perhaps I should have put it more strongly, it has first of all to disarticulate those elements from the discourses in which they are already placed, and then to re-articulate the elements within a new discourse or system of narration. So Thatterism picks up on the image of the family, on the image of the good parent, on the image of the responsible mother, on the image of the Smilesian household that only spends what it earns, etc. All of these figures are already embedded somewhere in the discursive universe of English culture. But, of course, they have been spoken in many other discourses before it, the discourse of Adam Smith, the discourse of classical liberalism, the discourses of reformism, have many of these ideas around. And I think previously, hitherto, we have thought of those ideological discourses as fixed. Liberalism belongs. A certain set of ideas belong to liberalism. They have a necessary belongingness to that discourse. And we think of those elements as necessarily belonging even to certain specific class positions. So we think of the Thatcherite discourse as a petty bourgeois discourse, and therefore we associate that with a particular set of class positions. So we speak about Thatcherism as a new kind of petty bourgeois discourse linked to the petty bourgeois class. But actually, as I was trying to say to you yesterday, first of all, there is no old petty bourgeoisie any longer. Thatcher, Mrs. Thatcher's family has long since gone over the hill in its old way. It is not the leading class. If the Thatcherite project is historically to remake Britain, it is not going to be remade from the corner shop. That's not where it's going to be remade. So this is an ideology which is speaking to quite different social forces and social interests. And some of the elements are combined with elements which don't belong in that discourse at all. Thatcherism is composed, on the one hand, of the elements of a neoliberal discourse. But that neoliberal discourse doesn't seem, doesn't appear to fit very easily with the discourse of nation and people and monarchy and institutions. But it is possible for Thatcherism to try to construct a discursive unity by articulating elements which don't, as it were, have a necessary or fixed class belongingness. And consequently, this opens up the ways in which we conceptualize the discursive fields of the ideological, of the cultural, to quite new conceptions. First of all, it underlines the necessarily discursive character of culture. When I say that, I mean that it is possible for cultural meanings always to be given a different accentuation. There is no one absolute, unilateral, fixed meaning to any cultural symbol, not a single one. It is possible to disarticulate that symbol or concept or word or term or idea or ritual or image from its setting within one set of discourses and to inflect it differently. That is the idea which I referred to when someone asked me before about Bakhtin, about Voloshinov, about the necessary multi-accentuality or the polysemic, many-meaning nature or character of cultural ideology. It breaks with the idea of cultural ideology as a single set of meanings, which are fixed and forever in one place, one political position. Secondly, it brings into play those ideas which I talked about last week. The notion, for instance, of the discursive of a discourse as a set or ensemble of elements, or what we can call different formations, different cultural or ideological formations, that any society never has any one cultural set of meanings, or one. Even if we speak of the positioning of dominance for a time of one kind of discourse over another, and of course there are those relationships of power, the relationship between knowledge and power is always inscribed in culture. Consequently, the discourses don't have, as it were, equal valency or equal power between them. But nevertheless, there's never only one. when we use the term dominance, the idea of dominance or the dominant instance in cultural ideology, we are never speaking of one unilateral discourse. We are speaking about the relations of forces between different discursive sets. We are speaking, that is to say, of cultures in the form of a magnetic field. I tried to talk about a magnetic field before. One talks about real lines of force, and one can even talk about lines of tendency. The one thing that one cannot talk about is one so-called dominant culture or ideology which has swallowed up everything else into itself, which has constituted the whole of society as an identity. There is no society which is an ideological identity in that form. Consequently, one has to either abandon the notion of identity or redefine it entirely. And I want to, part of what I want to say is to talk about the ways in which one can talk at all about identity any longer. Next, one thinks about the process of change or transformation within culture. Now, again, quite differently. No longer is it, as it were, one conception of the world related to one set of social forces, which can only be transformed by totally abolishing that, dropping it over the side, and constructing from a new, an entirely new conception of the world, so that, as it were, the world is blocked out by the total superimposition of one conception of the world on the other. That is not actually how transformation takes place. But much more in terms of the processes of articulation, disarticulation, re-articulation. So breaking up the sets, allowing the elements to float free, and then reconstituting them into new sets. Disarticulation, re-articulation. That process of breaking the field up and constituting it again are the ideas one has to put in the place of a different conception, which had the conception of an origin, where the ideas and the social forces were one, the force had only one set of ideas, and when the dominance of that class or group declined, then that conception went out of the window. It is not so. When a class, a dominant social force, or whatever it is, declines or disappears, its ideas continue to lie around. They constitute the vocabularies of the society, and new political positions can be constituted by recovering those old ideas and reworking them so that they now refer to contemporary realities, while of course carrying some of the luggage, the baggage of the past. You remember I told you the story about Sir Keith Joseph, who when he came in under the new Thatcherite regime, insisted that everybody read Adam Smith, all his civil servants. He sent them away. Take a week, he said, and go and read Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations. Well, now, it wasn't possible for a modern English civil servant in the Ministry of Employment or Industry or whatever it was, to actually reproduce the 18th century. So he wasn't under the impression that people were going to go back to agrarian capitalism. What he meant was he wanted to familiarize them with this vocabulary that people had spoken of as if it was dead. The age of agrarian capitalism is finished, so of course Adam Smith is buried with it and with the class which gave rise to his ideas. That was how people thought. But not at all. Those ideas are still around. The link between the market, property, the freedom and patriarchy are alive and well in the 20th century. It's a different form of property and a different kind of market and a different family, but the ideas will serve. They're there in the tradition. Indeed, because they are embedded in the vocabularies of the culture, they carry the weight, the resonance of the past with them. They carry the legitimacy of the past with them. So the idea of the articulation of elements of unities which consist of the linkage between different positions and then of change as coming about through the dissolution of one set of discourses and the recomposition of new which combine all elements anew which take up the ideas of the free market and rework them in the light of modern 20th century economic conditions. That is how a new discourse constitutes itself. So when one says Thatcherism is new, it is a quite new configuration, the like of which has not been seen for 200 years in English politics. And yet it is not new in the sense that its elements were thought about for the first time in 1975. And I'm trying to get you to see the way in which new conceptualizations of how cultural change takes place has had to be brought into play as a result of this new way of looking at things. I therefore talked about a discourse as a set of elements, as a combination of elements, and I've reminded you about multi-accentuality, which means that the elements can be combined in different ways. It means, for instance, that some of the major ideological and cultural contestations take place not around different concepts, but about different accentuations of the same concept. The real argument about democracy is not just between democracy and totalitarianism, but about different sorts of democracy, about different kinds of democracy. The argument about liberty and equality is not as it were as if those were fixed entities. It is exactly the different balances between the two, the different conceptualizations of the two, which you get in different political discourses. Or think of a quite new arena, the arena I was talking about yesterday, the arena of race and ethnicity. When the new social movements around race and ethnicity began to emerge in the 1960s in America and in Britain, they didn't coin a different word for themselves. They went back to the old word, which had negative connotations. Black, of course, meant that which is ugly, that which is behind God's back, that which cannot be recognized or seen. You know, the light, every Renaissance painting, after all, every medieval painting is structured in the opposition between light and darkness. Darkness is always down below. Yes, well, the contestation of those movements was precisely to recover that same term, the other, the despised, the marginalised, and make it central. So, what they said is, black is beautiful. That is what was scandalous. If they said we are beautiful and we will find a new name for our beauty, that would be a different thing. But to actually go into the existing structure of connotations around the ideas of light and dark and say exactly the thing which the entire Christian tradition has tried to construct as a negative is now positive for us. That is positive for us. You see how you turn the world upside down. And those are real contestations. they don't just go on in the head, you know. For a long time, I talked yesterday in my lecture about the whole long process by which black people became black. They were not black before. By which they became black. And this process I'm describing is one of the processes by which they became black. They snatched the word black from behind the back of Western civilization and put it in the center. And then they listened to the grinding noise as the whole culture had to learn to use the word. And if you trace it through the mass media at that time, if you listen to the BBC, for instance, having to begin to describe the blacks. And the way, I mean, you know, they couldn't bring themselves to say that, first of all. They would say things like the so-called black movement. a sort of disavowal. So it was a real crunch, a crunch in consciousness, which is provoked by contesting the same content. Don't imagine that this only happens when you are having a radical transformation. Mrs. Thatcher does exactly the same thing, the opposite way. She says, socialism says it's the same as freedom. But look, you know that socialism has meant the growth of the bureaucratic state. So I contest the idea that these two ideas can be equivalent. I must separate the idea of socialism from freedom. And I must reintegrate the now free-floating conception of freedom in my discourse. So the structure of a Thatcherite debate or talk always has the structure, Not that, but that. Of dissociating, of contesting, opening the space, and then establishing a new chain of equivalences. Not that stroke, but that. Liberty is not socialism, but Thatcherism. That's the structure. And it moves the identities of popular thought from one system of narration to another. By system of narration I mean any cultural ideological discourse is a way of telling the world. It's a way of telling the story of the world. And therefore you have to integrate these ideas into an alternative way of telling how the world is. That's a system of narration. And that is not only therefore the textual and dispersive nature of culture, but also the narrative nature of culture. That culture is in part the stories we live by. the stories we live by, the fictions we need to live by. Okay, that's one kind of shift that comes about as a result in the way in which we have to conceptualize culture. And you see that that now breaks up and begins to pluralize and fragment one's conception of the dominant culture, or the subordinate culture, or the old unities, ruling class culture and working class culture, etc. These great blocks, and now I'm going to try to undermine those great blocks from another direction. Because, of course, one of the things that held those structures in place was the idea of the homogeneous, unified class subject, or of what Pulantzis calls the class subject with its ideology, like a number plate on the back, you know, like a fiat. If you want to know what the working class thinks, it thinks, of course, revolutionary ideas. Then there's a slight discrepancy between the number on the back and the number on the front, because the two don't quite ever square up. That is the ideal thought. Meanwhile, of course, they're in false consciousness. They have a number of phony number plates at the front, But really, of course, they're always only really thinking. Their real ideas are still imprinted across the back bumper. Yes, revolutionary ideas. They're coming. Any moment now, the car will turn around and they will reverse through history backwards, showing their true thought, their true idea. Now, it's a long time since that notion notion gave people a great deal of difficulty. You know, it's already in Gramsci, when Gramsci talks about the individual as not a unitary whole, but as he said, composed of, on the one hand, stone age elements, and at the same time, intuitions of the future. Yes, there's a notion that even the individual subject is itself bifurcated between the ancient or archaic part and then the everyday, contradictory, practical part and then the part which is still an anticipation of what is to come, that all of that is what we are, that we as individuals are all of those things together, not one thing, and can't be easily kind of purified in terms of what we would like ideally to see ourselves as. That's the notion that human beings themselves are ensemble. There are themselves formations, that the self is a formation. It is itself composed of different structures. Now you can see how classy the conception of the individual in classic liberalism, which has dominated so much of the arc of contemporary cultural and social thought in the intervening period, finds it very difficult indeed to survive the notion that the sovereign individual dissolves into a set of contradictory configurations. If the self doesn't stay put so that it can be given natural characteristics natural qualities etc endowed from the outside with the instincts and understandings which naturally inhere in it as a human species if it too is a kind of production if the self is a kind of production and composed of has its own histories including of course the history of the unconscious, and the history of the past, and the history of tradition, as well as the histories of everyday life, and the histories or promises of the future. If that is what the self is, well, it's a very different notion now that centers or stabilizes the discourses of a culture. And that idea too is broken up and interrupted by the impact of Freudian thought, of psychonosis, etc., which sees the self not only as a process and a production, but as a contradictory process and production, and one which, as it were, comes to a unity, the unity we recognize as ourselves, only at the cost of a series of repressions. It's only by forgetting most of what is going on, that is at any rate Freudian theory, by forgetting most of what is going on in our psychic life, in the very important period when we are being formed as social individuals, only by forgetting most of it that we can come to recognize something in the end, at the end of the process, the different processes by which the self dissociates itself from the other. marks the difference from the other, the birth of language, recognizes itself as gendered, as a sexually gendered being, and begins to enter the discourses of the wider culture, to take on culture, that all those processes have to be resolved before there's anything called the self at all. This is, again, breaking up the conception of the unified self as an agent of action and as a center of understanding. to that one has to add therefore the notion that i've been using before when i talked about articulation disarticulation and that has to do with the nature of the way in which the individual the genetic or biological individual locates itself or becomes the subject of culture because again in the traditional conception there is no difference between those two things. The biological individual is the person whose ideas it is or whose self is represented in speech. There's no discrepancy between the two. But of course one of the impacts, one of the effects of the new conception of conceptions of language and the impact, the interruptions, which what I called last time the paradigms of structuralism have made into cultural theory, enforces the recognition of the distinction between the individual subject as an agent and the subjects, in quotation marks, of culture. There isn't a necessary identity between the I that speaks and that bundle of biological drives, psychic energies, and that ensemble that we call the self? It's a different question. In discourse, we can be interpellated. That is the Althusserian word. We can be hailed or summoned. We can come to recognize ourselves as apparently the authors of a variety of different discourses. A variety of different discourses. And what I tried to say about Thatcherism yesterday is only possible, see, if it can construct a system of narration which is able to interpolate the different facets of the identities of the so-called class subjects to which it is addressed. It has to be able to resonate these different facets. For instance, what I'm saying may sound very abstract to you, but let me try and make it concrete. Whenever for 15 or 20 years there was an industrial dispute in Britain, say, a dispute involving the miners' union, It was always possible for the mass media to represent what was at issue in the struggle between the miners and the coal board, say, by the context in which they interviewed people. If you interviewed the miner, now there's only one, let's call him Tom, right? You interview him at work. Yes, he's in the context of the hard masculine labor of the mine. He is surrounded by the miner's lodge, which has protected him from birth to death. He's a trade unionist. He has only one identity in that position. He's a trade unionist. On strike. And the media says, What do you think of the strike, Tom? Well, what does he say? This is the strike of the working class. This is a strike in defense of our living standards. We will never give up. Okay, but if you follow Tom home, now Tom is the family man. Tom is a father of five children, all of who say, It's Christmas. Where are we going to get our Christmas presents, Dad? Not this year. Can't get any this year. I'm on strike. Well, who's going to pay for the food? Sorry, no food, no strike. Well, what do you think of the strike, Tom? Tom the father now? Well, it's difficult. Of course, I'm not giving up. As a trade unionist, I can't give up. Though, as a father, my children, I have to think about my children, how they're going to survive. Has Tom changed? Is he different? Is it two people? No, the two people are Tom. One is not more authentic than the other. Tom the father is not a more authentic figure than Tom the trade unionist. It's not that Tom the trade unionist is false and the other is real. That is a kind of inversion of the question. Tom is both those identities and in a sense neither of them. He's also some other things which we can't go on to say. What about Tom on his evening off with the boys? Tom who has left the mine behind and wants to leave the family behind and is out with the boys up in Sheffield for the night. How do you feel about the strike now Tom? I don't want to be reminded about that. I just want another pint, you know. This is Tom, the l'homme moyen sensuel. Yes, this is Tom, the man at the disposal of pleasure now, not of the disciplines of the union or the responsibilities of fatherhood. Is this then forced? No, that is part of him too. He's all of those things. So in the discourses of trade unionism, of familialism, Tom says different things. He's a subject of three different ideological... He can produce three or four or five or ten different ideological discourses. He can speak them all authentically. He can invest them all with the authenticity of his particular personality. None of them is untrue. None of them is the whole truth. He is all of them. What do we call composite social man? Composite social man. Now, in that sense, once you recognize, therefore, that there's a distinction between the actual agent and the discourse, that the discourses can, as it were, position the same individual differently, then you get out of the notion, which, of course, has been a strongly contested idea around the arguments which surround the question of Thatcherism, Because when I say in England Thatcherism is popular, my critics instantly say, oh, that is an old story. That says the working class is always conservative. And I'm not saying the working class is always conservative. I'm saying the working class is never always any one thing. It can be constructed in the Thatcherite discourse. It can be under certain historical conditions. It can also be deconstructed. So the Thatterism, once it takes hold of the popular form, is not popular till the end of time. But it has to be deconstructed by some other political discourse capable of in the same way resonating itself in the popular, capable of interpolating a wide range of different social identities, capable of building those different social identities into one system of narration and of contesting the positivities of Thatcherism, well, in that way, Thatcherism can be displaced. But of course, until you get a political or social force that understands that that is actually the nature of disarticulation, re-articulation in the field, and that one is not dealing with people who are either once and for all the revolutionary subject or once and for all the reactionary subject. One is dealing with that person that you all know who has the touches of the reactionary, the progressive, the liberal and the revolutionary all mixed up together. A bit of each of those is inside all of us. Gramsci's Stone Age man still knocks on the door. It's inside the revolutionary mask. And at the same time, that inside us, which wants to get beyond the structures that we live every day, the hope of emancipation, the movement towards surpassing, which makes us have a vested interest in the future, in becoming something different, in getting on, in developing something new, that contests with the Stone Age elements in us. And we can be addressed and positioned in a variety of different discourses. Well, again, to conceptualize culture in that way is now to see the landscape being even further broken up. Now, not only is the landscape not fixed, blocked out in its different unities, but the actual subject which speaks the subject of culture is not a unified position either. So one's talking now about the ensemble, which is the subjects, in the field of discursivity, which is culture. This is a quite new way of conceptualizing the relationship between the two. Okay, I want to cut into the question of the pluralization of culture now from yet another direction. From another direction. Because so far what I've been trying to do is to break up or interrupt or problematize the central formations which have helped to articulate these great arenas of culture, the social, the economic, etc., which have been very often posited in the language of class. I want to remind you that not only is class, therefore, itself subject to what I've just said, it is itself a complex and contradictory formation. But, of course, there are also critical and crucial, important forms of antagonism and types of struggle in society which cannot find their origin in the so-called class contradiction at all. So, part of the so-called pluralization of the field arises from the proliferation or the expansion of the field of social antagonisms themselves. Well, I want to spend a little time on this question. it begins after all very centrally for me with Gramsci's notion of hegemony which after all is I understand Gramsci's notion of hegemony as itself the product of an attempt to struggle with the tendency to reductive and economistic and decentralizing and monistic conceptions of social agents, of classes, and of culture and ideology in orthodox or classic Marxism. I know that the term itself has a lineage within orthodox Marxism, but as Gramsci expands on it, it does not remain located in that discourse. It bursts the limits of that discourse. And one of the important conceptions that's associated with the development of hegemony as a central political concept is the notion that if, as it does, it implies relations of power, relations of domination and subordination, etc., that first of all, those relations of power have to be thought, as I've said a moment ago, in terms of what Gramsci calls the relations of forces, not as a single incorporating moment which swallows everything else up, but secondly, that it is a form of dominance or power, forms of domination or power, which are constructed across many different sites, across many different sites or locations in the society. Gramsci's notion that though the state in modern societies plays an extremely important role, we have to think of that role as constituting an instance of rule out of a variety of different relations of power. The state is not itself a unitary instance of power. It is the constitution of an instance of power out of a set of relations of power. It's the bringing together or the process of condensation which constitutes the state. Well, if you understand the state in this way, as not the given instrument of the ruling class, as not having a singular class character, class inscription, class connotation, as, of course, not just a field of an empty field of a neutral dispersal either, as itself a configuration of powers, of powers, with an uneven relationship between how those different contestations are working out in different arenas of the state, One of the things, if you don't understand British history, one of the things you would have to do is to talk about the ways in which different echelons within the state itself are differently disposed within the balance of social forces. They don't remain the same. The state itself has to be thought of as a contradictory ensemble. Well, in addition to that, Gramsci isn't only reconceptualising the state, but conceptualising the importance of the so-called sites of the non-state. that cites in civil society itself the arenas of moral, social, intellectual, familial power, which unless they can, as it were, be drawn within or integrated within some system of narration, articulated to some organizing principle for a time, cannot constitute genuine hegemonic power. That is the concept of hegemony. It must not be used as another word for simple domination. I don't need to say that in Italy, but you have to say that in America five times every day, because they use the term hegemony like they use the word domination. They use it interchangeably with dominant. And when they say such and such is hegemonic, they mean nothing else exists. They mean the incorporation of the working class that has become bourgeois. but hegemony is exactly the opposite concept for that it is a class the idea of the relations between different classes where the other remains what it is in the subordinate place the hegemony of men over women does not consist of making women like men it consists of keeping women exactly as they are deeply feminine and secondary in their place, in their proper place. That's what the relations of forces mean. It doesn't abolish the difference between different people or different positions. It maintains the difference within a hegemony. Hegemony, therefore, is not the obliteration of difference. It's the constitution of power across difference. So that casual way of using hegemony as a way of, you know, every time, any time you want to talk about power, dominance, anybody who's above superiority, hegemony, abolish it. Cross it out in the mind. Find another word. It doesn't mean that. It's a much more specific concept, and it has a quite complex internal structure. It refers not to the one site of power, the state, but to the multiple sites of power. Not to the one instance of power, the state, which is unitary, but to the state as a contradictory formation. the conception which goes of politics in Gramsci, which goes along with the idea of hegemony, that is to say the notion of a war of position, recognizes that, as it were, you can only gain hegemony in the war of position if you can articulate different positionalities together. The articulation of different positionalities, not the unfolding of all positionalities into one place. of different classes unified through for a time, through a system of narration and a set of political allegiances and alliances into a formation which remains complex, which has within it elements of what he calls the leading and the subaltern and the subordinate. It's a formation, not an instance, formation, but nevertheless has the sufficient unity to, as it were, construct a society for a period of time around a new historical project. So, already in the notion of hegemony, one has the idea of multiple sites of power. One has the idea of a unity which is not unitary and not a set of identities, but which is itself a complex formation of different antagonisms. And one has the notion of cultural politics or politics itself as a question of the project of unifying that which remains different and dispersed. But even what I've said so far, which breaks up now from another direction, the fixed political landscapes, the fixed political positions and the fixed political landscape, that doesn't take us far enough. In the last 15 or 20 years in societies like Britain, the United States, other parts of Western Europe, etc., the field of the political has been marked by the emergence of new kinds of social movements. These are social movements which clearly have, now I'm beginning to use the terms that I used before, which clearly have articulations with that which we use the term class and the economic to refer to, but which do not have class or the economic as their point of origin. I want to speak about four of them First of all I want to speak about the feminisms Then I want to speak about the ethnics Then I want to speak about the subculturals And then I want to speak about sexual politics These are only some of the social movements There are ecological social movements Which have to do with the environment there are social movements which don't have a distinctly political character which don't have change at their centre nevertheless what we are looking at here are not incidental political developments one is looking at a change, a shift in the composition of the terrain of the political and an expansion of the terrain of the political itself Since the 1960s, one of the strongest, most decisive and transformatory movements has been the movements in developed industrial democracies of the feminisms. There is not one, of course, feminism, though feminism is constantly represented as unitary. Feminism is itself not totally defended against the illusion of thinking of itself as a unity. It often contests the so-called unity of class, but it is not outside of thinking of itself as one thing. But actually, those of you who have ever been in or near or pulled towards the feminist movement know that it has always been more than one feminisms. More than one feminisms. Now, what feminism has done to this more unitary conception or landscape that I've been trying to describe is, of course, deeply to problematize it. To problematize it. what it made us alive to, was the fact that what we took as the descriptions of the processes and forms which related social forms to cultural forms, that is to say, largely the language of orthodox historical materialism, had also, like any discourse, its inside and its outside, its center and its periphery. And that at the same time, as Marxism constructed certain objects and relations as central, in the very same moment, it also established the margins or the periphery. And, surprise, surprise, it assigned women to the margin. This new revolutionary discourse, nevertheless, located itself in the taken for granted of gender. in the taken-for-granted agenda. And you shouldn't be surprised by this, though many feminists were astonished by it, if you understand how the discursive works. The discursive cannot create equalities. It has no equal discourse. Not possible to equate, to construct the discourse of perfect equality. It always, every discourse, centers some things because it marginalizes the rest. You can't say anything if your intention is to say everything. If you want to say everything, you have to shut up. Either that or you begin the interminable sentence, the sentence which never ends. The moment you end the sentence, you haven't said everything. Everything. So something always remains outside the frame, and something always remains towards the margins of the frame. discourse has those relationships of power and positioning. Positioning in that sense is not a neutral thing. It always positions some, it establishes some subjective positionings more central to the objects that are being constructed in the discourse than others. It's like, you know, the painting which makes sense from some points of view, not from every point of view. You can't see it in quite the same way by walking all the way around. There are some places where you suddenly say, Ah, I see. Now I can see. It's like those pictures, you know those pictures that sometimes look like a vase and sometimes look like a duck? And there are only some places where it makes sense. When you move to another place, the lines seem to assemble themselves differently. So no discourse is able, as it were, to establish that we know of yet is able to establish the perfect equality of all subject positions. Habermas believes, I think, that one of these days there will be the condition of perfect speech equality. But I'm not quite as optimistic as that. That's the last lingering of the Enlightenment dream, and I'm glad he has it, but I'm not sure that I can share it. So, of course, the struggle to come in from the margins, to center the questions of gender, to establish the rhythms and the histories, the alternative histories of sexual division, older than capitalism. We speak about capitalism these days as if there's nothing older than capitalism. But the sexual division of labor is older than capitalism, much older. It's the deepest archaic structure of all. Actually, Marx and Engels said so. They said that the social division of labor was modeled on the sexual division. It's the one closest to nature on which the much more refinement, that huge process that has created our world, nothing but the implacable march of the social division of labor, modeled on the sexual division of labor. So the notion, of course, it's quite true that the sexual division of labor does not operate outside of its articulation with other histories. So the notion that you could identify that strand or that strip and just look at that as if it was another pure history, another unified history, is of course quite wrong. Each time it occurs, it occurs in articulation with the histories of class and of culture and of ethnicity and of nation, etc. There's no one history. But it has a different durée. It has a different temporality. It has different structures, different categories. and it produces different realities, the realities of the sexual divisions. Well, the social movements that have organized themselves tried to, as it were, construct the subjectivities of feminisms, of the feminisms, and which in that sense have transformed and partly transformed the subjective, the constituent subjective elements of human feminine subjects in the world, in the modern world, have simply pluralized our conception of what is important, what is central, what needs to be explained in the histories of our own civilization. And one of the other transformations which the development of the feminism has brought about was that radical affirmation, the centering of what the feminisms called the personal. The personal. For most of us had inhabited precisely those common sense structures which told us that if you were keyed in to the political, you had to abolish the personal. Because those were the two great categories in which you occupy. If you were inside one, you could not think properly about the other. Indeed, you remember, Engels said, how you get women really to change is to take them out of that personal life, the private, and plunge them into the public. Then they would become citizens, citizens. Then they would become truly public and social persons. They can't become public and social when they're immured inside the personal. Well, the affirmation, it was an ideological affirmation, its complexities are still not even deeply understood by feminism itself but nevertheless the affirmation that contested this separation just like the separation between state and civil society that contested the separation between the private and the public and that those two are to some extent articulated on one another. So the very shift that I've been talking about within hegemony which brought about a new conception of the articulated and shifting nature of the relationship between civil society and the state, is connected connotatively with the dismantling of the distinction between the public as a fixed realm and the private as a fixed realm. So that is another huge theoretical shove, impetus, which feminism has given to the way in which we occupy analytically the area that I'm trying to discuss. Secondly, the question of ethnicity. I don't want to go over this in any detail. I talked at length about it in the lecture yesterday. I know some of you were not there, but I think I've said enough probably to establish how central, I think, has become the question of ethnicity. And I want to now, I want to just say one or two words about it. Until 15 or 20 years ago, ethnicity was held to be what I would call a soft term. A soft term. It was about the sort of cultural differences between different groups. And people who occupied what one might call strong thought insisted that one shouldn't talk about ethnicity. One should talk about race. She should talk about race. And in confrontation with the realities of racisms, of the racisms which I tried to describe, there was very good political sense in insisting on the abrasive and contested antagonistic character of the struggles around race. Race is almost as ancient a structure as gender, and believe me, long predates capitalism. Here is another huge structure mobilizing men and women into different configurations, establishing points of antagonism which now cut across the points of antagonism which are established either by class or by gender. I mean, if you think of those, you see, as lines of organization and antagonism, if you think of the way, if you think of the world as a single homogenous population, and then you think of these different social contradictions as splitting the world in different way, well, the gender distinction splits them into men and women, but the class one doesn't split them in the same way, it doesn't overlap, It's not an identity with it. It splits them in a different way. So that person who is both a member of a class and gendered has now four segments to deal with. That identity when they are thinking and speaking and acting within the frame of reference of the divisions of gender and that in which they're operating within the divisions of race, of class. Now, race splits them another way. Do you understand what I mean by splitting them another way? A person can be male, black, working class, or white, female, middle class. Yes, and there is an identity in each of those, and not one thing. It's three possible positionalities. Indeed, it's many different positionalities. So each social contradiction not only has a different history and a different articulation, but actually creates a new field of antagonism. And the problems, you can see what emerges now in the problems of politics, which tries to speak as if all of the points of contradiction are the same. Race and class, race and class, race and class and gender. If they split them in the same way, when in actuality, they are constantly cross-cutting the populations in different ways. What that means is that you can't assume the unity is any longer. The unity is not given in the ways in which the populations are divided according to the relations of class, race, and gender. The unities can only be constructed by holding together within some system of narration or set of positionalities, subjectivities, which are different, differently placed, and which will recognize their different positionings. So race interrupts the great stable configurations of culture and theory in that way, and it does it in another way too. Because I described to you yesterday the fact that once you get out of thinking of these cultural points of reference as essential, as essential, you can't re-establish the essentialism even when it suits your book. If there are no essences, there is no feminine essence either. feminism as a radical discourse on politics can't depend on the unity of the feminine. In the same way, race cannot believe or assume the natural unity of the blacks. And who on earth could? If you come from the place that I come from, in Jamaica, Blacks have exploited blacks for 300 years. The fact of there being a particular color is not the clue to their subjective identities, does not explain what they do socially and politically, and does not constitute them as wonderful human beings. You have to come out of the essentialism, even when it suits you. You see, essentialism is subversively attractive when it suits us. We talk about the oppression of women, but then we talk about women. But a woman also is the dispersed, contested, contradictory, fragmented, non-centered thing that everybody is. So, in the same way, black is the same. In England, in the last ten years, there's been a politics of insisting that everybody calls themselves black. That includes Asians from India who are patently not black, if you look at them, and who come, have different cultural, historical, religious, linguistic, ideological traditions. You would know this instantly if, like me, you had children of mixed race and tried at one and the same time to teach them the colors and their social identity. I would say to my kids, being a right-on progressive father, you, of course, are black. And they said, I'm not black, I'm brown. Well, yes, you are brown, but of course you are black. Well, I don't look black, I know. He looks black, I look brown. You look brown, how come you're black? Well, you know, that's just a trick. Well, yes, a kind of the false consciousness of the color spectrum. Yes, really. And of course, you know, the fact was, we are not, there are two discourses. Black is a political identity. And you can be black if you're white as lily white, as they say. It has nothing to do with how you actually look. And you can be absolutely white politically and be absolutely black as the ace of spades. And so one had to say, eventually, find a way of saying to my children, You see, there are two discourses that have this common phrase, black in it. One is about politics and so on, and the other is about the colors. Until you did that. Well, so there is, of course, the political unity of being black in a racist world. Very important politics. But it shouldn't allow us to satisfy ourselves that, as it were, that is another natural unity. Because inside there are the distinctions between the radical blacks and the reformist blacks and the reactionary blacks and the blacks who are Asians and really brown, etc. Yes, the recognition that these are the necessary over-determinations of the attempt to construct political unities for the purposes of action, which are, of course, not unities at all. They are not closed. They are not finally closed. In the same way, in the same period, have arisen a much more dispersed, the much more dispersed, not political in character, set of movements which have been associated with the subcultural formations. These subcultural formations are not always linked in with generation, which is another structure that long predates anything else, not only to be identified with youth, but it is the case that since the 1950s, the construction of alternative social and cultural identities of youth movements that promulgate alternative ways of conceiving the world, and which try to establish alternative relationships, alternative relationships of the family, alternative political relationships, alternative ways of dressing, alternative kinds of music, alternative standards for cultural practice, etc., have had a kind of subcultural formation. Now, there was a time in the theoretical development of cultural studies when one resisted the attempt to locate subcultures as a kind of wholly autonomous formation. One insisted on the articulation between subcultures and classes. But that discourse also has the danger of a kind of creepy essentialism in it, where we misread some of the subcultures as if they are simply standing in for, signifiers of class which cannot speak. They are the voice of the class which cannot speak. Whereas the fact is that the subcultural and countercultural movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s have, of course, their articulation to class, as they had indeed their articulation to gender, and as they had their articulation to ethnicity, but they were not and could not have been constituted as the pure instances of a class or a gender or an ethnic group. Subcultural movements have drawn and tried to construct their own alternative discourses by borrowing and re-articulating various ethnicities. They have also done the same, the inversion and the ironic reconstruction of some elements of class discourses. We know subcultural movements, for instance, that only operate, only have any meaningful sense at all, if you see them as ironic operations on the language of class. Think of skinheads. What is the skinhead style, subcultural style, but an ironic commentary on the class connotations of short hair, big boots, and red braces. It's not a class discourse, because nobody in the working class wears those things anymore. They don't wear their hair that short, and they don't wear those boots. Those are Doc Martin boots. They're not, you know, Navi boots. They're not miners' boots. And nobody wears any braces except the kids. So it's not a literal sort of transposition of class, but it could not be understood without its connotative echoing, reference to that with which it is articulated. So the subcultures don't exist outside of class formations. They certainly don't exist outside of gender. For a long time, even in cultural studies, the discourse of subcultures proceeded totally oblivious of the fact that we were only talking about subcultural males. And suddenly somebody said, what happened to the women? How come all the subcultures are boys' subcultures? How come there are no women in this universe? You know, what do they do? What are they going to the seaside for? Where is the other of the subculture? Oh yes, oh yes, well there were some women around, I can't remember what they were doing, on the back of scooters, you know. They must have been around somewhere, etc. But they were unfortunately not centered in our discourse. So the idea that subculture is outside of the articulation to gender is untrue. But nevertheless, the subcultural forms could not be located, centered as a women's subculture or a class subculture or an ethnic subculture exclusively. Those other structures with which it is articulated exist inside its cultural practices and discourses as a set of connotative reference, as a set of connotative reference, as a set of signifieds. Finally, I talk about sexual politics more generally. The period of the 50s, 60s especially, and 70s is the period of the articulation of sexual politics in a more general sense. Sexual politics draws on the development of feminism, but is not, of course, exclusively about men, about women. Sexual politics is about the sexual division, the sexual construction of culture and subjectivity, and especially it problematizes the question of masculinity. Problematizes the question of masculinity. For the other structures that I talked about, ethnicity and class, is often, has often been in culture grounded, sutured by the structures of masculinity without recognizing them. You couldn't now give a real account of the character, structure and organization of the British trade union movement without speaking about masculinity. It has become one of the important analytic concepts in understanding how British trade unionism is as it is. And the contestation of masculinity, the contestation of the so-called fixed and essential categories of men and women, The opening up of the notion of the processual and relational character of sexual identity, of sexuality itself as a production, as an always unfinished production, of sexuality as always in process, of the sexual identity as psychoanalysis teaches us, of the sexual identity, as always, the ultimately arbitrary selection from the spectrum and range of possible sexual identities, the recognition of the pluralization of sexual identity, of the degree to which modern societies have had to ram men and women into these single opposite position, polarities, in order to understand the reality of gender at all. They could not, as it were, see men until men took on the carapace, the armor, as the Frankfurt School rightly called it, the armor of masculinity, five, six, seven layers, understood the connotations of masculinity which defended us against the reality of the fact that if one has to say something about the maturation of the two genders, it is in masculinity that the child in men hide. The place of hiding of the child of men who find it difficult to grow up. And the way in which masculinity is locked through the family, through sexual identities, through sexual roles, through the operations of sexual power, in both the personal and the public domain, and gives a kind of psychic, apparent psychic stability to other structures, creates them as personal identities. Think about the operation of modern work. Think about work in our society. Work and skill and craft and the pride of a man in his work and the sense of danger and of the words associated with it, the mastery of a craft, of a skill, they all have masculine connotation. They're about the construction of that powerful identity which we take to be masculinity. And we have accordingly defined the opposite, the other, as the inverse essence of that. Of course, a lot of women work, but work is not central to their identities. They have a center somewhere else. Somewhere else. I don't need to tell you where it is. Center somewhere else. If you think of sexuality itself as the, as it were, demonstration of the efficacy of a kind of power, that is a masculine power. Of course, some women enjoy it, but that is not their true identity. They are centered somewhere else. After or before, but not in sexuality. Their pleasure comes before, because they think about it, and their pleasure comes afterwards, because they, of course, will nurse it and bring it up for the next 25 years. But in it, that is something else. That is the pleasure of the orgasm, which belongs to that which is powerful. That which is powerful. The structures of sexuality are not only so central to modern identity, but they are the linchpins of a whole range of other social and political and cultural forms. The articulation of those forms into and through sexuality have helped to stabilize them. When all else is abandoned and moving about, men are men and know what they have to do in the world. And that is a political and a cultural and a familial and a productive role. a set of different roles and identities flow outward from that construction, a powerful historical construction of the masculine. Well, when sexual politics problematizes the stability of the structures of masculinity and makes men and man himself and man male sexuality itself problematic, well, then there is what we call no hiding place. There is no hiding place. That is, the pluralization of the great structures is now not only out there in the universe, in the theories we had, and in the class configurations, and in the cultural configuration, and in the power, and in the state. It's not all blocked out, but actually the subject has become an ensemble, and the identities which knitted the subject together around the most, not just personal, but the most private, the most interior, that also has become contradictory and problematic. There's a wonderful pamphlet written by three feminists at the end of the 70s called Beyond the Fragments. Beyond the Fragments. Beyond the Fragments is a recognition of the fragmentation, the pluralization, the increasing complexity, the necessary dispersal, the unsurmountable differences out of which cultural unities, cultural totalities, social relationships are now have to be understood as constructed. And I want to end by opening this question, though I don't want to wrap it up or close it up. I will be continuing on this theme a bit tomorrow, but really when I talk at the end about Cultural Studies, A Reconstructed Terrain, the final lecture, I will try to say how, in a more theoretical way, one has arrived at these notions. But we could describe it as the, in a number of different ways, as a recognition of the necessarily relational character of what we call identity. Identity itself is a word we need, because without it, we are in a sort of a world of infinite dispersal. The world of infinite dispersal has its apologies, as it were, the world of constant deconstruction. But even the world of constant deconstruction, though it insists on the infinite dispersal, dispersed nature of the universe, does nevertheless conceive of itself as enough together to talk about at least once. But what is certainly clear is that our whole notion of identity, domination, similarity, correspondence, totality, has had to be opened up. It had to be radically pluralized. We have to understand those fixities which create meaning, which allow the possibility of the creation and construction of discursive meaning to be the result, not of an origin, which then produces a closed field, but much more as the fixing of differences in a relational system. We have to think of, as it were, fixity, like we think of the sentence. Like we think of the sentence. Every sentence has its range of meanings. Not one, but more than one. Its range of meanings. The end of a sentence is arbitrary. that which gives you sufficient recognition of the connotational field of the words and phrases used so that one can mean something requires the establishment of some discursive limit. But the discursive limit is not, as it were, given in the thought. That same thought can be differently expressed. And open another sentence. You can inflect the meanings differently. That is to be in the necessarily discursive character of culture. Consequently, one has to think about limits, not in a determinist way any longer, but as what Althusser called an over-determination. Limits are always the product of more than one structure, more than one discourse. And those discourses don't always come from one place or one position. In the same way, the political has its own structures. The political in our society is not an open field where anybody can, as it were, acquire power and exercise power as they like. It is a field with a structure, a field of relationships, a field of tendencies, a field with different balances, etc. So it has a kind of structure, a kind of configuration, but it is no longer conceptualizable as a closed field. It cannot be a closed field. And though it has conditions of existence in that which has happened before, in the way in which history has played across it, in the things with which it is linked, which gives it a configurational form, those things on which it depends for its existence cannot produce one and only one necessary result. it remains open in a sense to the play of contingency if you can think of a field which is not closed of a field which has its determinateness but is not determined of limits which are nevertheless not in place forever and which are not limits established by any one discourse or practice but by a set of practices by limits which are over determined by a field which is heterogeneous, of unities which don't last forever, and of things which come together which remain different. If you can occupy that broken, fragmented, relational kind of language, you can make sense of the pluralizing structures of modern culture. What I said, all that I said before, which shows you the different discourses which have fed into and helped to construct modern contemporary culture, I don't take back for a moment. I'm not now rescinding the importance of the Great March of Liberalism or rescinding the important imprint of race, empire and monarchy on contemporary British culture. But I insist that what its product is, what it has produced, is not one thing, British culture. Not the essence of the British, which they have always been. Not something which is unchangeable. It remains this increasingly complex and plural field. Field. It's a field. It's a terrain. It's a set of configurations. It's a set of systems of discursive constructs. Now, what I've tried to do is to, as if it were to get you to inhabit a different vocabulary, get you to inhabit a different vocabulary. It's not just a different vocabulary, because I believe that it's not just a different way of seeing it. I think that is really what it is like. I think it really does have that open and unfinished character. I think we have to talk about culture as constantly in process. It is in the process of production. It is never quite produced. It is in that self like the self. Death interrupts the process of the production of the self. Nobody ever dies finished. You are never quite finished. You could always do with a few more days just to finish yourself off perfectly. Never quite finish. There's always some one project you would just like another moment if death would only allow you another moment. Of course, there are wonderful fictions about the perfect end. You know, the great Victorian figures used to know how to come to it. I have nothing else to do. Assemble my family around me and I can die happy. Not true. they would like just to have had another few days they would have been even more perfect the more perfect man but with another few days death is an interruption and the end of the analysis is also an arbitrary fiction it's an arbitrary fiction I'm going to stop now but it's not because I've finished let me not try to answer the question about self-consciousness because I don't know what she understands and what she doesn't I really don't know it's in a sense not important because what she does is more important than what she understands she does quite enough and if she's doing it from the back of her head I don't care standing upside down And she still does it and a lot of it has come off. So let's talk about what she does rather than what she understands. Well, first of all, let me say that something which I should really have said and I thought of it coming down and I meant to put it in and I didn't and therefore I didn't say it. But I talked about at least four modern movements which have expanded the field of the political. but of course they were my choice to locate those which fall on what one might call the progressive and the democratic side don't forget that the same expanded field consists of the social movements of the anti-abortion of the right for life and of moral entrepreneurs in the same way some non-class discourses also contests the field of the expanded field of the political from the right. So it's not just that the pluralization has a necessary and essential tendency towards liberalization, openness and democracy. There are also movements contesting in the same terrain for closure. So that's one important feature. The second thing is that I think that she operates as if it is possible to disarticulate and rearticulate. So that, whether she understands that or not, she has an instinct for going for the ideas that she wants and taking them out of their bag and putting them in her knapsack. So in that sense, she has the practice of, in that sense, I have always thought that Thatcherism, which I said yesterday, and you'll understand me better now that I've spoken of the question of hegemony, Thatcherism has never become hegemonic, but it is a hegemonic politics. It has a hegemonic project, yes, because it understands, for instance, the whole notion of different sites, yes? Thatcherism knows it has to have a discourse for the non-political mother and the teacher in the classroom and morality and pornography and television and religion, as have all those discourses to command the universe. So if you said to Mrs. Thatcher, well, that is a hegemonic strategy, she wouldn't know where it came from. And if you told her where it came from, of course, you would say, I want nothing to do with those Italian Marxists, etc. But nevertheless, she understands how to wage politics in that way. And one of the desperate things in English politics is that the left does not. The left thinks that if tomorrow they can occupy the narrow ground of the political, win an election move a few people back into power they don't need to have a moral discourse and a discourse about the family and a discourse about abortion and a discourse about sexuality etc they will command the field through the political and in the same way if they do it that way they will precisely be hegemonized as they deserve anybody who doesn't understand hegemony deserves to be hegemonized and they will be hegemonized that's why the left is in such dispersal in Britain at the moment. It's not that it's not in power. It's that it does not understand the game. It's as if it's playing, you know, blind man, but it is playing, you know, two-card, the two-card trick when a game of bridge is going on. Yes, and it deals a few cards and it's looking there, and the game is going, it's a different game. So, first of all, Leth has to understand the nature of the game, and she understands the nature of the game. Now, on the other hand, whereas I think the thrust, the impetus in what I was saying, was towards the recognition of that pluralization of society as part of what yesterday, when you asked me the question, I was beginning to talk about as democratization. Yes, to welcome the heterogeneity of difference. Not to try to stuff everything inside the same box, but to see that if we move together, it's not because we forget our differences, but because we choose to be together through our differences. Now that is a positive recognition of that. Now when it comes to that, that Mrs. Thatcher is opposed to. Because of course she wants to reconstruct a different unity. She wants the whole of the nation inside one box. And anybody who is not inside that box ought to go back home. Yes, or ought to go somewhere else. So, at that point, you see, this is the point at which she either doesn't understand that the pluralization and fragmentation is really part of a deep historical movement. She understands that more as really, well, sort of what happens under social democracy. People fragment and break up, and she must reconstruct them into the unity of the nation by giving them a new system of narration. So at that point, she reaches backwards to Victorian values, the spirit of the entrepreneur, the great laws of the market, etc., to shove people into unity. And at that point, that is what yesterday I called the authoritarian aspect. That is where she's willing to use the state to make everybody in schools teach the same kind of thing. regressive kind, really. So there's a point at which, though she's in the practice of doing it in a new way, what she's aiming for is really something very old, something archaic. She would really like to restore, for instance. She understands, you see, let me put it this way. She understands the centrality of sexuality. She understands that there has to be a politics of sexuality. But her politics of sexuality is, of course, the politics of the old masculine and feminine roles. You see the difference. So the Labour Party does not understand. Think sexual politics is, of course, irrelevant to the political. That's nothing to do. You know, why would a Labour politician ever have to say anything about that? Every now and again, you know, there's a Labour politician who declares himself to be gay. And Labour, why bother? First of all, why embarrass us by telling us? Secondly, why bother to bring that into the political? Who minds about that? People don't vote for you for active. People don't vote for him in droves because of that. But let that pass. The fact is, they don't understand that there's a politics. And Mrs. Thatcher understands that there is a politics and wants to stabilize it around the existing sexual structures. So that's, I think, the point at which she ceases to be a modern, yes, and becomes an archaic. But she operates in the terrain which perfectly well understands that she can contest some structures which looked in the 60s and 70s as if they were tied up inside the social democratic reformist strand, and she can recover them, she can recuperate them, she can bring them back. They're not lost. The idea of English liberty was nearly lost. nearly overwhelmed by liberalism, but not quite. She caught it just at the last moment, hooked it, and is pulling it away. Give it back to us. She's pulling it away, reviving it, restoring it, feeding it, nourishing it, building it up. It becomes now a counterpole of organization. It doesn't belong to the left anymore. Now, she says, now we see the true character of the left, which is illiberal. Illiberal. Having pulled the idea of liberty away from it, it doesn't have an idea, so it is illiberal. That is the state, statism, bureaucracy, etc. Now around this, we can now begin to constitute a new set of discourses. Liberal at its heart, a free-born Englishman, the guarantee of liberty is the market, etc. Filling out the new space. It's a very important, rather difficult argument because when you said objectivity, something in me stopped. objectivity alone in the normal sense. Objectivity alone has the blindness of that which is taken for granted. You think when you arrive at objectivity, well, you haven't made it, it's made itself, almost. And that is a point exactly when it cannot recognize its own limits, weaknesses, etc. So I was going to say, I think it would be better to say a culture needed a strong sense of its own subjectivity, of its own subjectivity, because then at least it would see itself as still in play. But now I understand the word objectivity differently has to do with the kind of certainty, as you say, of the individuals in the culture. And I see what that means. I think it's true that no culture can really begin to be at all productive or creative. As I say, it can't generate new forms unless it does have a certain, well, reflexivity, self-consciousness about itself. And unless it has a certain clarity about what its formations are. That's quite true. But there's a delicate, delicate line between certainty and ethnocentrism. Those who are really certain about their culture are very often precisely the subjects who find it difficult to accept that other cultures exist which are different from theirs, where the people who occupy them are just as certain about their culture. And how to get the line, which produces the clarity which allows people to use it creatively. Without the exclusiveness which downgrades the cultures and certainties of others, it's a fine, fine balance. A fine balance. You see, if you talk about the certainty, well, British culture is one of the most certain cultures in the world. Its problem is its certainty. It's so certain about what it is, where it came from, that it's better than most others, etc., that that has become problematic. That has become a problem. It's become a problem for the rest of the world to live with the certainty of English culture. So that kind of certainty is wrong. On the other hand, I do agree with you that I have a sneaking sense of danger that if all of us deconstruct the British so much that they don't know who they are, they will go absolutely crazy. And then I really think they will, you know, loose off the bomb, you know, etc. They could eat us all. I do have, you may have noticed, it's a recurring phrase that I use. It's not a joke. I do sometimes have the fear in England that England will eat everybody. that in a last great imperial gulp it will just swallow everybody up since it can't rule them and dominate them and imprint itself on them in the end there's only one alternative left and once we're down there the world will look British again so this balance that's why I sometimes think I sometimes have an argument with the left people on the left that people on the left have a duty not only to deconstruct the certainty of power of English culture but to give them a way of living with themselves as one ethnic group among others. We have to teach them how really to be British. I don't want the British to be not to feel that they are British. That is an identity among others. I just don't want them to feel they have to make me British like them. Of course, they have strengths and weaknesses, have a particular history. That's fine. They've produced really important things. I want those to be valued, to be recognized. I just don't want it to be valued and recognized because what other people do is not valued and recognized. So I would agree with you that, yes, there is a sense of a culture which can become so fragmented and broken up that it's nothing. It's just the debris of what it was in the past. But it has no configuration of its own. And people then, you're quite right, find it difficult to write even. To write creatively, to paint, to produce, to make music, to create out of it. Because culture in that sense is a resource. It's a set of languages. And if all that one feels about the languages one knows is that they are corrupt and dispersed and that nobody wants them any longer, you find it difficult to have the confidence enough to write and speak. So it's important. But one has to guard against the point where that slips over into being so certain of itself that it really has to destroy others. Very fine line. Because the world isn't any longer in a place which will accept the centering of any one culture. That's really what that, I think that's the message. Yes. I mean, I think that is the reality of human history. And if you think about the religious, for instance, yes, well, that may be a point of religious, of spiritual belief, a kind of center. But as that manifests itself in the world culturally, it creates difference again. It creates difference again. So even there, there isn't, I think, any one universal point which can provide a center for the different cultures so that it would get us around this problem of the toleration of difference. That is an important argument, very important argument. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. But there are some points in common in the sense that out of these, out of a social movement like the movement of sexual politics, there has emerged, you know, alternatives. Yes, alternative ways of life, alternative ways of relationship, alternative activities, etc. In that sense, these social movements are like subcultures. But it's hard to speak of the subculture of women. Actually, they're half, more than half the human race, you see. So subculture is really a funny way to put it. So what I think one is seeing really is that subcultures and other centers like that have produced social and cultural movements of one kind or another, whether they're stylistic or musical or sexual or about the environment. But they have a particular kind of character. They are a social movement, but they're not a political party. They are around a particular set of issues, but they don't have a particular program. Everybody doesn't have to be the same in them. You subscribe to them, but you have different interests from other people who belong to the same. So they have a looser kind of affiliation, not party membership. You're not a paid-up punk. There are ways of connoting your belongingness to it. But then if you do something on punk life, well, it's okay. So it's loosely bounded. These movements have loose boundaries. People come in and out of them much more freely. Actually, I think that increasingly even the established centers of political life are treated like that. These days, people join up and belong to parties, but nobody gives their whole life and spirit to them. They belong in exactly the same way in which you become a punk or whatever it is. Yes, well, I'll go with it for a while. That's the best I can do in a bad world. I enjoy being with those people. They're my kinds of people, etc. So there's a kind of subculturalization of belongingness. Rather than, you know, either you're over there or over there. You're in that organization. So although they aren't exactly subcultures in the ways in which we have talked about a lot of youth movements and subcultures, they have something of the character of the subculture. They are more like social movements. I would now, I now reverse the terminology. I talk about subcultures as social movements. I think social movements is the more general phrase. And I think the ecological movement, sexual politics, feminism, the gay movement, and the different subcultures are forms of social movement. And that increasingly, the political arena is filled out, articulated, partly, of course, with the old structures of parties and party formations and so on, but also increasingly in the gaps and spaces between them by these new social movements. And the social movements do have a particular character in that they are usually cross-class. Yes, they don't have one class identity. They may have what I called earlier on a class connotation. They have a kind of stronger weighting towards one or another of the great class formation. But they don't consist of one unitary class anymore. And I think that's true of the subcultures, too. You can find, as you know, you've always been able to find working class and lower middle class and middle class punks. You can affiliate to being a punk without paying your proletarian card. And so I think these are new kinds of groupings, new kinds of groupings. And what they signify is the proliferation of the kinds of social antagonism in the society. I think rather than seeing the society as blocked out around one contradiction only, capital and labor, the contradiction formed by the old structures of class, my own feeling is that not that that has disappeared. I called class yesterday the template. Yes, the lines, the structures. It's like the skeleton, which is still there. But the actual disposition of people is never within the class identity only. They don't divide and move and experience the world around that contradiction only. So one has to conceive the society now as a field of different antagonism. and of social movements clustering to create and articulate these different points of contestation. People are contesting about sexual identities. They're contesting about the position of femininity. They're contesting about their ethnic character. They're contesting about class. They're contesting about the family. And these different positionalities really are more, what increasingly the domain of the political looks like in our society. Actually, when you come down to it, the movements of 1968, you know, hoped to one day become a class, but they weren't. They hoped to trigger off a class, or they stood in the place of a class. They were representing the class, et cetera. All of those ways, but they weren't the class. Parts, because there wasn't any one class to represent. because parts of the class they hoped to represent were being represented by them, and another part of the same class was watching them on television, and another part of the same class was passing by on the side streets. One never forgets May 1968 in Paris, watching May 1968 on television, and you see the battle of a lifetime taking place on the center of the television screen. police and students yes and the things saying the revolution and you can always see on the edge of the television screen a few people have just gone into the bread shop over here yes and who are on their way home they're picking their way over the bodies and the barricades and the banners yes and civil society destroyed 1968 civil society went on it couldn't generalize itself across the society as a whole I don't mean that it was unimportant because many of the social movements I talked about had its origin there we have to understand 68 as that which opened the field of the political sometimes we talk about it as if it was the termination of something that didn't come off the revolutions the revolutions that 68 started into motion are just now beginning to form up Just now we're beginning to see what 68 meant when it said revolution is also something that happens in the imaginary. It's also symbolic. Don't mistake the fact that revolution is not something which doesn't have to do with the symbolic, with the signifier. We're just beginning to understand that. But nevertheless, there were always people who were supposed to be represented by this great confrontation who didn't know they belonged in it. or somewhere else, moving somewhere else. So I think one has to see the field of the political as not now unitary or locked into the existing structures, but as having a more subcultural character. Yes, I make the difference, though it's... I'm not sure I can be very precise about them. yes no that it would be true to say that any subcultural form overcomes them but what I would say is that the subcultures that arise after feminism are much more self-conscious about questions of gender and have weakened the limits of gender. That's what I would say. So the ones before feminism were utterly oblivious of it, totally oblivious of it. If you read the magazines of the counterculture between 1964 and 1968 in England, you would not have read anything so sexist in the world. They were preaching revolution, but the revolution was entirely conceptualized as the right, then, of revolutionary men to have however many women, whenever they chose. The notion that women might be part of this liberation that they were preaching had nothing whatever to do with it. Nothing whatever to do with it. Now, nevertheless, feminism arose as what I call the revolution in the revolution. Yes, it arose because women said, while you are liberating yourself, why don't you just try liberating us for a little while, or we are going to liberate ourselves alongside you. You know the famous cartoon of those radicals, American radicals, who, of course, could only go out every day to the demonstration because somebody stayed at home and washed their jeans. Who do you think it was? There had to be an unliberated bit so that they could be 101% liberated. And when I went to America in 1967, the first feminist thing I ever heard were from the women and the wives of the new left. And they said, we are fed up, absolutely fed up to the back teeth. that you can go to the South to liberate the blacks while I stay at home and wash your fucking jeans. And what about us? When does our time come? How come the working class and America and the world and the blacks and the voters and everybody's going to be liberated and still I'm making the tea, typing the notices and washing the jeans? That's where feminism begins. So in spite of the fact that the early subcultural movements are deeply unconscious of their gendered character. They do precipitate a response which is the beginning of feminism. Now then, once feminism has been established as a politics, the later subcultures, some of them, do reproduce the old relations of subordination between men and women. Some do. Yes. I want to think about the elite in that sense. Yes. Yes, Donald, then he... Well, the same. I mean, feminism arises because of the apparently unlimited power of masculinity in the early phase. Yes? Well, no, what I'm saying is in the period after feminism, there are still some subcultures in which masculinity seriously limits the capacity of women to participate. Yes, there still are some, even now. A lot of so-called working class subcultures still, yes, seriously foreground the masculine elements of the culture and masculine participation in it. And, I mean, for instance, all those subcultural movements which circulate around football are still articulated around football, around the boys going together, the men in the train, the night out afterwards at the pub, and women are a nuisance. You might pick up girls where you go, but you don't take your own women as full participants of them. But nevertheless, there are many more subcultural movements nowadays in the 70s and 80s where there is a real reflexive self-consciousness about that question, and where they're trying, as it were, to equalize the participatory capacity of men and women when people are aware of just the taken-for-granted nature of masculinity and try to, as it were, de-center masculinity and question the modes of masculinity which function in those subcultures in the 70s and 80s. I mean, of course, some of those subcultural movements are around sexual politics itself. And of course, those clearly do question the taken for granted nature of masculinity itself. Gay politics, for instance, clearly understands that it is different after feminism. Not all gay politics, incidentally, there isn't only one gay politics. As you know, we have in England a very distinctive, highly masculine gay politics. Highly masculine gay politics. in which the thing to do in gay politics is to appear to be more masculine than anybody else. So even the movements of sexual politics are themselves not simple, but some forms of modern gay politics are deeply penetrated by feminism and are therefore very, very self-conscious about not reproducing within gay politics itself the taken for grantedness of the old styles of masculinity. That has shifted as a result of the interruptions of feminism. Feminism has made it more problematic for the old masculine-feminine gender divisions to survive inside the new subcultural movements. Consequently, as you know, for instance, even some subcultural trends which circulate around dress are quite consciously dressing what I call cross-dressing. Elements of the dress style are deliberately connotative of the feminine rather than the masculine. Not all of them, but some of them are. And that's a deliberate attempt symbolically to connote the feminine inside the masculine. Yes, and therefore to blur the edges. That's what I was saying it does. Weakens the boundaries. or blurs the edges between the fixed roles or identities of male and female. Okay, Enzo's question now is, if I can still remember it, is the question of the difference between subcultures and countercultures. And I wouldn't want to make a big thing of that distinction. And I would say I call subcultures a movement of alternative practices and identities which, in terms of its formation, remains relatively enclosed within the larger forms, and finds it difficult to kind of break out of them. Whereas counter-cultural movements, although they can be quite small, have the project of transforming the whole of society. So a countercultural movement isn't satisfied that, as it were, people should behave and live differently while they're members of it. They want to turn on, transform, change the world. So they're a movement directed kind of outwards. Whereas a subculture, I think, is more concerned with how people operate towards one another within the group, within the gang, etc. it's more bounded and self-enclosed so the reason why I don't want to make them hard and fast is because you can find elements of both in each there's no subcultural movement which wouldn't quite like the world to change as well though that may not be the object of its practice and counter-cultural movements have a strong internal feel so it's a loose distinction but I think you can it is useful in looking at different social movements to kind of try to place them as more subcultural than countercultural that's the only difference that's why I try I really say usually I say two of them together subcultural and countercultural formation yeah if you mean do I agree that men are constructed as transcendent and women constructed as immanent, yes. If you ask me whether I really think they're like that, no. I don't think men are transcendent at all. I told you, I think men are mainly children, mainly children. Yes, they have not attained transcendence, but that they are constructed as transcendent, that is certainly the case. Yes, our culture It's structured around the notion that men have the reach, the universality of reference, etc. And then women have the rich inner life of imminence. Men, of course, then do funny things with women. Because what they think about imminence is that it is both the greatest thing in the world and not so great of us. And how men go about this double movement whereby, yes, would that they could be, you know, have such a rich internal life and yet that they're really powerful because, of course, they don't concern themselves with those subjective, they're not bothered about those subjective things. They know how to master the world. If you master the world, who cares what you feel inside, et cetera. Well, men have learned to position women in their secondariness exactly by managing the game of imminence and transcendence. Now then, whether eroticism is one of the means of women breaking out of their confinement to imminence, well, it is certainly one of the ways because of the linkage or articulation between transcendence and eroticism. While masculinity and power is the source of the erotic, of that which confers the erotic power, then, of course, eroticism becomes a subversive force. And if women can claim it for themselves, then they begin to disrupt the structures. Women, of course, have always been the source of the erotic in a passive sense. In a passive sense. But you can't, so is the doxer, so is the orthodoxy, You can't, as it were, draw it out of them until they are genitally set, until they're fixed, until the other enters their life and centers them. Women radiate eroticism, like a kind of perfume, but never in one place until they are placed and men place them. Well, and consequently, women did begin to disrupt exactly those lines of transcendent power by affirming the erotic. What more, not only did they say, we have a sexuality too, what they said, which was really terrifying for men, that is not in the place where you think it is. That really destroyed men. They didn't know what to do with that, because they thought they knew where it was. the center of the world yes and what women say well there is a kind of eroticism which is all over the place actually all around the place all around the place and actually I experience it again and again and again how about you you know if I have a good long sleep in between yes I might you know rise up to it more than once etc well so there are eroticisms after all You know, many, your eroticism and mine, male and female. And some men are happy enough to have a bit of the other and so on. The pluralization of eroticism. But certainly you're quite right that in the contestation out of which modern feminism rose, eroticism precisely because it had been hegemonized by masculinity was the arena, one of the main arenas of contestation. In that sense, modern feminism is different from the feminism of the past. which principally contested the masculine power around the political. Give us the vote. Make us a citizen too. Recognize us as people with human rights. Now, the modern feminism has gone one step further. Recognize us as people who have our own access to the sexual, our own access to the erotic. So, in that sense, Tim and the Bobois, as you know, you know, someone, a kind of pre-feminist, modern feminist. Before the modern feminist movement was going, she began to articulate some very important concepts which were pulled together in contemporary feminism. All hailed me fane of Pordor, by which title before these weird sisters saluted me and referred me to the coming on of time with hail. that shall be. This have I thought would to deliver thee, my dearest partner of greatness, that thou mightst not lose the dues of rejoicing by being ignorant of what greatness is promised thee. Lay it to thy heart and farewell. Oh, glam thou art, and caulder, and shalt be what thou I promised. Yet do I fear thy nature. 'Tis too full of the milk of human kindness to catch the merest way. Thou wouldst be great, art not without ambition, but without the illness should attend it. What thou wouldst highly, that wouldst thou holily, wouldst not play force, and yet wouldst wrongly win. Thou'dst have great glans. That which cries, thus thou must do, if thou have it, and that which rather thou dost fear to do, than wishest should be undone. I need that I may pour my spirits in thine ear and chastise with the baller of my tongue all that impedes thee from the golden round, which fate and metaphysical aid doth seem to have me crowned. What is your tiding? Cain comes here to life. I'm mad to say it. Is not thy master with it? Who were it so would have been fawn for pleasure? It is with it true. But Arthane is coming. One of my fellows had the speed of him, who almost tend for great and scarcely more than would make up his message. Give him tending. He brings great views. The raven himself, his horse, that croaks the fatal entrance of Duncan under my battlements. Cow, you spirits that tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here. and fill me from the crown to the toe, top full of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood, stop up the access and passage to remorse, that no compunctious visitings of nature shake my fell purpose, nor keep peace between the effect and it. Come to my woman's breaths and take my milk for gall, you murdering minister. Wherever in your sightless substances you wait on nature of mischief. Come, thick night, and pour thee in the dunnest smoke of hell, that my keen night see not the wound it makes. Though heaven peek through the blanket of the dark to cry, Hold, hold. Great lands Worthy Cawdor Greater than both By the old hail hereafter My letters Have transported me beyond this ignorant peasant and I feel now the future in the instant. To my dearest point. Duncan comes here tonight. And when goes he? Tomorrow. As he purposes. Oh, never shall sun that mother see. Your face, my fane, is as a book where men may read strange matters. To beguile the time, look like the time. Bear welcome in your eye, your tongue, your hand. Look like the innocent flower, but each serpent under it, he that's coming must be provided for. And you shall put this night's great business into my dispatch, which shall to all our nights and days to come give solely sovereign sway and master them. We will speak further. Only look up clear to alter save our ever is to fear. Leave all the rest to me. Lombardo sostiene che Macbeth tace sul male, sul sangue, sulla lotta fisica e morale che la realizzazione dell'omicidio comporta, come anche tace sulla profezia che riguarda Banco. Qui Macbeth compie il suo primo fatale errore, perché sopprime l'unica informazione circa il punto debole del piano ordito contro Duncan, facendo credere alla moglie di essere l'unico possessore del segreto della profezia, Walter. D'altro canto, come Mewel dice, noi ascoltiamo solo la seconda metà della lettera. Jameson, 1832, afferma che Lady Macbeth agisce per ambizione, ma sottolinea che, in quanto donna e moglie, è ambiziosa per suo marito, non per lei. Inoltre, egli osserva che è Macbeth a compiere l'assassinio, non lei, e che, dopo aver raggiunto il suo proposito, ella non incita il marito a nuovi crimini. secondo coleridge lady macbeth vive dei quotidiani sogni di ambizione non c'è in lei gioia al ritorno di suo marito non c'è considerazione sui pericoli a cui è sfuggito si può paragonare il saluto di macbeth ma dearest lord al suo ritrarsi di fronte alla franchezza con cui ella gli rivela i suoi pensieri ne parleremo dopo dice infatti macbeth Bradley, 1904, definisce Lady Macbeth la figura dominante e la più inquietante che Shakespeare abbia mai delineato. Condividendo alcuni tratti con suo marito, si distingue da lui per la sua volontà inflessibile. Per lei, a differenza di Macbeth, non c'è separazione tra volontà e azione. Client Brooks, 1947, sostiene che il coltello affilato sia stretto nelle mani di Lady Macbeth. La notte deve essere particolarmente nera, cosicché persino il coltello non possa vedere la ferita che provoca. Secondo Brooks, il coltello rappresenta il carattere contraddittorio e paraussale di Macbeth stesso, che non vorrebbe agire lealmente ma accetterebbe di vincere con l'inganno. Per indurlo ad agire, ella lo rimprovera cercando di infondergli il suo coraggio. La tragedia di Macbeth potrebbe apparire come una seconda caduta, con Lady Macbeth nella parte di una seconda Eva. Così scrive Lombardo nel suo libro Lettura del Macbeth del 1969. Macbeth affronta temi che contraddistinguono la trattazione del fatto tragico, cioè la degradazione dell'ordine a disordine, seguita dal ristabilimento dell'ordine, e la natura proliferante delle forze del male nel nostro mondo. Il tema dell'inganno, avviato nelle scene precedenti, che è al centro della problematica delle grandi tragedie e lega l'opera al clima politico contemporaneo, diventa, soprattutto negli ultimi versi, più esplicito. Lo strumento del successo al quale Macbeth nella lettera non ha accennato gli viene brutalmente descritto dalla moglie, anche se ella non nomina il fine ultimo dell'inganno, cioè l'assassinio. Ma ciò che spinge Lady Macbeth al male non è il male in sé, infatti il male è un mezzo per lei, non il fine. Il fine della sua azione è un altro. È il potere, la gloria, il tema imperiale, che sono fini negativi quando sono conseguiti capovolgendo l'ordine della natura e della società. Secondo alcuni critici, Lady Macbeth si indurisce e chiude il proprio cuore per spingere il marito a conquistare una corona, alla quale entrambi attribuiscono un significato mistico, più che sentito razionalmente. Ella agisce così perché è una moglie estremamente amorevole e devota. Shakespeare non la rappresenta come una donna priva di femminilità, ma come una donna che deve lottare per dominare la natura femminile, che se da un lato la spinge a cercare ad ogni costo la felicità dell'uomo che ama, dall'altro può esserle d'ostacolo in quella ricerca. Sostanzialmente, quindi, il rapporto lega lady macbeth e macbeth è un rapporto d'amore e proprio il suo inaridirsi fino a scomparire sarà uno dei temi dell'opera

Today I decided that you look much fresher than I do, so that you should do the work today, rather than me. So I propose to talk for much less time than I have talked previously and to give you an opportunity to talk to me rather than for me to talk to you. And in order to encourage you to do that, I want just to say what I'm going to do this afternoon, what I'm going to do tomorrow. Tomorrow, when I talk about cultural studies in the 1980s, I want to look at the theoretical influences which cultural studies has been using to try to analyze and describe that very complex cultural reality which I was talking about yesterday. It's not only that the fixed landscapes of English culture are to some extent pluralizing and breaking up, but corresponding with that differentiation of the cultural landscape is also a pluralization of the concepts, of the analytic concepts in cultural studies. If you remember my very first lecture, I talked about the first moment in cultural studies. I talked about Williams, and I talked about Hoggart, and I talked about the idea of the text and the break of cultural studies from literary studies. If you remember then, when I was talking about is there an English ideology and how do we analyze ideology and culture, I talked really more about the second moment in cultural studies. I talked about Gramsci and I talked about Althusser. I talked about semiotics and so on. And tomorrow I will talk about the post-structuralists. I talk about people whose ideas I was drawing on yesterday and the day before, but in a more theoretical way. I would talk a bit about Foucault and I would talk about psychoanalysis in the sense that I was talking about the breakup of the unitary subject of culture yesterday. Well, one of the things that has precipitated that are development in psychoanalytic theory, which have influenced cultural studies. I talk a bit about deconstruction. I'll talk about post-structuralist theories in cultural studies and the influences that they have brought to bear. That really completes, that's the third moment in the theoretical development of cultural studies. So that's a more theoretical talk tomorrow. Today, I want to talk about, I've given the talk the title, Uneven Development, Pre-Modern. It's not quite right on the sheet because it should say pre-modern, modern, and postmodern developments in contemporary Britain. Now, what I'm talking about is really following along some of the themes that I was enunciating yesterday when I tried to speak of the forces that are at work, bringing about the increasing pluralizing and fragmentation, the breakup of the great landscapes and configurations of English culture. And what I want to do today is to stand back from that and try to look at what the landscape, what the cultural landscape in Britain looks like right now. Now that's a difficult thing to do. always difficult to be, to attempt even, to offer some provisional accounts of one's immediate cultural experience. So I have tried not to do this by giving a well-rounded and well-integrated talk. I want to give you instead a few snapshots, a few snapshots, pictures, quick, quick pictures of British culture now. and then instead of offering you some final model of what all this adds up to in the spirit that you know snapshots must finally compose one picture and that we can all know which direction he's going instead of offering you the certainty of a road map I want to speculate more openly on where is British culture going? Is it going in one direction? Or is it perhaps going in several directions at once? So I offer the talk in a more informal way than the talks that I've given before. You may indeed feel that I've been as informal as it's possible to be already. But I'm going to surprise you because I'm going to be even more informal today. Even more informal today. And I'm going to be deliberately disconnected. I'm not going to try to offer even the beginnings of a thread, of a set of connections between one thing and another, because I want you to try and hold in your mind these very different snapshots. and I won't talk about uneven development yet I talk about uneven development later but what I want to give you is I want to describe to you the street where I live or just by where I live it's called the Kilburn High Road Kilburn High Road and if you go to London and you go to one of the great landmarks in London which is Marble Arch, and you turn your face north up the Edgware Road and keep going, you will eventually arrive at the Kilburn High Road. The Edgware Road is one of those English roads that remains the same but changes its name as it goes. So sometimes it is the Edgware Road, then it's the Kilburn High Road, and then it's Shoot Up Hill, it's the same road but it keeps changing its name. and it changes its character as well. Now I want to describe to you what living on the Kilburn High Road as a prism, as a microcosm of English culture, what this is like. I have to tell you, I love it. I think it's wonderful. But you wouldn't love it because partly it looks a little bit like Naples in London. It is a little bit like Naples in London. First of all, it is extremely dirty. Why is it dirty? That is because I'm afraid Mrs. Thatcher has stopped cleaning the streets. One of the things that's happened in London is that London is much dirtier than it has ever been in my knowledge. And people who have been in London recently will know that I'm not making a joke. Yes, I mean, the streets are not soaked, not cleaned, the rubbish is not collected, paper blows around and nobody bothers. Not everywhere, but in the Kilburn High Road, that is. So the impact of English de-industrialization, of the process by which Britain is becoming no longer a modern industrial country, is perfectly evident to the eye. If you walk along Kilburn Eyre Road, you can see the ravages of a declining economy right in the litter on the street. Okay, Kilburn is a very interesting place because it is the residence, the place of settlement, of the old Catholic Irish working class in London. It's one of the areas in London where the Catholic Irish working class settled. That's to say, if you walk into some shops along the Kilburn High Road, a lot of the shop assistants, etc., speak with an Irish lilt, an Irish accent. Just down the road is a great, one of the old large cinemas called the Odeon State, which closed down about 15 years ago and became a bingo hall. And then it closed down and it's now open for Irish folk singers in the evening. Yes, so the place is very alive with Irish culture. There are three big pubs along the Kilburn High Road. Two of them are Republican pubs, and one is a Protestant Unionist pub. If you go in on Saturday night to the Republican pubs, they are collecting for the IRA. But if you go into the other pub, they are singing Unionist songs. down with the IRA, etc. They're 101% Irish-British. They belong to Ulster. There are Ulster men and women in there. So you have to be very careful if you're discussing the Irish situation. You have to be very sure which of the three pubs you're in because if you launch the wrong topic in the wrong pub, the place blows up. The third pub, which is called Biddy's Pub, blew up about four years ago. It was a huge explosion. Okay, so it's the settlement of the Irish working class. It is also just on the opposite side of what is called West Hampstead. Now, I don't know whether you know what Hampstead is, but Hampstead is, you know, the fashionable part of London to live. And if you go onto that side of the road, you begin to move up the hill into Hampstead Village, into some of the most fashionable residences and shops anywhere in London, and the great Hampstead Heath, etc. That is refined, fashionable London, Hampstead Heath. West Hampstead is not as fashionable as Hampstead, but it lies in between Kilburn and Hampstead. Halfway up the hill is West Hampstead. Now, if you walk up the left-hand side of the Kilburn High Road, the pubs close at half past ten at night because they belong to working-class Brent. That is the area that they belong to. On the other side of the road, the pubs are open until 11 o'clock at night because they belong to West Hampstead and Camden. So you can choose whether you want to be in an early-closing or late-closing side of the road, depending very much on what your tastes are. And once you get into West Hampstead, you move in the direction of Swiss Cottage, Finchley Road. Yes, you are going up into trendy London, into trendy, fashionable London. If, however, you move the other way, yes, into Brent, you pass the dwellings where the London Irish working class have settled, and you get into an area which is almost exclusively black, black and Asian. In Brent, the majority of people who live in Brent are Afro-Caribbeans. And if you shop in Brent, you're shopping at stores which are run by Asian people, you're shopping at vegetable stores which are selling things from the Caribbean, You're in what, in my lecture, I call Colony Britain, in the colony. You'd have to go about a quarter, half a mile in that direction to get into what is called Darkest Brent. Darkest Brent. They call it Darkest Brent because not only are most of the people black, but sort of it's halfway to, you know, Africa or the wilds. I mean, if you're moving in that direction, you're moving into unknown country, many people think. If you move the other direction, you're moving into Hampstead. That's the articulation. Kilburn is in between. But as it happens, many of the old working-class houses or families in Brent on this strip of the Kilburn High Road live in what used to be Victorian dwelling houses, Victorian houses. Very large, four or five-story, roomy Victorian houses, which when the middle classes left that part and went up into Hampstead, were then split up into little rooms and flats, etc., and that's how the Irish working class came to occupy these houses. Now, however, many of the houses are being reoccupied by fugitives, middle-class fugitives from West Hampstead who are moving into Brent, because of course the housing is not as expensive on that side of the road as it is on the other. And they are recovering the old Victorian houses from the Irish working class, driving them down the road into darkest Brent. Then they are remodeling the houses, opening them up to one family once again, putting in new bathrooms and modern kitchens, etc. This is the process called gentrification. Yes, they are gentrifying, reoccupying the middle class, reoccupying old middle-class housing that went down the scale and became working-class housing and is now going up the scale again. Gentrification. And I and my family have nothing more or less than an agent of gentrification. We are professional teachers and lecturers who have moved into Kilburn and who have taken over a large Victorian house, which was split up into six flats, and returned it into a family house and we are busily gentrifying. Gentrifying. We go up the hill in Hampstead to shop for a few trendy items which we can afford. We bring them down the hill and we establish this enclave of professional middle-class life surrounded by black and Irish Kilburn. Now if you go into Kilburn High Road where we all have to shop, them, us, refugees from West Hampstead, people coming from Darkis, Brent, etc. If you walk down Hampstead, down Kilburn High Street, I Road, on a summer's day, you encounter the entire panorama of all these different segments of English society living side by side. Most of the shops now are owned by Indians, owned by Asians. And this is one of the things that gives Kilburn High Road a Neapolitan feel. because in order to make a living, these Asian families are willing to open the shops until 9 o'clock at night and every day on Sunday. So on the Kilburn High Road, you can always find a shop open. Always find. Any time of the day or night, any weekend, Christmas Day, New Year's Day, Easter, it will be open. An Asian family, scrabbling for a living. The sons and daughters who go to the school that my children go to, nevertheless, at the weekend, work in the shop in order to keep it open in those hours when other English shops close in order to make a living. So Kilburn High Road is full of commerce and trade, somebody scrabbling to make a living while the paper and the dirt accumulates. Scrabbling to make a living. Now, in the sunshine, in the summer, in the three days of summer that we have in England, there are parades down Kilburn High Road, the youth, young people, young people. And at that point, Kilburn High Road suddenly becomes a little bit like downtown Kingston. Because the record shops, the four or five black record shops, playing mainly dub records which have been illegally imported from Jamaica, playing music that has never been recorded in London, but then is recorded in Kingston, unknown bands, etc., turn up the sound system to high volume. And they open the doors and open the windows and pretend that it's Kingston. So as you walk down the high street, this music, yes, Reggae music or new soul music throbs. And suddenly people look around as if they think they're hearing the music of the spheres, the music of the angels. But actually, it's some great sound system which is throbbing away, usually in a record shop run by black kids. It's run by black kids because if you're into modern music and soul music, Black kids know more about it than anybody else, so they are actually into the music industry. By into the music industry, I mean not only do they run the shops, but now if you turn on the local radio to listen to local London stations, what you hear are continuous music with black DJs. Only if your ear is well attuned to the timbre of the voice can you tell they're black, because they sound actually like they come from Clapham and Bermondsey and the East End, which of course they do. That's where they were born. They were born in London. They're Londoners. They're black Londoners. But of course, on the radio, they have jive talk or the dub talk, etc., which goes, which is part of the performative recuperation of modern music. No record is a thing in itself, a text in itself any longer. It has to be embedded in the talk which opens it, which interrupts it, which comes in at the end, which frames it, which makes it a kind of... It's a live thing. Playing a record on radio is a live activity. It's remade. It's, of course, a vinyl disc, and it's transmitted by the most advanced technology, But it's recovered, recuperated, not by people pretending that they're making the music, but by a live interaction through the technology with the music. And the voice, the spoken voice, interacts with the music. Of course, some of the music is also itself improvised voices, because it's scratch music, or dub music, or it's talk music. Yes, it's music which is mainly, a great deal of it is mainly talk rather than singing. So you can hardly tell where the beginning of the voice comes and the recorded music ends. And those are sounds which you would hear as you walk down the street. Most of the kids, however, are only listening to that sound tuned in. They're walking entirely plugged into it in the private networks of the walk person, as we say in Latin America. the de-gendered Sony Walkman. It used to be the Walkman, but after feminism, who would dare to call it that? It is the Walkperson. And kids are tuned in in the internal universe of music and speech and language to the continuous performance, 20th century continuous performance of the interior transistor to the mechanism of the Sony Walkperson. most of these kids are unemployed most of them are unemployed between 17 and 23 or 24 they have no jobs they left school at 17 and they may have had 15 jobs short jobs two weeks there and three weeks there and four weeks there etc the majority of them will be on drawing unemployment benefit. They'll be drawing what we call in England the dole. But to draw the dole, you have to be living with your parents, or you have to have some fixed address. You have to be able to say, I'm living in so-and-so's house, and she will vouch for me, and I pay rent every week, etc. Otherwise, you can't draw the dole. So if, like many of them, You have left the family home and not yet located yourself in anybody, in any other permanent address. You are a kind of non-person. Some weeks you will get the dole, some weeks you won't. Most of every Thursday you put aside, like I just put aside this morning with Marina's help, for the encounter with the state. Probably at the end of the day you don't get any money at all, but you have to make the round. going to the Department of Health and yes, etc. Social Security. I have been unemployed for five weeks. Who are you? Do you have any letters? No, I don't have any letters. Well, we can't give you any money this week. Well, I don't have any money. Well, we'll give you two pounds but you can't, etc. The round of the state. You come out swearing, people come out raging at this encounter but not with much actual tangible goods. So they're sort of partly on welfare. Of course, if they're plugged in to the weekend or midday interview with Mrs. Thatcher, which happens all the time because one of our most popular journalists on one o'clock, 12 o'clock television, who used to be a pop singer, is called Jimmy Young. And Jimmy Young, who is the most sort of popular middle-aged non-radio star, is one of Mrs. Thatcher's deepest favorites. Whenever she's in trouble politically, she arranges to have an interview with Jimmy Young. And he calls her Maggie and she calls her Jimmy. And she tells him how things are really okay and the popular forces are really all right. And that solves it up. So if they come out of the encounter with the state, Thursday's encounter, unsuccessful encounter with the state, and they're tuned in to the Jimmy Young show, they will hear, of course, how, well, really, young people should get on their bikes and find a job. There are plenty of work in the country. The trouble is that they want to hitch up on the Kilburn High Road and not go somewhere else where the jobs are. But they don't believe it, because either they don't have any bikes, or what is much more likely, they don't intend to leave the Kilburn High Road. They don't intend to leave the Kilburn High Road. They don't believe that there are any jobs over there, and they don't believe that they will really get the dole if they move, and this is, in any case, their territory. This is their terrain. Now, are they then just like the hordes of unemployed, of millions of unemployed people that England produced in the 1930s? After all, we have an image, a clear historical image of what unemployment was like in Britain in the 1930s, in the period of the Depression. And the truth is that they both are and are not like the unemployed of the 1930s. It's a peculiar thing that unemployment itself is a variable experience. It's a variable experience. It's not true that one experiences unemployment always in the same way. Unemployment as an experience varies with different historical situations. So nowadays, of course, these kids don't have the wherewithal for a decent life. They can't get the dole because they don't have a place to live, but they can't get a place to live because they don't have a regular income. And no one will take them in unless they know that at the end of every week they're going to have the rent money. So they're caught in the circle, in the cycle. They can't break out of it. It's a catch-24 situation. No money without a resident. No residents without a money. So they shuttled backwards and forwards, trying to, as it were, survive. Well, so in that sense, of course, they suffer all the problems that we know of young and old people in the thrall, in the thrall of unemployment. What is more, unemployment is not just an objective fact of their lives, not enough money to survive, But unemployment is a subjective experience in a society which still depends on the disciplines of work, saving, putting money aside, building up your economic base, getting a little security. On those rhythms and disciplines which have organized and stabilized working class life and the life of the popular classes over more than a century and a half in British industrial society, Well, to live outside of that, without an occupation, without a skill, without a job, without the hope of a job or the prospect of a job, with no entry to the idea of the career, is, of course, to have one's psychic as well as one's material identity shaken. Because I've tried to describe to you before the degree to which in England people's identities are caught up with the fact of their occupation, of having jobs, of having a craft, having a skill, of something they can be proud of. They feel that it's only the job that stands between themselves and the loss of self-respect, of self-identity. So these kids don't have any longer either the material benefits to survive or the psychic benefits of having a kind of stable set of continuous things which anchor them into the society, give them a continuing stake in the society. How do they survive? And how is unemployment for them a different experience? Well, they survive by the old practice of what is called hustling. Hustling. And I don't think in Naples I need to describe in great depth to you what the activity of hustling is like. There are a multifarious range of activities through which you can hustle. And you're not hustling? Oh, yes. Thank you very much. Well, hustling. Some of them are, of course, driven from time to time to crime. After all, if you are in that position and you walk past a fruit shop and you haven't eaten for the last two days, there's only one thing to do, which is to take it. Somebody rushes out to the front and screams, and the police car is there, and before you know where you are, you're in the station, and you're booked, and you've just committed a crime. You're beginning on the long descent of the English into the lack of respectability. So some are indeed driven to crime. Some are driven to hustling. Some will manage to eke something out of the occasional payoffs from the dole, from the state unemployment benefits which they get, or every now and again they will visit their parents and get some. There's a whole thousand ways of knowing how to survive. Being streetwise, as we say in London, is knowing how to survive without any continuous visible means of support. but what is new is this what is new is this that in a very peculiar way which is hard which I can describe but cannot explain can't account for these young people do not feel like the depressed unemployed of the 1930s the experience has I mean, I don't know how to express the contradictoriness of this experience to you. Because if I say that they don't, you know, it's not so bad for them, you will think that really unemployment isn't biting into their lives. And it is really seriously biting into their lives. But it is not biting into it in the same way that it did into the lives of the, you know, the men on the Jarrow March who marched from the north of England right into London in the 1930s. Yes, the organized working class poor. And in part, that is because if they managed to put together, yes, a little bit from the dole and from hustling and from crime and from their families and from God knows where, what they will do is to use it to construct an environment, a symbolic environment, which stands between them and the depths of poverty. They'll buy themselves a really nice jacket, a really nice jacket. Or they will go into with their last savings, Yes? Not, you know, not a Woolworths store or, yes, not somewhere you can get cheap clothing. Yes? They will go into a fashionable store and try to find something which signifies, I don't know how, what it is, signifies we're still alive. Yes? You can't leave us out of the things that are making and creating modern life. Just because we don't have any money and you can't find a job for us and we are hustling to keep body and soul together does not mean that we are excluded from the new things that are of interest to us. Now this, you can imagine what this does to Mrs. Thatcher. Because, I mean, this is the most horrendous spectacle of even the unemployed and the poor who don't understand that really they must find a job and get into the system. These are kids who are beginning to survive on the margins of the system. On the margins of the system. Well, I paint that little picture, very contradictory picture, of kids who at one and the same time are in the depths of unemployment and on the other hand are at the forefront of modern stylistic trends. One and the same time. One and the same time. If you go into the city center of a place like Liverpool, the adult rate of unemployment is between 25 and 30 percent. The rate of youth unemployment is probably closer to 50 percent. That is to say, One out of every two children coming out of the school system will not get a job. So at 12 o'clock in the morning or 10 o'clock in the morning, if they're awake yet, you can go into the Liverpool city centre and the place is absolutely full. It's crammed full of people who are not working, so they're standing about, etc. But you could talk to anybody in there, any young people especially, in the Liverpool City Centre about the latest music, about things on television. They have not been excluded by their unemployment, by their material deprivation from their participation in the symbolic world of contemporary culture. They are, in fact, now making the contemporary culture that, by all rational means, they ought to be excluded from. But actually, they assume this double role of both the producers of what is most alive, moving fastest in English culture, and at the same time, materially and socially, most deprived. Okay, I want to talk about a second snapshot, another picture. Another picture. The center of English industrial life has never been in the south or in the southwest. It has lain in the central and northern cities. These are the cities of the first wave of the Industrial Revolution. If you go into any of those large cities, Birmingham, Liverpool, Manchester, Bedford, etc., Wolverhampton, you will find that these great centers of industry, the steel industry, the motor car industry, electronics, etc., that these great centers are beginning to lose their economic viability. They are being, this is the common word, de-industrialized. There's one process which we are familiar with from the third world, this is of a society which has not been permitted to industrialize. But this is a new phenomenon. This is the phenomenon of the industrialized world which is ceasing to be industrialized. The northeast and the northwest of England, that is to say the area around Liverpool and the area around Newcastle and Durham, which are both centers of coal, steel, shipping, shipbuilding, Yes, the great industries that created Britain as a modern industrial giant, her firms and industries are shedding labor like crazy. They're putting people on unemployment. They're making people redundant. They're closing down. The great industries are simply no longer the productive source and life of the center of the society. Britain is being de-industrialized, being de-industrialized. it has, I tried to argue earlier on, never properly entered the second Industrial Revolution. By the second Industrial Revolution, I mean the revolution which was principally based on modern communications and electronics, not based on steel and coal and textiles and shipbuilding, but based on the new electronic and chemical-based industries which made advanced capitalism Japan, Germany, parts of northern Italy, France, and the United States. Britain has never fully entered as a fully paid-up member of the Second Industrial Revolution. Now, that Second Industrial Revolution is what we have always taken to be the dynamo, the economic and industrial dynamo, producing the cultures of modernism. And therefore part of the cultural effect of Britain having remained, or not only remained, but become progressively a more archaic type of capitalism. A capitalism whose great moment lay in the middle of the 19th century rather than at the beginning of the 20th century. A society whose capital has been, instead of being reinvested in the internal modernization of domestic industry, was exported to the imperial world overseas, where Britain is known in the 20th century as a center of finance and money and trade, but not as a center of industrial production, of renewed industrial production. This de-industrialization of Britain is happening now as part of a conscious economic policy, the policy of Thatcherism which I described before. But it is part of a much longer structural economic decline of the British economy. And I hate Thatcherism as I do. I have to say to you that if Thatcherism were to end tomorrow and an entirely new political regime were to come into existence, the long economic decline of Britain, the lack of modernization in British industry, which has been the case since the 1890s, would not instantly be halted. So part of what is going on is the effect of the imposition of monetarist policies on the British economy, but part of it is the long secular decline of British economic life, of the failure to enter the second Industrial Revolution. and consequently the extremely uneven character of the modern, modernizing processes, capitalist modernizing cultural processes in British social life, and consequently the very uneven forms which were taken by contemporary modernism in English culture. There is economic development taking place, but none of it is taking place in the old centers of production and trade. In the new, what is called green area, that is, the areas that have never been industrialized before, in an area in the southwest and southeast between London and Bristol is the British version of Silicon Valley. It's called the sunrise industries. the sunrise industry. Not very large, not very effective, but at least based on modern consumer production, modern computers, the information science revolution. A bit, a touch, a touch of the third industrial revolution, not the second, third. The second happened around the period of the turn of the century. This is now the third one, the third one that is being generated by the information revolution. Yes, by information technology, by the new technologies of the computer world. You know, of course, that the computer was first developed in Britain. It was first developed in Britain in order to break the codes of the Germans. That's where the computer began. It began by building a huge decoding machine, which was called the Enigma machine. What has happened to the Enigma machine is that Britain has exported it effectively to everywhere else, which has developed it like crazy, while the British computer industry is a very small, small area of development. Nevertheless, there is something taking place in the Sunrise Belt. In the Sunrise Belt, most of it is Japanese. Most of it is Japanese. Japanese firms come in and they say two things, well, three things, before they come. First of all, they want a site where there has never been any industry before. They don't want the legacy of Manchester and Sheffield and Birmingham, etc. If you say to them, well, but that is where people had the skills of the second industrial revolution, perhaps they will have the third. No, they don't want that. If there are people who want skills, they will come to the new Sunrise Belt. They will get on their bikes and come. So they want an area which has no industrial tradition at all. They want what is called a green site. Secondly, they want an agreement with the trade unions, which includes the right not to strike. And they want not the usual agreement, as we have in Britain, with about six different unions, because you know our union structure has one union for clerical workers, and one union for engineers, and one union for electricians, and another union for drivers, etc. They want a comprehensive trade union agreement with everybody, which includes the agreement for five years or six years or seven years, as the thing takes off, not to strike. Thirdly, they want an agreement from every English person who is recruited into that firm, the acknowledgement that management attitudes have to change, that there will be no separate dining room for middle managers and a larger dining room for superior managers and an even larger one for, you know, the upper tier. Most factories have that. They have at least four dining rooms or five dining rooms which correspond to the different strata of English management. Each one, you know, the table improves, gets bigger. The quality of the formica gets better. The last one, the biggest one of all, will have a carpet, etc. Well, the Japanese say, no, one Mensa, just one. Everybody goes in there. None of the stuffiness of British, the discrete and delicate differentiations which the English are able to make between one stratum of society and another. And with these three things, Japan can do what the British can't do, start the new third revolution in Britain. Japan and the United States are the main motors of the new industrial and economic development in the Sunrise Belt. Not all thereof were some British firms, but many of the British firms aspire to reproduce within their structures the kind of Japanese way or the American way. There is no indigenous British way of entering the Third Industrial Revolution. Now, if you live in or near the Sunrise Belt, Or certainly, you know, if you are part of upper management in those parts of industry elsewhere in England, in the industrial centers of English life, which are still going, well, you have not only a secure standard of living, but actually the fact is that in spite of the depression, the economic depression, which has been going in Britain since 1975, your standard of living has been improving and continues to improve. continues to improve so that one of the great divisions which has entered British society in the last ten years is not between the English working class and the English middle class. And within the middle classes, those who have links with finance and the city, with commerce, or with the new industry rather than with the declining ones, have an increasingly affluent way of life. So if you move off the Kilburn High Road, so to speak symbolically, you can move in England into an arena where people enjoy, middle class people enjoy, a very, very good standard of living. Where they are able to take their children out of the public school system and send them to private schools. The upper middle classes in London would not dream of sending their children to the degenerating public school system. Wouldn't dream of it. You either do two things if you're a middle-class parent or upper-middle-class parent in London. You move to the area where the few good state schools are left. That's to say, you buy a house in Hampstead because the Hampstead schools are like private schools. Or you take your kids out of the system and send them to one of the first or second or third or even fourth rate public schools, which have mushroomed. You know what I mean by an English public school? An English public school is a private school. It's one you have to pay the education for, the English private school system. If you send a child to an English private school system, you have to be on a good standard of living because you have to pay for their education and you will have to pay for their education in university and you will have to, at the same time, maintain a decent home, etc. These are people on an expanded standard of living. This is a society where three and a half million people are unemployed, where three and a half million people is a fictitious figure because they give six months training as soon as you come out of school to anybody who wants to go into training, and those young people who go into the government training schemes will not necessarily get a job. But while they're in the training scheme, they don't count in the unemployment register. So it's a way of doctoring the figures. Then women whose husbands are at work, who don't claim the dole, who have a part-time job, who don't necessarily claim the dole in their own right, they aren't recording the figures either. And a large number of people are held to be not actively looking for work. So the three and a half million people of the adult workforce who are formerly unemployed, the number is much closer to four million. Four million of the working population is unemployed. But some thousands of those who are in middle management and the middle classes have an increasingly affluent standard of life. so one of the things are the polarization of English society between first of all those who are in work and those who are not in work and then among those who are in work those who are attached to the new centers of production to the new industries, to the growing areas of management and advertising and so on which are expanding and to those sectors of industry and the economy which are in decline. And if you are attached to the expanding areas, your standard of living has been continually going up. For one thing, Mrs. Thatcher's policies have been to lower the tax rates on people in the upper levels of the tax system so that, in fact, they pay less taxes than they did 10 years before, while their standard of living continues to increase. Okay, let me give you another picture, another portrait. I don't know whether you've ever read George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier. The Road to Wigan Pier was written, as you probably know, during the unemployed period of the 30s, and was a long journey which Orwell took to this place in the north of England called Wigan, where the unemployment rate was extremely high and where what he wanted to do was to discover what the experience of unemployment was like. Among many of the people that Orwell talked to and wrote about at that time, not only in the Road to Wigan Pier, but in some of the accompanying essays, were, of course, miners. And we have a picture of the centrality and importance of English mining life as one of the great themes of early 20th century English literature. One of the great novelists of that period is D.H. Lawrence, and Lawrence is from Nottingham and wrote both in Sons and Lovers and to some extent in Women in Love and in others of his writings and essays about the importance and centrality to the identities of the working class of the mining communities. Now, I want to tell you a little bit about mining, about the miners, because you probably know that over the last year, the miners have been on a year's strike, strike for a whole year. And the strike of the miners has been treated and was treated at the time as the last showdown between the organized trade union movement and Thatcher's. When the Thatcher government came into existence in 1979, people said, well, where is the resistance of the working class to the cults in the welfare state and to high unemployment? It never came. There was no organized resistance, really, to Thatcherism. One of the really important features about the early years of the Thatcher government is that although it cut the welfare state and cut the level of public spending altogether and encouraged redundancy and created unemployment, it was not met by anything like an organized resistance from the trade union. But gradually, eventually, there was an organized resistance and it came in the form of the miners' strike. And if you know something about the experience of the miners in the 1890s, 1880s, 1890s, 1920s, 1930s, if you know the centrality of the miners and the miners' union to the labor movement, the English trade union movement, They've always been considered not only... Well, the miners have in English, in the iconography of the English class system, an absolute centrality. Yes, the miners have been the distillation, the symbolic crystallization of the working class. Organized, full of the feelings of solidarity. among themselves. Minors, Lawrence said, were bound from the inside by the dependence which one miner has on the other in the mine itself, in the actual labor process. You have to depend on the person who is putting up the thing that holds the roof up. If you're going in next, you have to depend on him. He has gone on the last shift and you are coming in but if he hasn't put it in the roof the word will come down your head. And what these writers said is, you know, the way in which that dependence, that bond of one worker, one male worker on another, created in the environment of the mine, was then translated into the solidarity of the miners' union, which was a great mining federation, one of the stable points in the development of English trade unionism. And it created a culture of its own. In the mining village, which was usually a one-industry village, where people had sent their menfolk, the boys and the husbands and the grandfathers, down the mine for generations, and where women had watched often serious mining disasters and lived through the terrors of unemployment and recession in the earlier years, it had created a tremendous bond of solidarity in the mining communities. Now, of course, there are other areas of the working class and of trade unions and so on, but mining had always been, has always been symbolically, a kind of touchstone of the unity, the capacity of the unity of the English working class and the labor movement. And when in 1972 or 1974, the miners' strike broke through and the Heath government had to take them on, this was thought of, you know, as the great heroic battle. Mr. Heath versus the miners. The embodiment of the kind of capital and labor were seen kind of struggling against one another in a great confrontation. Well, at last there was to be another great confrontation, the miners' strike of 1985. The miners versus Mrs. Thatcher. The argument about the miners' strike was that many pits, many pits, had become what the Thatcher government or what the National Coal Board calls uneconomic. That is to say, they could still be mined for coal, but the coal was now so deep and inaccessible that it cost a great deal to get the coal out, and the Coal Board decided that it was not worth spending beyond a certain amount to get the coal out. That's because there had developed in British energy policy a decisive turn towards the new sources of energy, namely nuclear power. So Britain had built in the 60s and 70s a range of new nuclear power stations and they were facing up to the decline, the systematic decline of the mining industry. the miners had been in therefore in contention with the coal board about the progressive slowing down of production of coal and the numbers of miners were being made redundant and finally finally they decided to make a stand to defend to protect the mines that were elect against closure and to defend the mining communities now I don't know whether you've heard anything about the miners strike it was really a quite tremendous and heroic struggle and people of all walks of life in England people had never been down a mine, seen a miner, spoken to a miner ever been in a national union of mine workers, chapel or anything rallied behind the miners. The miners' strike went through English politics, especially the politics of the left and of the Labour Party, like a dose of salt. People had never been so energized in organizing fates and concerts and raising funds, of course, primarily to pay for the life of miners because the Union could not afford to keep miners, to pay miners' strike when they were out of a job for a year, a whole year. So there were miners' wives dependent on this industry and their children dependent on this industry. And how were they to live while they were fighting this battle? Well, people subscribed millions of pounds to actually do something for the miners. And one of the things that drew people to identify with this struggle was indeed the mining communities. It was not just the political struggle between the miners and Thatcher. It had a great deal to do with the notion of preserving the traditional life of the mining community. This close community where people had worked all their lives, where a whole way of life had developed around the fact, the hard, brute fact of mining. And where now that we were moving into the nuclear age, the age of nuclear energy, the mining communities could just be scrapped. People could be made redundant in their 40s. What would happen to miners' wives was not said. What would happen to the children? Well, they would get on their bikes and go somewhere else and find a new kind of job. And what people felt was, you can't destroy the traditional way of life of a whole community in this way. So there was a kind of symbolic aspect to the rallying around the miners' strike. The miners lost. The strike was unsuccessful. After a year, the miners were obliged to give in. I tell you that. Now, that's not really the story I'm telling you. But that is indeed what happened. The miners did not win. They did not win. But I want to talk about it. Not that. I want to talk about, just to look at the miners' strike in a little bit more detail. The person who had prophesied that such an event was going to take place and who rallied the miners, who organized the miners, was the Secretary of the Union, the National Union of Mine Workers, Arthur Scargill. Art Skagel is a 40-year-old Yorkshireman comes from one of the radical areas of the miners' union had been in the Communist Party in the early stages no longer, now in the Labour Party but a miners' leader and a radical and he symbolized this struggle of the miners and he symbolized the symbolic quality of place and position of mining in the iconography of English trade unionism. And he appealed to the defense of the traditional ways of life of miners and their mining communities. And what he said was, these communities have no cost. Don't tell me that it's uneconomic to do the pit. The people depend on the work in the mines, and while that is so, their lives can have no cost. No cost. There's no economic cost. And he appealed to the unity of the working class in this struggle against the Thatcher government and the National Cobour. the heroic, the heroic phase of traditional English, traditional trade unions. However, some parts of the mining industry, not in Yorkshire, but in Nottinghamshire, in Lawrence's old country, have been modernized in the last 15 years. Their coal is brought out on a much more economic basis. They use advanced machinery, much more advanced machinery than elsewhere in Yorkshire and in Wales and in Scotland. And the section of the miners who work in Nottinghamshire have a higher standard of living and have had a higher standard of living than those who work in the declining mining communities of Yorkshire and elsewhere. And this fact of the different remuneration, the different living conditions of the two sections of the miners, made one section of the miners' union in Nottinghamshire say, we don't want to go down strike. We don't want to go down strike. the first time that the miners' union has been split. Yes, that the deep solidarity that people talk about has been split between one sector of the miners who wanted to go to work and another sector who did not. Okay. Nevertheless, I want you to bear in mind, yes, the appeal which Arthur Scargill is making to the unity of the working class, the unity of the working class, and then the fact that the miners split on the issue of whether to strike or not. Okay, the Nottinghamshire miners, who are now what we might call black work, yes, because they are wanting to go to work, while their own mining colleagues and comrades are not going to work. So, of course, what you have is a section of miners trying to prevent another section of minors from going to work. This is the split, the division within the working class between those who are so terrified of losing their standard of living or of losing a job in a period of four million unemployed that they are dying to cling on to the job and the others who are going down the drain anyhow who are going to fight to the death to call it a universal strike. Some of the deepest and most wounding clashes in the 1985 miners' strike is between one mining family and another, between one set of miners and another, because, of course, one set of miners block the roads, they stop the buses in which the coal board is trying to get the working miners through, the split in the working class, against the rhetoric of the unity of the working class, the actual split in the working class. There is another reason why the working miners refused to go on strike, and that is because there was never a vote to go on strike. The strike was declared by the miners' union leadership and Arthur Scogill, but there was no ballot. No ballot. And the Naughty Emptia miners said, well, we would have gone on strike if the majority of all the minors had been given a free vote and they had decided for a strike. But in the absence of a strike, we will not go on strike. In the absence of a vote, we will not go on strike. People on the left said about this, what is this business? What is this formality of the vote? Who cares about the vote? Who cares about a vote? It's just an excuse. But actually, the Nottinghamshire miners held to their position that without a ballot, there could be no stripe. Here are the mining communities then in some parts of Yorkshire and Scotland and Wales who are going to fight this year-long battle with the help of people outside. Normally, the whole structure of a mining community is that, of course, the defense of the community lies with the National Union of Mine Workers. That is to say, with the men. With the men. Miners are men. First of all, the work is too heavy to be done by women, and so the miners' lodges and the mining communities dominated by the miner, dominated by the image of the miner, which is the image of, yes, you know, the, it's the heroic image of labor. You understand what I mean by that? Yes, it's the man who, yes, whose labor depends on actually hacking energy out of the rock. That's what coal is, rock in the bowels of the earth. It's the worker as a kind of subterranean force, energy, entirely masculine. There isn't an image. It can't be a feminine image of mining. There is a feminine image of the miners' wives, solidarity with their husbands, sacrificing their sons to the mine. Miners' wives regard their children who go down the mine like, you know, women in the fishing village regard the sons who have to go out and face the sea every day. They don't know whether they'll ever see them again. Every day they go down the mine. There could be a mining disaster. There could be a fall, etc. They may never appear again. So the sacrifice, you see the importance and centrality of miners' wives, but their dependent position in the configuration and symmetry and symbolism of labor and solidarity and community. in the mining world. Well, here is a year-long strike. The women are going to not be able to pay the mortgage, not be able to pay the rental of the television, not be able to go down to the shops and buy food. They're dependent on things which are being collected in Kilburn and in the cities, money coming in. They're dependent on charity where they have never been dependent on charity before. They're going into Christmas, unable to buy things for their children. they are dependent on the weekly wage and there is no wage and because the strike is not official the funds of the National Miners Union are seized by the government they try to send some abroad but most of them are seized so even if they want it to the Miners Union cannot pay strike pay so here are the embattled wives but something is different because the wives the women of mining communities, remote as they may appear from many of the trends of modern English society and culture, have been touched by the ideas of modern feminism. And they are unwilling simply to, as it were, provide the feminine support to the strike, you know, to make the tea, etc. They actually, for the first time, organize as women, organized as women. They want to fight the strike themselves if they're going to be involved. They want to have a say in the strategy of the strike as to whether it's right to block the miners who are going to work. They want to enter into the politics of the miners' strike. The National Union of Mine Workers doesn't know what to do with these women. They expected the women to come out in support of the miners, but they don't understand what it might be for a strike to be fought by the miners' wives. In the course of the solidarity which arises in the miners' strike, hundreds of different organizations go down to mining villages. They go to bring gifts, to bring money, to bring food, etc. And some of the most extraordinary encounters occur during these visits from outside the mining communities to the miners during the miners' strike. For instance, there's a very active London Support the Miners Gay Group. Now, if you can just conceive in your mind's eye what happens in a remote Welch mining village, structured as I just described to you, the heroic image of labor, the masculinity of the National Union of Mine Workers, visited either by a feminist lesbian support the miners group, who have come only to talk to the wives, who don't want to meet the NUM at all. They're not interested in the MUM or the miners shop stewards, etc. They want to know about the self-organization of the miners' wives. The support the miners gay group very much wants to meet the young miners, of course. But, I mean, can you imagine the encounter in the miners' lodge? as these young gay lads arrive, decked out, cross-dressed as they are, etc., to greet in solidarity, in absolute solidarity, against Mrs. Thatcher, the young, young miners, 101% male young miners. An incredible, fantastic encounter, in which, of course, in their extremity, the mining communities opened their doors to anybody who comes. Anybody who comes. Black miners groups in mining communities that had never seen a black face in their lives suddenly discover when the police start to beat them on the picket line that they speak exactly the same language about the police as young blacks who are being bitten in the center of Brixton. They discover they have a common language, have a common enemy. They are both being harassed by the fuzz. They collapse into an understanding of one another's discontinuous position. What happens to the miner's strike? Well, what happens to the miner's strike is, as I say, it is defeated. It's defeated because the assumed unity of experience and identity of the miners did not exist. There was never one mining spirit. There was never one mining identity only. And the old supports on which that identity had survived for so many years could not survive the passing away of the traditional working class community and its psychic and cultural and social support. Could not do it. What's more, there was a failure to translate the defense of the mines with larger issues. People outside of the mining communities were sorry for the miners, but there was never a politics which linked the defense of the mining communities with things outside. There could easily have been. Because, for example, the new nuclear power stations in Britain have become one of the leakiest places in the world. They spill radioactive nuclear waste practically every day. in that there were five spillages of nuclear radioactive waste from the energy station called Sellafield in Britain in the two weeks before I left Italy. Five of them. Steadily. So lots of people who are not in the mining community, never been down a mine, have some relationship to the question about how Britain is to produce energy and what the real costs, the real social costs are of a nuclear policy as opposed to a mining policy. It may even be the case that actually the number of mines and the scale of mining coal production in Britain ought rationally to be reduced. But then, of course, one isn't, or one hoped one wasn't in the early days of the Industrial Revolution where technological change and modernization is heaped on to the shoulders of those people, you know, who are at the bottom. We know how that is done. That's how the first Industrial Revolution was made. As the new technologies came in, you simply made people redundant. New kinds of textile industries came in as they introduced the new spinning jennies, etc. Thousands and thousands of people were just thrown on the scrap heap of history. One had imagined by the beginning of the 20th century that there might be a more planned, socially planned, and socially responsible way of actually bringing or introducing new technologies of energy. Not so. We're going to do it in exactly the old way. We're going to do it by throwing people on the scrap needle of history. Well, of course, they revolt. On the other hand, the claim that mining has no cost is the wonderful humanist demand, but it is utterly utopian. Everything has a cost. Everything has a cost. Everything in the world, not only in the world of capitalism, in any world, everything has a cost. There has to be an argument in Britain precisely about the cost of coal as compared to the costs of nuclear energy. The destruction of the environment and pollution of the environment by a nuclear industry as contrasted with the savage ravages of human life which coal mining has cost. That is a question of cost as well. These are costs. People have to bear the costs. The world does not owe Britain a new energy policy. Britain will have to find a way of financing itself an energy policy for the modern world. And it will have to find a way either of brutally discarding thousands and thousands and thousands of people whose entire life and culture has depended on the old industries and the old skills which are now going out of existence. Or it will have to make that transition into more modern forms of production and consumption in a more socially responsible way. That is the issue that was at the heart of the miners' strike, how to bring about the historical transformation of the energy industry. But there was no form, no area, no institution, neither the Labour Party nor anything, that was able to articulate a general politics around these questions. You understand the point I'm making? So, people identified with the sectional interest of the miners. They didn't want miners' wives and miners' children to suffer. But there was no general politics in which they really felt affected us as much as the miners. Although there is a policy, the question of energy, every time you flick on the light, you use energy. Somebody is producing it. Either the miners are doing it or the nuclear energy factories are producing it. Somebody is producing it, the capacity to turn on the electric light. So everybody has an interest in what the energy policy is and how much it costs and at whose expense. So you could have built on the so-called community, the mining community elements of that argument and constructed a general politics which would have involved everyone, would have generalized the issue. Do you understand me? Instead, it was not fought as an issue around one section of the working class, which had reverberations for the whole society, whatever class you were. It was not articulated as a general politic. It was articulated in the old revolutionary argument of the united working class versus the united capitalist class. And when structured in that way, that old way, it didn't work. some went and some didn't lots of people gave but didn't feel involved it could not win the minor strike could not win it's the most, in some ways it's the most terrifying experience for people like me because of course I identified with the strike I gave to the strike we tried to work for the strike I knew from the day it began the day it ended that it could not win it was fought it was constructed culturally like a kind of struggle which is finished. It's finished. It could be won, but it would have needed a new vocabulary, a new politics. It would have needed a new way of conceptualizing, a new way of thinking about miners, a new way of thinking about the relationship between mining communities and the rest of the world, etc., to have articulated general enough struggle to make the possibility of the minor strike winning. There is, however, a new book which is written by a woman journalist called B. Campbell. It's called The Return to Wigan Pier. The Return to Wigan Pier. It is itself an effrontery because it's written by a woman, not a man. it is also about the miners but it's as much about the women in mining communities as it is about the men and indeed it is more about the experience of women in poverty the numbers of single mothers it's about young women in unemployment it tries to depict that contradictory experience of unemployment which I tried to talk to you about half an hour ago it does interviews with a lot of young women who are on the one hand deeply, deeply affected by the absence of work, of a steady job, and of any way to keep themselves together, but who are at the same time refusing to be defeated by it. Many of those young women are deliberately choosing at a certain point in their lives, between the ages of 20 and 23, to have a child. They don't want to get married. They don't expect the guys to marry them. they are not interested in becoming a nuclear family their lives are not going to stop because they have children but they want a child, it's time for them to have a child so they have it, on the dole, on unemployment, etc. They refuse to let their lives stop because of the backwardness of the life which is offered to them. Now, between the heroic imagery of the old road to Wigan Pier And the return to Wigan Pier in 1985 is a lifetime, an eon, an age, an age has passed between those two points of reference. What is it that has happened in the period in between? I spent a lot of time last week trying to describe to you some of the deep old structures that I said had contributed to the construction of English national culture. I talked about liberalism, and I tried to pinpoint the revival of the religion of the market and of individualism in the contemporary discourses of Thatcher's. I talked about conservatism and how the discourses of conservatism and respectability had also surfaced in the reactionary nationalism of contemporary Thatchers. I remind you about the Falklands War, which appealed to the popular classes in the old discourses of race, monarchy, and empire. You should not imagine for a moment, for a moment, that those structures have gone away. Those structures continue to shape and inform the deep structures and forms of English culture. Indeed, while the whole Thatcher mood, Thatcherite mood, it's not just that government. When I talk about Thatcherism, I don't just mean the fact that there's a government led by Mrs. Thatcher. I mean the whole atmosphere, the whole set of discourses that make that kind of position popular While that remains in place, these old structures absolutely dominate and wrap up the English cultural scene. If you look at one or two aspects of that, if you look on the one side at how this old culture responds to the trends that I was trying to depict yesterday, today, the new sexual politics, the emergence of new attitudes among women, the birth of feminism, the rise of the counterculture, it has towards that only the language of discipline. Discipline, work, order. It intends to police the permissive society out of existence. It thinks the worst thing that ever happened to English society was the period of permissiveness of the 1950s and 60s. It thinks swinging London was the bottom of the pit, that nothing was worse than the decline, the cultural decline, which occurred in that period. It thinks that social democracy and the welfare state has sapped the moral vitality and fiber of the English nation, that what is essentially English cannot survive what Mrs. Thatcher called in a wonderful metaphor the nanny state. When people, you know, are accustomed to having their every want dealt with by the state, instead of being sent out into the hard, ruthless, competitive world to carve out a job, a survival for themselves, that only by the restoration of the competitive instinct, backed by the force of the state, And the issues of law and order are central to the politics of that. And the use of the police and the coercive elements of the state in disciplining the minors, in policing blacks, in policing the crisis of English society. And English society now is organized and held in place partly because it is police. The powers of the English police have never been so great. The police can stop anybody at any time of the day or night without any warrant and ask them what they're doing, where they're going to account for themselves, what they're carrying. They can keep you as a result of the Terrorism Prevention of Terrorism Act under lock and key for three whole days before habeas corpus begins to operate. habeas corpus was thought of, you know, as the beginning of the rule of law. One thought one could not have classical liberalism without the duty of the state to produce the body. Well, they don't need to produce the body for three days. They don't need to tell anybody where you are. They can pick up young people of 16 and 17, and they don't have to ring their parents and say, we have him. They just hold him. Then they have to let him go. Then they have to let him go. They are the only, the police and the army are the only sector of the public service whose salaries have not been cut in the last six years. Everybody else has taken a cut. They only have not taken a cut. There are new powers, new police bill, and new police powers, an expansion of the judiciary. So this is the law and order society where you speak of those who are the enemies of the orderly and disciplined Thatcherite state as criminals and deviants. Criminals and deviants. The language of law and order is one of the principal ways in which Thatcherism sells itself to those who are terrified of change, frightened of change, who believe that because the Kilburn High Road no longer looks like it used to look 10 years ago, it doesn't look, all these strange people walking around, these strange sounds, these funny smells, these strange fruits, who is it that speaks right to them, the fear, the urban fear of walking the street at night and says you can only protect your life and property if the police and the state look after you. that is the law and order society and we are deeply in it so any illusion that as it were you know Britain British culture is softening that the old lines of race and empire and nation are beginning to dwindle away that the state doesn't have a central is not a center of authority in the society that we aren't as it were trying to modernize Britain by going backwards rather than forwards, by returning to the image of Victorian values and the entrepreneurial spirit and Britain as the workshop of the world, etc. Any idea that that old archaic structure, what I would call the pre-modern structure of British culture, that that is eroded or disappeared is quite just fantastic. It's just not true. It's an illusion. It's a utopia. Well, now you might say, well, what were you talking about yesterday? What is all this about the pluralization of English culture and the new forces and the new social movement? What happened to all that story yesterday? Yes, that lies right alongside the archaic, pre-modern character of English cultural life. At the same time as the attempt is being made to restore and refurbish those old patriarchal, national, nationalistic, ritualistic centers of cultural authority in the society, right in amongst them as a weak impulse, but nevertheless a long, delayed, dispersed impulse in English culture, are all the processes of fragmentation, of pluralization, of ethnicization, which I was trying to describe yesterday and in my lecture on race. The two things are happening simultaneously. Two rhythms, two different tendencies, pulling the society in the opposite direction. That is unevenness. That is unevenness. English culture does not have any one characteristic. It is not going in any one single direction. It is the consequence of the rhythms of uneven development. Of uneven development. The archaic, the pre-modern, the hardly modern, and the intuitions of the post-modern inhabit exactly the same contradictory social, economic, political, and cultural universe. That is pretty. All of them together. All of them together. That is unevenness. And British development is now one of the examples of the most uneven type of development of a modern industrial society. Uneven development, where backwardness and forwardness and moving to the past and moving through the future happens in the same place, the same people, the same impulses, cheek by jowl, the things are kind of pulling in the direction. You can see the evidence of these two counter movements by shifting your eyes one centimeter. You take your eyes off the archaic there and you catch a glimpse of the postmodern there as you're on your way back to another archaic structure. Yes, they lie there. They really are. Contradictory complexity of what I'm describing, any one tendency of that kind. See, I think it is true that there has never been a British modernism, never in the sense in which we understand it, and I think it has to do... I don't want to give a... and it's not giving an economic explanation for it, but a country which culturally has never made it into the second industrial revolution finds it difficult to begin to create the means by which it signifies and understands itself and creates the subjectivities which are more characteristic of modern culture. Well, it's extremely difficult without that really transformed base in modern culture to try to conceptualize the forms of post-modern culture as constituting anything like a dominant set of configurations. Very difficult to conceive of such an eventuality taking place. That doesn't mean to say that I think the ancient or archaic structures of English culture will remain unchanged, untransformed by these new elements. The new elements are extremely radical. They permeate. Rather than taking the old structures on, head on, and as it were challenging them to a stand-up fight, they move around them. That is the effect of a more dispersed and pluralized culture. It doesn't attempt to take over the state. or stage a great battle, a great showdown. It doesn't have that image of change. It simply moves around it. Moves around it. A lot of young people are simply, well, they're going to probably be largely unemployed for the next 20 years, so they can't. They're not going to sit and mourn their loss of a central meaning to their life through work. They're going to get on with living. They're moving around some of the problems. And that does create the real interstices of life and movement and fluidity, which if you went to England, you would be bound to see, as well as the depths of the archaic and older structures, the traditionalism of what I call the traditionalism of English culture, you would sense at the same time this fluidity in the interstices of the old structures. It's there in the cultures of youth. It's there in fashion. It's there in the trends. It's there in music. It's there in the increasing ethnicization, the English population. Yes, it's there in television. It's there in everyday life. It's the kind of revolution of everyday life which can't occupy the centers of power and cultural authority, but which can, and which aren't creating an alternative, unified center either. They're not two centers, but which surrounds and surpasses, flows around, and tries to, as it were, there's no other word for it, they try to surpass, to just transform by erosion, by local erosion, the old centers of power. Now, this fluidity, this increasing, these new aspects of modern life are, of course, centrally important because they do indeed take place in everyday life. They are not limited to the avant-garde. They're not an intellectual creation. They're not what is constituted only by the producers of the media. They are most evident in how people live their everyday life, in their relationships, in what concerns them, in their everyday culture, in their practical life. So these are not what is important about these new trends. is that they influence the actual structures of the popular itself. So one can no longer speak of the English national popular as if it is simply constructed by the old discourses of nation, people, empire, traditionalism, etc. The popular life in English society is also now being deconstructed by these new cultural forces and impetuses, by the new technologies, by the new media, especially. Young people who have learned to be creative in the bricolage of contemporary cultures are creative in entirely new ways. They're not creative like artists used to be. They don't have to. This is an immense breakthrough at the popular level, the ability of people to not create but to perform, to perform, to make things. Often to make things out of what has already been made. so that there isn't now the notion of making new things out of nothing. You don't, you know, the heroic level of creativity, 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration, etc. Not that. Creativity is more like making an omelette than like making a poem. You've got to know how to throw the things together. At a certain point, you have to take the risk of tossing it in the air. You have to toss it in the air with style. If you can't toss it in the air with style, don't try. Find another way of turning it. When you actually appear in public, you must be able to do that. Because that is, of course, what releases you from the compulsions of the fact that you haven't had an omelette for months and probably won't have another one. This is the only omelette you'll make, but this one is made with style. This one is not made without a touch of brandy because, you know, that's how our folks have always made it. If that's the way in which you make omelettes, we can make that too. You can make an omelette like that over any fire. Over any fire. But democratization or demoticization of the modern practices of making culture is an astonishing change, an astonishing transformation. I mentioned it to you when I talked about the growth of ethnic culture. You would be, if you went to London in the last three years, you would find it breathtaking, the creative capacities of young black boys and girls, who are at the same time dispossessed from the educational system, feel that they go to schools that don't recognize their culture or identity, and yet nevertheless they are in an explosion of creative activity using these modern means of communication. They are absolutely at home. They would find it difficult to write poetry with a pen but they can write it with a word processor. The word processor has no magic for them. It has no mystique for them. It's just a fast, easy way of writing. And if you can't spell, you can get a program for spelling. So who cares if you just know how to... If you know the right program, you don't need to not wait until you can spell well to write a poem. You don't need to do that. Or to write a song. Or to write a new dub to another tune. Or if you like a tune, and the tune is recorded and copyrighted, well, who cares that? Because if you have two recorders, you can break them apart. the bass and the treble, and you can take the treble away and keep the bass, which is the dub, and write a new tune on top of it. You don't need to actually know how to write music. You don't need to have gone to the Jouillard School of Music and studied with whoever it is to write another tune. That democratization of taste is profoundly transforming the everyday culture of the popular, while these archaic centers of discipline, order and authority are trying to hold the society down. And now there is another slightly different image from the one I gave you before. Because in spite of all her confidence, Mrs. Thatcher is trying to put, she's like somebody in Pusillipo. She's trying to put a stopper on these kind of explosive spouts. And every time she leaves one, another water spout comes up. She's trying to stop pornography and halt the minors and police the blacks and clean up television. Meanwhile, getting the Japanese in and selling off a bit of British industry. Every time she does something like that, people don't take her on and fight her and stand for an election against her and have a manifesto and form a new party. They just move sideways and write something else. They move sideways. The moving sideways from the centers of power. Now, the great question is, you know, can we all move sideways enough? Can we move sideways enough? Yes, so to circumvent the centers of power so that they just dry up on their own. And this is indeed the, I mean, if you were full postmodernist, this is what you're waiting for. You don't need to take politics on because after a time, it will just, you know, they'll only be talking to themselves. They will publish their manifestos and they will hold elections, they will go to Parliament, etc. And nobody will listen. They'll just be going on about their business. The moving sideways strategy as a cultural and political strategy. Well, that is certainly happening and it's transforming all those old structures. And although they look right now more centered, more with greater authority and greater power, etc., than they have looked in English life for many decades, nevertheless, they are fragile. It's very peculiar to say. It doesn't mean that Mrs. Thatcher is going out of power tomorrow. That's not what I'm saying at all. But nevertheless, the power that she has is not hegemonic, because it is not confronted, but it is surrounded. It's being, as it were, frozen out. A dialogue is going on over her head, which she doesn't quite understand, which doesn't appear to be about the same thing that she's talking about, but a lot more people are in that conversation than she's actually talking to. That is the puzzling thing. What is it that they're talking about if they're not talking about the things that she thinks are important? She establishes the agenda of politics, and that's what everybody ought to be riveted with. and people are not riveted with that at all. They're thinking about some other little local difficulty or business that they have here and there. This is the revolution of everyday life. Now, is it possible for that strategy really to unpin and unpack the deep authoritarian and traditional structures of archaic, unmodernized English life and actually, in the end, modernize British culture? You look at me as if you're expecting a simple answer. You expect me to say yes or no? I can only tell you I don't know. I don't know. One thing I'm absolutely certain about, and that is that that system which people are trying to evade and surround and escape and sidestep has deeper roots and deeper rhythms than I think many of us actually understand. For what has created the revolution of everyday life if it isn't the remorseless, remorseless expansion of modern capitalism? That's what it is. It may not matter what you call it, and it certainly isn't the capitalism of the 19th century. It isn't the capitalism even of the early 20th century. It's a capitalism that is as rooted in the production of desire as it is in the production of everyday life, material goods. It's a form of production which operates as much through fantasy, through our fantasies, in the construction of new subjectivities, as it is one which, as it were, establishes and underpins the old identities of the first Industrial Revolution. Nevertheless, one of the things that is creating this quasi-international alternative culture of urban spaces in advanced industrial societies is, nevertheless, the astonishing revival of global capitalism in the 1960s and 70s. We thought, I think, in the period after the 1950s, which created what we sometimes call the consumer boom, that then we could graft onto and tame that system by the welfare state and by, you know, the social environment, etc. But actually, once that containment was broken in the 1970s, it has unleashed itself into a new, immense dialectic. We don't begin to conceive of what dialectic at life. It is transforming all the relationships across the globe. For example, in the modern capitalist world, there is no third world left. The third world itself, and so what I mean by the third world, we used to have three worlds, the West, the East, Eastern Europe, and then the third world. But the third world is not a homogenous thing anymore. The third world is often the centers of the production of the dreams and fantasies of the first. You need to go to Hong Kong. If you want to make a trip to the center of postmodernism, go to Hong Kong. There is nothing in Hong Kong but consumerism. Nothing at all. It's like the whole of the enormous dynamic of modern capitalist production has just spilled out on the street. You want to go especially on a Sunday. It's when every shop is open. You can buy anything you have ever thought of in Hong Kong. Anything you've ever thought of. And there, in some remote, run-down, little back room, some Asian women are stitching the jeans. that are going to appear on Oxford Street. They are making the jeans and the trainers and the flash coats in the most advanced modern style. In some enclave in Latin America, they are for the first time printing the circuits of the modern information revolution. The lines of modern global capitalism have created an international division of social labour, which links First World and Third World. Not all of the Third World, of course, you know. Little bits of it, little enclaves of it. Korea, parts of Hong Kong, bits of Latin America. That bit which is tied into and incorporated in the new productive explosion of consumerism in the West. Behind that lies the great interlands of the poor, of the colonial poor, of the third world poor. But the third world is split between these centers of advanced modern production. I wrote a book about this at an earlier point called Policing the Crisis. Policing the Crisis was composed in Pakistan and printed in Singapore. When I said I wanted to change something in the chapter, they said, well, I'm sorry you can't, because it's on the way from Pakistan to Singapore. I said, but how come? I mean, who are you? They were Macmillan's. Macmillan's, one of the oldest English firms in the world, the home and center of Harold Macmillan, former prime minister, etc. They don't put a single word on the page in England. They put it only in the much lower labor-costed world of the Far East. It's more cost-effective for them to send the book to be put together in Pakistan and printed in Singapore and shipped back to England than to develop British industry. So if you say, what is the economic base of Macmillan's publishing house? It is spread across the three worlds, the three globes. If somebody in Poland would put it together, do you think the fact that it was in the Eastern Bloc would stop them? I mean, do you think Sir Harold Wilson or Sir Harold Macmillan would say, no, we can't do that because it's the Third World or the Second World or the Soviet Union? Forget it. Forget it. So all that I'm reminding you is that one part of this immense fluidity of the alternative world is indeed the extremely extraordinary rapid movement of modern capitalism. Which Marx said was a revolutionary force and he hadn't a clue about how revolutionary a force it was. Not a clue about really how revolutionary a force it was. How has capitalism englobed the world? It's englobed the world through incorporating at its forefront the modern information revolution. Of course, information and programs, television programs, and styles, and the message about youth can go from one end of the globe to another in the twinkling of an eye. But that which goes fastest of all is the stock market prices. There you go. You print them on one day in the market in one place and they have an economic effect the day tomorrow. Those centers of modern production and modern commerce are linked together by the invisible web of the modern information revolution. So the idea, as it were, that the archaic structures belong with these old forces and that the new elements of fluidity and movement and decentiveness are in some uncontradictory way way the promise only of the future doesn't recognize the contradictory nature of the new. The new is also extremely locked in to some of these older structures in their modernized forms. They reproduce the old structures in some of their modernized forms. They have an investment in the new, of course. So they are, in a sense, at the frontier of some of the new identities and new desires, but that they are an unfettered or unlimited arena of invention, of the production of the self in some more democratic or open-ended form remains to be seen. Well, that is the enigma, the enigma of uneven development in British contemporary culture today. I'm reading the Nabdis off of you. Economic uneven development, yes, and I was trying, although I don't want to make any simple correspondences between the two, I was trying to talk really more about the unevenness of cultural development as well. But what I would say basically about Neon's thesis is that that is one of the more over-optimistic ones. It's written in the end of the 70s, when you did get this revival of Welsh and Scottish nationalism, and of course Irish nationalism going on throughout the whole period. And when it looked as if the British state, you know, was weaker than it had been before, the end of the Labour governments, etc. The attempts at corporatist development, which the Labour governments tried to set in motion, didn't look as if they were happening. and it looked as if there was a real thrust towards devolution. It was splitting up the British state for the first time and giving Wales and Scotland a much greater autonomy from the centre. And as I think I probably said in response to a question last week, this was underpinned by the discovery of oil in Scotland, which made it look for the first time as if the Scottish economy, if the money was allowed to remain in Scotland rather than being exported downwards, that this might really underpin a genuine national development. There's no reason why Scotland should not, you know, on the basis of oil revenues, Scotland could have modernised itself. Whereas actually what has happened is the oil revenues have more or less paid for the unemployment benefit. The three and a half, four million people I just told you who are getting unemployment benefit is about equal to the amounts that Britain has gotten out of oil. But the fact is that since the 1970s, those neo-nationalisms of the Scotland, Wales and Ireland don't look, are not so strong. The tide of devolution has ebbed. It's not as important a political force as it was. The Scottish National Party, which was the party of national independence and autonomy, and the Welsh Plaid Cymru, the Welsh National Party, neither have been very successful in the elections of the 1980s. Yes, they have either remained stable or to some extent declined. Irish nationalism is there and is a strong force, but remember that Irish nationalism in any case has a relationship to the Republic of Ireland like to split Ireland off altogether from Britain. That has a long history. And the nationalism of Ulster is, of course, quite the opposite from devolution. It wants to be more British rather than less British. So Irish nationalism isn't quite the same explosive force in English politics as Scottish and Welsh nationalism was. And I don't think that anybody looking at the British scene immediately now would give the same weight that Neon give to those nationalisms as a potential counterweight yes to English nationalism which I think has tended to reassert itself as a popular ideological force um I think that there are two attitudes to this question I mean one is of course something has changed in consciousness. I mean, if you think of what I was talking about, the miners, the consciousness of women in the mining communities and of men in the mining communities now is not the same as it was when Orwell or Lawrence wrote about it. So there have been those changes. But I would say that that one of the things we have to recognize is that the consciousness was never as unified and homogenous as we imagined it to be. We always imagined that in fact the miners were 100% solid, but there were always cross-tensions within the mining communities about solidarity. There have always been more radical and less radical mining communities. so although I don't want to deny the transformations of consciousness which arise especially in those groups in urban situations which are more open to the new cultural forces and which are very much attuned to the structures and identities which are constructed by the modern media etc I don't want to suggest I'm really answering you in exactly the same way I think I answered you earlier on when you asked me a question about the two histories. Do you remember? I don't think that it was ever the case that there was the unified consciousness of the working class. So that now, I think the tendency is to exaggerate, retrospectively to exaggerate that unity and therefore to make a sharp polarized contrast between the period of homogenous consciousness and now the dispersal of consciousness. That's not to deny that now consciousness is indeed more complex, complexly structured. It responds to the construction of very many more forces, social forces. So, of course, it's more fractured and more dispersed. But still, one mustn't exaggerate that in contrast to some previous time when, you know, people thought as they were supposed to think. The idea of the homogenous consciousness of the class was always an ideal construct. An ideal construct. Something perhaps that people needed. I don't know whether the labor movement could have been created without the fiction of the unitary consciousness of the class. But, in fact, it never existed in that unitary form. No. When you speak about the young black and boy, they buy very expensive jackets and so on. And you speak about them, in relation to them, as a strategy. Yes. Yes. Yes. Well, yes. And that wouldn't, they wouldn't, they wouldn't see that as a strategy against Thatcherism. They would see that just simply as a strategy of life. as a way of living. All that I meant was it is implicitly a strategy against the notion that you can't buy good things if you don't have a job. So it's a refusal of that old structure which links work, routine, reward, saving, the steady, disciplined life of labor. It isn't a consciously done thing, but they just don't feel imprisoned inside that old structure of consciousness. But remember that those kids in their jackets, in their new trainers, are also the kids who riot. So they don't feel that that prevents them sometimes from confronting the police in an old-style, very sharp, immediate confrontation opposition. They're not in that sense. See, they're not because they're involved in that. They aren't just passive consumers either. they aren't either of those things they aren't either the old discipline of work and they aren't just hedonistic on thinking about their position in society they know that they have been excluded they know they are second class citizens they know people are harassing them they know they are criminalized and they sometimes resist in very open, sometimes quite violent very angry ways some of those kids it doesn't matter the fact that they shop where they shop tomorrow in the housing estates that they go back to at night, they can be deeply, deeply angry, very angry indeed. So the link that we used to make in the 1950s between consumerism and passive politics, apathy, that link is also broken. You can get quite politically active radical sensibilities which you aren't afraid of dealing with the market or involving themselves in style. That, again, breaks on the more radical side of the fence of consciousness certain old structures and old equivalences. What they are might not be is in joining the union, going to a Labour Party meeting, passing a resolution. They would think that as That is the vocabulary of an older politics that doesn't speak to them. But what I'm trying to suggest to you, to ask you to think about it at any rate, is that though that politics was counterposed to the consciousness which arose out of work, family, home, etc., it reproduced some of those structures inside itself. So the mining community reproduced the subordination of women while it was being very solidary as part of the labor movement. So of course it was antagonistic to dominant society, but it wasn't entirely outside of some of its forms of consciousness and some of its forms of culture. So what you may say is happening now is that some of those forms of consciousness and culture are being transformed, even when people are still subject to the forms of material deprivation and exploitation which still define their lives. There too you see an uneven development in the breaks that are made. What doesn't happen is a break of the old kind made with all the structures at once and the formation of an alternative party of the dispossessed or party of the working class. So it's that opposition movement of that singular kind. But you do get a re-articulation of the elements of radical consciousness, consciousness of style, sense of the novelty of the world and of new identities coming into existence. It's very, it's confusing, certainly. But I think that that is a more accurate description than to depict it as, you know, one kind of consciousness which has really dominated, you know, for 200 years, which has just kind of dissolved sometime between 1950s and the 1970s. And now we are in a period of pluralization and diversity. I think there's always been, as it were, I suppose to put it crudely, I think that there is more diversity in the earlier period than we imagined and more structure in the present period than we would like. I think the present period is somewhat more structured than our utopia that people are really going to create their own freedom without restraint. now and i think the past was never so sewn up and orderly and blocked out as we used to talk about it so i think we need a kind of revision of the whole history the whole history in the same way you know there is no one there's no i talked about britain not becoming modern and there is a certain set of elements that we might call modernity. But all, there is no one modernity. All modernities are historically specific. And when one says that, what one means is that there are structures in the peculiar development of English society, you know, which will always shape the, even if Britain had become a modern society, it would have become a modern society in a particularly distinctive English way. And one mustn't forget the persistence of those ethnic, national, historical peculiarities. They aren't going to be dissolved simply because some of the forces which are creating contemporary culture move globally across national frontiers. That's quite true. You can find a rather similar kind of culture in the urban centers of most societies. But for that to become a kind of well articulated cultural pattern it has to make links with the groundwork of what is distinctive and peculiar about English cultural formation. So one mustn't detach those forms and culture and consciousness from their from their from the shaping patterns of past traditions, of historical development and of unevenness. well first of all I should just say a word about Jameson who is one of the critics who has been most important in defining postmodernism but who has a very particular kind of slant on it and he thinks about postmodernism as the culture of advanced capitalism yeah and I suppose I have a slight quibble with Jamestown about that, just simply because I think he lines up capitalism and culture in a kind of simple set of correspondences, which I don't quite accept. I think he's, in a surprising way, Jason's become a kind of old Lukashian in his old age, except that he has a new phase now, and he's finding the kind of artistic and discursive and cultural equivalences to this new phase. And of course there are connections between the two, after all, because you couldn't describe the new elements of constructing postmodern culture without describing the new technologies. And the new technologies obviously have a material basis in what I call the global expansion of capital. So, of course, there are links between the two, but I don't think the one is simply an expression of the other. Now, I also, you'll see, agree with, you can see from what I said by talking about the persistence of the old structures. Yes, and of their, the fact that they survive and reconstitute themselves as different kind of centers of power and authority inside the modern period. that I do think that they have not, they're not in any sense losing their power and that they have the capacity to constrain and limit and displace many of those modern developments. So I think there is, of course, still power. It's not imposed from any one center in the old way. Actually, I don't know whether the old way ever actually also, either imposed it from one center in that way, Because if you think of the English bourgeois revolution, it didn't occur from one centre. Yes, it was, if you remember my description of the long march of liberalism, it took place on many centres. For a long time, it wasn't political at all. Yes, it was mainly constructed in the country house and in the way of, yes, etc. And the market was constructed in civil society, not in the state. The bourgeoisie doesn't take power in the English state. Well, some people say it never has. it certainly doesn't take it on to the second half of the 19th century. So, again, I think there's a funny kind of way of retrospectively simplifying the old picture. But it is true that there were kind of centers of cultural authority in the past that one could more easily identify than one can today. Power seems to be more dispersed. Yes, it seems to depend on a much... And because of its deep investment in the popular and because of its capacity to construct the desires and fantasies and the emotions and the unconscious of psychic and symbolic life, it can't any longer be thought of as kind of coming from the outside and impelling people to do something or feel something inside. It's inside and outside. That power is inside and outside, constrains us from within, as well as delimiting and circumscribing us outside. So in that sense, something of the inside and outside of power has kind of broken down in the contemporary situation. I think Jameson is right in saying that, that there are still powers. There is still authority. There are still centers of decision-making and areas where they're not, etc. And the inequalities of power still remain central to anybody's life in modern society. But nevertheless, power is not unified in the old way. There is, of course, the myth, the image of the revolutionary moment, which was when people would seize the center of power in the society. And once you've seized the center of power, you know, everything else has fallen into your hands. The central power used to be the post office or the telegraph station. Once you seize the... And in the Irish Revolution, that's what they went for in Dublin. You seize the post office. Nowadays, in the Philippines, for instance, you seize the television station. The moment you can say, President Marcus has gone, he has gone, Whether he's left the country or not is a different matter. But you command the means of making meanings in the society, and that has its real effect. It becomes real because somebody says so. The center of authority is the news, and if the news says, he's gone, he's gone. It helps to erode his power. But actually, of course, if I said to you, well, here, for a moment, for about an hour, you have total power in this society. you only have an hour to seize the strategic centers of power and authority, where would you go? See, where would you go? Would you go to the telegraph office? Would you go to the government? Would you go to the bureaucracy? Would you go to the television station? Would you go to Via Roma? I mean, where would you go? Where would you put your hands on, you know, on the making of a new consciousness? Where does the world turn over? Where does the world flip over? television well that would be closer to the center of power certainly than the post office my god if you went to the post office in Italy you wouldn't hear about the revolution for another two weeks you'd have to wait until the so that's certainly finished but the television is closer to the center of power but even the television itself wouldn't quite do it you see the point I'm making We live in societies whose complexity is such that there is no one. Power is not centered in that way any longer. It's not centered in that way, just as it's not outside us in that way, radiating in on us. It operates in and through us, and we are part of the micro and macro physics of power. Jameson is right in talking about that relative de-centering of power, in the pluralization of power, and yet the fact that it still exists. It still exists. And one of the things I was trying to say about in my description of the uneven development of British culture was that if you fall suddenly into the illusion that you're in a powerless universe and try to kind of walk through the culture of the society as if you don't, you come up against some very old, hard-faced configurations of power like the old police. who shouldn't be there at all. This should be a self-policing society. But actually, they're there, more powerful than ever before. With the newest technology in the world, the newest technology of intelligence and surveillance is in the British police. They have transformed themselves technologically in the last 10 years. Transform themselves. When you see them going, the British police now going on riot control, they go with the most advanced weapons for the management of modern terrorism. So the idea that this is a powerless, a power vacuum in this new world isn't right either, what you talked about. The existence of centers of power, remaining centers of power, are very real, very real, although they're not condensed in any one place. In that description, I think Jameson is quite right.

Well, this is the last of this series of lectures and discussions. And it says on the program that it's about cultural studies in the 80s, a reconstituted terrain. And that second phrase ought to have a question mark after it. Is cultural studies in the 80s a reconstituted terrain? Let me remind you that I have on two occasions in this course of lectures paused to say something about the theoretical reflection in cultural studies of these changes and developments in British culture, which I've been trying to sketch. In the first of the discussions on the objects of study and methods of study in cultural studies, I raised the question about the early questions, which really helped to inaugurate the field of cultural studies as a set of theories and reminded you of the importance of Hoggart's work, analyzing the changes in class cultures and the impact of the modern means of cultural production in the 1950s, and of the beginning of Raymond Williams' long and extremely varied contribution to the cultural studies field, and of the importance of giving a historical dimension to cultural studies of the work of Edward Thompson. In the fifth lecture, which was around the question of cultural ideology, again considered in a more theoretical vein, I tried to sketch what I've called elsewhere the second moment in the development of cultural studies. That is very much the interruption in the earlier, more culturalist and historicist modes of cultural studies formed by the development of structuralism and semiology. That second moment is not simply a moment of structuralism in any simple sense, because it is also the period in which partly as a resistance to the over-theoreticism of certain structuralist approaches, cultural studies was also most deeply influenced by Gramsci. So I have structuralism in quotation marks. Nevertheless, that phase in cultural studies, which is marked by the work of Levi-Strauss and of Barthes and of Althusser and of the critique of Althusser and of Gramsci's work, etc., is a very important phase. In the lectures on the British culture and British cultural identity since the turn of the century, which have really occupied me this week, the lectures this week have been more about the late 19th and the 20th century. I've already indicated some of the trends which I think are to be observed in the contemporary cultural scene. And I talked yesterday about the very contradictory face which British culture today actually offers. The existence and the persistence of ancient, archaic, often traditionalist, sometimes even pre-modern structures. The uncertain entry of British social formation into the terrain of modernism and of modernization as a society, as an economy. and consequently the highly uneven development of English culture in the 20th century. And then towards the end in yesterday's lecture and the lecture the day before, I was talking about the tendencies to fragmentation, to diffusion, to the breaking up of some of those older configurations and so on. So I talked yesterday about unevenness as a principal feature of the structuring and forming of the different discourses which contend across the terrain of English culture today. And now, so today is a theoretical reflection on that moment, which represents the third moment in the development of cultural studies. and I want to say something about the relationship between the second and the third moments. Okay, however, I want to remind you of something which I think I've said more than once, but which ought to be taken as a framework of what I'm saying today, which is that there was a moment in Arteser's work when he dreamed of an absolute distinction between science and ideology. And when he thought or proposed the idea of what he called the epistemological break, the definitive rupture between one form of theorizing and another. This is an attractive idea. It's an idea out of which, in many different forms, the utopia of a fully scientific study of the human sciences and culture was born, and the Structuralist Project was very closely linked with this dream of a scientific theory of human culture. And Algec there, in a sense, in his own discourse, brought that hope to a very full theorization in his notion of theoretical practice. Nevertheless, I don't think that Althusser ever adequately established the possibility of a total epistemological rupture between one paradigm and another. The truth is that paradigms don't work that way. Paradigms overlap with one another. the one paradigm which interrogates and disrupts the previous theoretical formulation, nevertheless then borrows some of the concepts which it has detached from the old paradigm and reworks them in a new theoretical discourse. That is how that folding in and folding over each other is actually the real movement of theory. It is theory moves not unlike all the other cultural discourses that I've been describing. It moves by the process of re-articulation and dis-articulation, rather than by the notion of a total break and the conversion from ideology to science. So when I talk about three moments in cultural studies, I don't mean that one has lost many of the important ideas, many of the important theoretical advances which were established in the first phase. I refuse the totalizing discourse of the Altissarians in their full flight, full theoretical flight, whereby one had to choose up sides between culturalism and structuralism, pay one's dues and enter one or the other party, theoretical party. I don't believe that that kind of final choice in theory is ever a useful thing. Indeed, one of the places where I'll end is to contest even the so-called closure or finality of the third moment and to look forward to the possibility of a fourth and the fifth and the sixth moment in cultural studies, an unfolding theoretical project. Instead of theory, now I only talk about theorizing as a process. I think theorizing as a process is interesting. I think theory, capital T, which is installed in the libraries, which becomes canonical, which becomes a doxa, that people intone like the litany, not for me. Not for me. I don't believe any longer in an autonomous theoretical practice. I believe in the lower level weaker project of using one's head of using one's head to understand difficult things which is sometimes called theorizing theorizing so I'm going to talk about a third way of using one's head of trying to develop some ideas of informing one's understanding and analysis with certain theoretical concepts etc. which distinguishes is the movement between what I call the second and the third phase in cultural studies. I suppose the other thing that I ought to say by way of a sort of introduction is that I suppose I would have been more comfortable 10 years ago in trying to say what cultural studies now is in the third phase as an objective fact. But I don't know that I can attain or aspire to that kind of certainty anymore. I can say where I think the useful lines are going. I can say where I find it most useful to move, what new ideas I find most useful to learn from. I can also say lines in modern critical thought and inquiry, which I don't find particularly useful. So there is in your journal, in Anglistiki, an essay by me called Culturalism and Structuralism, the two paradigms. I reread that essay as if it's written slightly by someone else. Not that I disagree with what it says, of course, and I'll perish the thought, I still agree with most of it. But what I find strange is the certainty with which it is delivered. Yes, carving up the theoretical terrain, producing the two paradigms out there. So today, partly as a way of reflecting what the movement to the third movement, the third moment in cultural studies is really about, which is the recognition that no reading is without a reader, no theory without a theoretician, that though there isn't a single author who remains steady and the same, and I'm telling you that I look back at me, the author, ten years ago in Naples, and I don't quite recognize who it is. So there's not one stable author, but nevertheless the discourses have a signature. They don't have an author, but they have a signature. At a certain point you have to say, this is where I think cultural studies is at or this is where I am at in the discourses of cultural studies or something like that. So everything that I'm going to say now is followed by a signature, followed by a little s, a little s, which means signature or the subject or steward with hair or one of those signifiers. Okay, let me quickly try and sum up what structuralism and semiotics did for cultural studies. And I try to sum it up now without talking too much in detail about the particular theories of particular authors, etc. I sum it up in a rather brutal way just to establish the interruption because I think it was an interruption. If you don't believe me that it was an interruption, you should read the poverty of theory. Edward Thompson's book on Altissere. A key figure of the first moment trying to reckon with the impact of a key figure of the second moment and then you will understand that it was an interruption. A clash. Yes, a brutal confrontation in some way. There's a debate between Edward Thompson, Richard Johnson and myself which was conducted in the hallowed walls of Ruskin College. actually it wasn't Ruskin, to be perfectly fitting in Oxford, they found an old church for this confrontation. Yes, a church which had been cleared of its pews and so on, but it still had a kind of religious atmosphere. And in this hollowed-out temple, these combatants, their ethical combatants, met. There were hardly any seats. People were hanging from the ceiling. There were no lights installed. There were bulbs and beams, etc. So it looked like a scene from Warsaw 1945 or something like that. And there the combatants met. Theory and anti-theory. And experience versus theoreticism. And the clash of the juggernauts took place. But I don't want to go over what we were arguing about then. I have a modest piece in that volume called In Defense of Theory. in defense of theory, which I would now call in defense of theorizing. But nevertheless, you can see how the sight of the Altusserian promised and of Levi Strauss and of the French, the appearance of the French in the deeply English terrain of Edward Thompson's thought. And there is no more deeply English terrain than the thought of Edward Thompson. More English than Raymond Williams, who is not English at all. Raymond Williams is like me. He comes from the borders of the central, the heartlands of English culture. He comes from Wales and I come from Jamaica, but both of us are colonials. He arrived in Cambridge and I arrived in Oxford as if it's a foreign place. People always ask me, why do you live in London? Why don't you live in the countryside? Nice day. If you come from the sticks, if you come from no man's land, Where you want to live is on top of Eros statue in the middle of Piccadilly Circus. You don't want to go and live in Milton Keynes. Some new displacement like that. So Raymond has remained in Cambridge because if you leave Wales, you go to the center of the dominant culture. You want to storm the heartlands, the fortress of English culture. You go right to the heart of it. You went to Cambridge, I went to Oxford. So you take the battlements and then you either leave it as I did or you climb inside it and fight it from the inside as he did. But the terrain of Edward Thompson's thinking is very English. So the appearance of these peculiar French figures was a deep moment of interruption in English, in the appropriation of English as a concept of culture, both in cultural studies and in social history and so on. Now, what is it that this theoretical interruption brought about? Well, you will know from what I've said about Thompson and Williams' work, and Hoggart to some extent, though Hoggart doesn't operate in that kind of theoretical terrain, that cultural studies could never have functioned with an unproblematic notion of the model of base and superstructure as a way of expressing the relationship between cultural practices and other formations in a society. It used that model or metaphor and sometimes tried to elongate it and mediate it and establish its articulations, but it has never been happy with the essentially reductive relations which find an expression in the model of Bay superstructure. And you shouldn't mistake what it is that I'm saying to you when I say that because I'm using what has often been in cultural studies a necessarily coded language, a coded language. when I say that it found the metaphor of base and superstructure problematic, I'm declaring what is in fact an extremely important fact about cultural studies, which is that it has always been, on the one hand, located in a tension with Marxism, and on the other hand that it has never been able to develop within the space of orthodox Marxism. It has always been an attention, an argument with Marxism of some kind, but it has always been in some ways revisionist. And one of the areas in which it was revisionist is about the base superstructure metaphor, about the tendencies to a reductionist conception of culture, which is contained in that. Suspicious, that is to say, about the apparent relations of fixed dependency of the so-called superstructures, ideological, cultural arenas, etc., in relation to something else, the base, the economic, material life, whatever it was that was held to both ground and guarantee and determine. as a necessary relationship, something which was secondary, culture which was secondary or dependent. So that structuralism helped to articulate or to develop a new way of conceptualizing the relationship between the cultural domain and other structures and formations in a society. And that is the conception of articulation. Of articulation. Structuralism established by borrowing the metaphor of language and of linguistic studies, by borrowing the Saussurian linguistic model essentially, began to conceptualize culture itself as an articulation. That is to say, as a set of not necessary linkages between different elements. meaning symbols whatever they might be the notion of articulation and to conceive of the relationship between culture and other structures culture and the economic for example as also an articulation a linkage a relationship but one which is not necessary not fixed not fixed by some first last instance which as it were tell you how the relationship must go. That is to say that if one wants to talk about the relationship between class and culture one has to think of both class and culture as themselves articulations. A class is a formation it is a set of different elements a relationship between different, sometimes contradictory identities. The fact that at certain historical moments part of that class has appeared as a historical, collective, social, or historical actor does not mean that its internal identity and contradictions are summarized by any one single identity, or by any one single ideology, or by any one single culture. Consequently, in the same way culture itself is conceived as a discourse, as to say, as a set of elements, of a set of relations, of a set of symbols, or as out as they're called ideology, a system of representation, where the linkages were important but were not given by the economic or the last instance or by something which fixed it in place in some unchangeable way. And this way, this shift from the older notion of a culture as a determined sphere to the notion of the necessary determinateness of culture. Of course, culture is not an independent realm of ideas or great thoughts floating free of history or of society or of class or of the economic or of the political. It's not a free reign. So it's not just a sort of ideal realm up there, but nor is it linked in any set of simple correspondences with other structures or with other formations, social formations. And this notion of articulation as a different way of thinking, relations which are not determined in some final sense, was a major breakthrough at the theoretical level, which the structuralisms and the semiotic approach and the influence of the linguistic model actually brought to cultural studies. It helped to resolve many of the problems with the base superstructure metaphor with which cultural studies had been wrestling from that moment which Raymond Williams records when, as a student of literature, he had to say, Leavis wins because he's able to give a more articulated and differentiated account of culture than contemporary Marxist literary criticism. Well, secondly, therefore, now to put what I've just said a little bit more positively, the second major interruption which structuralism practices was, of course, the impact of thinking about culture and about the relation between culture and other structures within the metaphor of a language, within the metaphor of a language. I don't want to go into this in any great detail, but know there are lots of misconceptions about this moment in cultural studies, which sometimes thinks or speaks of this moment as if this is the time when cultural studies took on linguistics. And in a way, that is true. It learned a great deal from the various schools of linguistic. But actually, the impact is not so much at the level at which cultural studies is informed by the arena of linguistics as a set of disciplines, but much more the bringing into cultural studies of the theoretical metaphors of culture operating as a language does. As a language does. well now what one learnt within structuralism from the models of language developed especially in structural linguistics and by Saussure was of course the notion that a language was not a word as a meaning but the differential system by which meaning was made meaning is impossible to make meaning Levi-Strausson learned from Saussure without the notion of a differential system And you know I don't want to go into the Levi-Strauss example of the systematic relationship between sign, signifier, signified, etc. Alongside this notion, the impact of the linguistic model in culture, the concept of culture as a system of differences, came the notion that insofar as culture had to do with meanings, that insofar as it's impossible to speak of culture without speaking of the way in which people, as it were, used the languages of culture to construct meanings for themselves, that one had to move from a passive to an active conception of culture. From the passive, dependent conception of culture, where culture simply expressed or reflected the values and meanings of a group or class subculture or whatever it was, now to the notion that culture was the medium in which the practice of making or producing or of constructing, meaning these are the new metaphors that come into the critical discourse of the systems of what were called by Levi-Strauss signifying practices, or by Barthes, the signifying practice. So the notion, once you break with the notion that culture is a dependent and reflective mirror to meanings and values which already exist outside of culture in the already formed totalities or unities of classes or subcultures or groups or whatever it might be, now one sees that first of all one has to think of these groups, classes, social formations as themselves complex and contradictory constructions, and of the articulation between them and the way in which they articulate themselves as subjects differently in the different signifying practices, culture as a signifying practice. That is the impact of the semiotic aspects of structuralism and of a deepening of the semiotic and symbolic character of culture. And it's associated very much with Roulon Baud's work. This shift from a passive to an active conception of culture includes, of course, the notion of the centrality to culture of the relations which cohere around the sign, around the sign, centrality of the sign to the conception of culture, signifying practice, signification as a production, the sign as the side of culture, and consequently, to a very profound revaluation of the conception of the text. the idea of the text is no longer in Roland Barthes equivalent to what we might call the literary work the meaning does not inhere in the text any longer the text is the site of the construction of meaning it is the site for the production of meaning it is the site where as it were the reader, and the textuality of signification encounter one another. It is also the site of the struggle for meaning, because one understands by semiotics that there is no one final meaning which is established in the world of the real, that the real outside of the processes, the discursive processes of culture which construct the world meaningfully, does not exist. There is no, in that sense, final recourse to the real, which will wrap everything up. That is the end of what is called the transcendental signifier. There is no final end to the guarantee in the real of the meanings within the sign and the discursive itself. And so the third interruption, which is represented by this moment in cultural studies, is the abandonment of the idea of fixed or closed totalities. Cultural studies before that had operated very much with the conception of the relationship between well-integrated wholes, old classes, what were called the vision du monde, yes, the totality of a culture, or the totality of a thought or the totality which is composed by a work of art or the totality of the major works of an author. One looked for the correspondences or homologies between these different totalities. But this conception of discursive practice and of signifying practice and of the end of a reductionist conception of culture leads to the abandonment of the notion of fixed or closed totalities. and of any necessary correspondence between them. The language of Adesir is the language of the complex, non-expressive totalities. It is not the terrain of determination, but of over-determination. Each text or each event is determined like the Freudian symptom from more than one discourse, from more than one source. There is no single one origin to be discovered. in the same way one talks about an event which seemed in some ways in the older discourse to be the final as it were the the the transcendental signifier yes at least an event really happened that event itself is understood in the outer Syrian discourse as a conjuncture as a conjuncture, as a coming together or convening in the same historical moment of several different histories, not of one history at all, but of several different histories and of several different determinations. It's not, of course, the notion of an indeterminate field. The field is determinate in the sense that it is shaped by the specificity different history. It's shaped by what is specific to its time and place and its structure. It has a location. It has a place. The histories have different durées or lengths of time, temporalities. Certain events have short and abrupt histories. Others have longer durées. There isn't... History is not equivalent to time as such. You have to speak about the histories and the times which construct events. But nevertheless, that an event is in that sense over-determined, over-determined, and has temporalities in it. And this breakup of both the notion, the warrant or guarantee of the single event on the one hand, and on the other hand, the interruption of the discourse of a single homogenous history with its laws, its impersonal laws, which will, as it were, drive behind the backs of men and outside of action, etc., which will drive or lead to particular conclusions which are inscribed in the universe. That notion of history, which I tried to say earlier on, has to be differentiated from the notion of histories. There's a ludicrous moment in Al-Tazarianism where a lot of people read the critique of historicism, the idea of a single historical narrative, as if it was also the end of the histories as such. And for a time, structuralists were utterly idiotic about the question of history, totally idiotic about it. They quoted all kinds of rubbish about synchronic time and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And suddenly, to be interested in the historical at all was, you know, to belong to the past. This is the kind of excessive fury to which theoreticism is sometimes given. So one of the reasons why I'm suspicious of theoreticism is that it sometimes goes to such an excess in its reaction against incorrect or weak positions. It sometimes elaborates itself in a kind of highly sophisticated idiocy. And there was indeed a kind of idiocy about the way in which some devoted Althusserian disciples spoke about history. Nevertheless, what is quite true is that the notion of a single integrated history and its given impersonal laws, which, you know, through all the movements of different conjunctures and the reversals and the advances, etc., was nevertheless working itself out. That deeply, deeply, deeply religious conception, which sometimes calls itself or goes under the disguise of materialism, that deeply singular monistic discourse of a quite religious character, which sometimes calls itself materialism, had to be broken for the real impact and imprint of differential history on culture, could be properly as if were appreciated. and in that notion also a change a shift came about in the notion both of the subjects of culture whether those are classes or individuals a notion of the necessarily collective character of men of the individual of the so-called self etc. and also a change in the way in which one thought about the relationships of power within culture because previously one had spoken about the dominant culture, the culture of the ruling class, the ideology of the ruling class, as if it had the capacity to obliterate everything in a society, as if its dominance depended on its ability to incorporate every other position within its own position. And it's only with the concept, with the elaboration of the concept of hegemony within cultural studies that one came to understand how it was possible to think the relationships of power and of domination and subordination outside of the idea of incorporation. Yes, of how you could be dominant and not disappear down the maw of the dominant, the dominating classes or groups or whatever it is, the dominating discourse. It's a transformation in the conception of cultural dominance. Well, so you can see that there is elaborated in this period of structuralism a variety of quite new concepts, of new concepts and new ideas and new relationships, which don't finalize cultural studies, but which allow cultural studies really to come to terms in a more theoretically positive and open climate of thought with some of the difficulties which had been in the inception of cultural studies, which had indeed prevented it. or hampered or constrained its emergence in the first phase. Well, what has happened to these ideas since then? What has happened to some of these great shifts and ruptures in the structure of early culturalism under the impact of new critical concepts? Well, here I want to talk about three developments in cultural studies which lead outwards from this second moment, which would not have been possible without the break constituted by structuralism, but which are themselves post-structuralist in their tendency and direction. The first is that which emanates from the work of Foucault. Now, I don't want to try to elaborate what Foucault said and what is distinctive about his work. There are about twice as many important books that tell you what Foucault said as there are any books by Foucault himself. He has quite a long and complicated work, oeuvre, before his tragic death. But there are many important works which tell you, which open up, as it were, expose the Foucauldian system. That's not my intention to do here, to speak objectively about Foucault's great work. I want to pick from Foucault those ideas which seem to me to have seminally contributed to the further elaboration of the ideas of cultural studies. I spoke about the impact of structuralism in elaborating within cultural studies the model of language. The model of language. But in the model of language, Levi-Strauss, as you may know, found the promise at last of a true science of culture. And it was done, it was accomplished, as you know, in Levi-Strauss and in the early Roland Barthes, by the movement away from the infinite complexity of the surface forms of culture down to the level of the structure. the level of the structure and the laws of combination and differentiation, which generated different cultural forms, that was what was scientific about the culture. It's not a mystery. Levi Strauss' empirical work, if you can call it that, Levi Strauss' empirical work on myth is exactly such a work. where he begins with the apparently endlessly invariant tales which peoples throughout the world have had no contact apparently with one another. You can't use the anthropological notion of diffusion. They didn't learn it off somebody else. They apparently tell this variety of stories. Not only that, but each myth-maker in each culture can tell the same story a hundred times over. And he does a wonderful work on, for example, the numbers of times that Western culture has told itself the myth of Oedipus, of which Freud is only one of the most recent of the myth-makers, of the tellers, the retellers of the myth of Oedipus. Now, what Levi Strauss says is, if you remain at this constantly varied and constantly changing level of the immediate forms of culture, how can you possibly have a science of it? Because it changes every day. Every time somebody tells the Oedipus myth anew, it will be different. That level, the level of the parole, of the sentence, cannot be scientific. The only thing that can be scientific are the rules of grammar, the logic, as it were, the grammar of the culture. And the grammar of the culture is a deep structure, not lying on its surface at all. It's the laws and the rules which tell you how to produce another variant of the Oedipal myth. And if you understand the rules, if you have the elements of the Oedipal myth, and you have the rules of being a myth-maker, you can tell it for yourself. That is what Levi-Strauss called bricolage. You can tell it for yourself. And consequently, the scientific moment was exactly as in Durkheim, as in positivism, as in French positivism, not American positivism. He didn't understand what positivism was about. As in French positivism, the moment of the scientific was exactly the movement away from the immediacy of apparent appearances to the deep structures and the deep laws which lie behind. In that sense, Alderste was absolutely right. Marx was the structuralist. What he said was, you can't tell what the universe is about by looking at the movement of the stars. You have to move away from it, and you have to use an instrument of a very long kind, theoretically, before you can produce an astronomy of the universe, which is the laws of its deep structure. You won't understand how capitalism operates if you stay in the market where people are hustling and bustling capitalism on until you move away from that noisy sphere of consumption. to the deeper laws of capitalist production. In the same way, in a kind of metaphor, Roland Barthes said, if you stay at the level of the production of new models of cars, you will never create a science of the motor car stylistics because every year there's got to be a new model. That's what car production is about. You have to move away from that to try to constitute the laws of the system, where the system is systematic. systematic at the level of the rules of the grammar. Of the grammar. And the grammar of the culture is probably unconscious. Or at any rate, it's what we would now call discursive. That is to say, you can produce it, but you may not know it. You can produce the well-formed English sentence without knowing a single grammatical rule. Of course you know it. Somewhere you know it because you can use it. So it's not a question of self-consciousness that makes it scientific. It's a question of its systematicity. It's a system. Now, what happens in Foucault is the recognition of the regularities and irregularities which constitute the field of what he wants to call the discursive, but the refusal of this relationship between depth and structure, depth and surface. Foucault is not in that sense. He breaks with the notion that somewhere behind the surface of enunciation lie the real regular rules of the system. What there is, is the surface. There is the surface of the discourses. There are the movements of how one discourse interrupts another, displaces another there are the transformations they're like the switches on an underground system where a discourse is moving that way and is met by another and is switched in another direction or splits so there are regularities and what Foucault calls uniformities to be observed but they're not uniformities which arise from going behind that and the reason for that is because of what I said earlier on the break with the notion of some final meaning or some transcendental signifier or some idea of an appeal to the real, the real, which will say, of the many things you can say in culture, this one is real, tick, and none of the others are real. There is no moment like that, like in the word process, you know, where you move it up and down, And finally, one of the things is blank to new things. I'll try to respond very quickly. There has, of course, been, yes, I could have talked about Derrida as well. There's been a very important influence of Derrida. Derrida's influence has been even greater, I think, in critical theory, in philosophy, and in literary criticism and aesthetics, even than in cultural studies. But you can see from what I've been saying that those are not discontinuous domains. Now I think Derrida has had two central to try to sum up what I think his impact has been One is in the area that you talked about about the movement from the movement to writing as the principle, as it were, metaphor of culture, cultural production though I think that that sustains and carries on a shift which was already going on in the moment of structuralism itself though Derrida deepens it and of course in deepening it he quarrels with Saussure and certain of those forms but nevertheless there's a very important moment when Levi Strauss says it is not the content of a culture but the forms of its arrangement, which is what one's interested in. And from that moment on, the centrality of form comes to play an ever-increasing role in the way in which cultural studies in its different manifestations operate. And I think Derrida gives that an even deeper kind of wider philosophical reference. And I would say the second central importance of of Derrida, I was really signaling without naming when I talked about the notion of difference. And not only the acceptance of systems of difference, because already structuralism has that, but the notion of there being a perpetually deferring of meaning. So there's always a surplus, the signifier never comes to rest. is always, yes, there's always a moment beyond the so-called moment of meaning, which unscrambles the meaning. And although what I said there, I didn't try to kind of pin to Derrida's work, an influence, and you can find it in Foucault, you can find it in other theorists, clearly it's a structuralist phase of thought. So I would say, yes, there is an important influence of Derrida. and probably now that Foucault's work has come to an end, in one sense, not the end of his influence, but he's not going to go on writing and producing, it may be that the influence of Derrida's work will, in the end, be more seminal, especially in critical theory, than Foucault's work. the moment that the discourse is unresolved on that question. Yes, unresolved on that question. For example, let me just give you a kind of practical example of work which people are doing. On the one hand, people who are fully in the deconstructionist position, of course, are not concerned with meaning as such, because by meaning they understand some kind of limit, even if it's arbitrary, some kind of closure of the signifier, and in that sense they are not sufficiently open to the idea of the perpetual play of signification and difference, which is an idea which more arises from Derrida. On the other hand, within cultural studies, people still talk about representation. A lot of work is going on on representation. Now, representation, in a way, sounds like a very old cultural studies problematic. But if you look at how people talk about it, they aren't talking about it in that way anymore. They understand that the representations don't simply reflect that which has been constituted outside of the means of representation. And the representation is itself a set of productivities and that they can be represented. What has been presented can be represented. So the terrain of representations is a study of the existing forms of representation. That's influenced by Foucault because those existing systems or forms of representation constitute what Foucault would call the regimes of truth. So while they are the dominant representations, men or women or blacks will, as it were, be constructed in the discourse within that regime of truth. So do you see the linkage between meanings and this interest in analyzing representation? But the notion of representation has been deeply displaced and problematized by the Derrida problematic, although I don't think Derrida could have given rise to the interest in representations as such. So what I suppose I'm saying is that there are different ways in which people are beginning to work in this field. And in cultural studies, what it amounts to is the impact of Derrida's thought and of the question of difference right across the field, weakening and transforming many of the older conceptions without as yet a loss in the idea of meaning or loss in the interest in meanings. So there's a kind of tension or play between a fully deconstructionist and the impact of deconstructionism on other systems and theoretical positions. And that's really, yeah. That is probably quite accurate. No, I think it's quite true. I mean, I do not, I said I don't believe in the end of history. I don't believe in the end of meaning. I believe that meanings will be in a state of constant disruption, constant displacement, etc. But I don't think that there is any such other final moment as the moment of total meaninglessness. Otherwise, I think I said this to you before, perhaps I want to elaborate on this in just a moment. Otherwise, I think one needs a different conception of language or writing. Because without a conception of writing which includes the construction of the rules of the production of writing in a code or in a grammar, etc., It is not possible, it seems to me, to read at all. The activity of reading otherwise becomes philosophically constructed as a natural moment. Well, if it is not natural, then there is certainly a profound loss today in the centered meaning or in the fixed meaning. But people are still in meaning. They're in a plethora of meaning, but they're still in meaning. signs are not without their connotation of meaning in that sense I think you can have a continuous dispersal and breakup without getting outside of meaning because to be outside of meaning is to be outside of any language any language at all that's why I find it difficult to accept some other final resting point you can have a movement which of course radicalizes, revolutionizes structures of meaning, they're no longer in place. But the opposite, the absolute opposite of that, which is the notion of utter, of without meaning at all, which is the notion of the end of history, i.e. identify the two together, is, it seems to me, a kind of inverted transcendentalism. That's why I call it a utopianism. And I think it's trying to live outside the tension between meaning and meaninglessness. the process which always goes on in language between meaning, meaninglessness and super meanings. And that is somewhere in there is culture because in there is the arbitrariness of the cut of culture which establishes the limit that is not natural but which produces the meaning for a moment even just like that has to have the limit. and that is the moment of power. So the end of history, the end of meaning and the end of power. And since I don't accept either of those three, I can't accept the moment of the total absence of meaning. But I do accept that writing is not where it was, that meaning is not where it was, that history is not where it was, but not the absolute other. I mean, I'm not changing the criticism that you made. I'm trying to elaborate why it is I try to understand myself as operating with that particular closure. Yes, it is my closure. The question of the epistemological break and relativism, because the epistemological break is absolutely the opposite end of the spectrum. What I was thinking on that you and the establishment of the United States on the day network. Yeah. That ideology would end and science would begin. And in the human sciences, we have never been outside of ideology. We are always in the break between ideology and science. So, oh yes, there are major displacements, but the displacement is not the same thing as an epistemological break. Marx makes a theoretical interruption in the discourses of political economy only because he then borrows what he has destroyed in part. He goes on being Adam Smith's greatest interlocutor. So, he says, of course, political economy is scientific. It is scientific. I've learned an immense amount from it. The fact that it is ideological in certain respects has to do exactly like postmodernism, with the moment, not when it describes the emergence of capital, but when it declares that this moment, 17, whenever the Wealth of Nations was written, is the last moment of history. This is capitalism, and now we've arrived. At that moment, Marx says, that declaration of closure, that is what is ideological about Adam Smith's work. But a lot of the rest is systematic. Think about Marx on the question of class. As to recognize, I myself did not develop the labor theory of value. Ricardo did. I had to disentangle it from the Ricardian problematic in order to recuperate some of those dispersed elements and integrate them into another theory. Now, there is the movement of what I call a theoretical interruption. You can never think in the old paradigm any longer, but the idea that you now think scientifically and have lost altogether some of the previous concepts seems to me quite wrong. And I think the idea of epistemological break, of a final break between science and ideology, holds out that illusion that, as it were, bad thought will go away and good thought will come. Whereas I think the good thought is always, yes, has just recovered some bad ideas, yes, in the Brechtian sense. It works from the, Marx works from the bad side of Ricardo in order to construct the positives of his theory. And in the very moment that he is constructing it, he constructs some bad sides, like the base superstructure metaphor, and one or two others about ideology, which his own theory can only be developed through another theoretical interruption. So my idea of the theoretical interruption is the notion of a displacement which is not a total break. Of a displacement which is not a total break. So I don't use the word good and evil or truth and falsehood. Of course, I'm not in absolute relativism because not all the discourses are of equal weight. Again, Marx said, Adam Smith and political economy is scientific, but there are a whole host of political economist apologists who are pure ideology. They just, they haven't generated new concepts. They're not articulating a conceptual structure. They're just, you know, reproducing the already known thoughts, etc. So there are weaknesses. Some theoretical ideologies have greater explanatory power than others. So I don't think that leaves you in the position of total relativism. But it leaves you without the guarantee of entering the scientific. It leaves you without the positivist guarantee. And I think, although you're right, that this makes cultural studies more open-ended, more... It depends on self-reflexivity rather than the positivistic guarantee of science to establish its better thought, its better and its worse thought. Nevertheless, that that is a more secure position from which to go on theorizing and doing empirical work than the kind of pretense that there is some moment of positivistic certainty that one entered and then one could methodologize or operationalize that science. You can teach cultural studies like a finished system and give out the methodologies. Always one of the interesting things about cultural studies has been that it has had to work self-reflexively on its own concept as it was doing its empirical work. So it tried to work and at the same time underneath it was doing something to the concepts, to the operators in order to perform the empirical operation. and that doubleness of cultural studies is well you may say it's a weakness yes it is I think it's a strength because I think it's what prevents cultural studies from becoming an institutionalized doctrine or dogma I mean it is condensed in culture it is a condensation world if there is an origin you study the structures the text has a structure even if it doesn't have one author the world has a number of histories although God doesn't exist God doesn't author it but it isn't without structure for that reason language, talk about language language has rules though there is no one author it can be studied Yeah, I don't know what getting out means. Getting out means dying, stopping it. You work within it, but there's no opening, there's no nothing. It's a sort of a brain master. You think about a singular moment which is said to have an origin, a subject, and a singular 1917 does it? one author, one meaning one origin, one destiny? well you might say well unless it does, no revolutionary politics a lot of people have said that but I'm afraid I have to say well I have to play with revolution or change or transformation as one possibility but it has to be the recognition that 1917 is an overdetermination. The person who came closest to authoring it, Lenin, said that about it. The most heterogeneous conditions accumulate to construct 1917. This has become, you know, such a combinatorism, a little whizzing machine, etc. that you can feed everything in. And now to say then, Fed, Marxist, work, capital through it. And lo, it came out structuralized. But I don't think contradiction over determination is quite like that. But I mean, I recognize what you are saying. It is very difficult to pass on, to teach, you know, a form of work whose open-endedness and constant refusal to stay fixed is one of its characteristics. Whose theories are relative, whose sense of history is of the overlapping of different durations. Yes, it is very difficult to stabilize that and institutionalize it and formulate it as a methodology and as cultural studies. I quite agree with that. That is true. And no doubt that weakness in cultural studies has kept people out and made other people feel that it is too amorphous really to be a properly articulated discipline. On the other hand, I'm a refugee from well-articulated discipline. I was positioned in the well-articulated discipline of literary criticism. And when I departed from that, I thought I could be positioned in the well-articulated discipline of sociology. And both of them disappeared like crazy. They just broke up. They just broke up. Nicolaus said in the middle of 1968, what is this science of sociology whose subjects have to stand still before you can know anything about them. They have to stop when the whole, the only thing of interest about them is that they're moving, they're on the move. But to constitute them scientifically, the whole world has to stop. Now, what is this discipline whose scientificity depends on, as it were, treating the objects of study in such a radically alienated way? so every time I've tried to get the security of a properly institutionalized discipline when I was finally offered a chair in sociology the head of the Open University said to me but I see you have never done sociology in your academic life and I said no so he said well how do you feel about professing sociology and I said to him now that it doesn't exist I am happy to profess it since it no longer is an integrated total field I am glad to be a sociologist before that I would never recall myself a sociologist not for a million words when the Center for Cultural Studies first opened the day it opened there appeared in the student newspaper in Birmingham a letter signed by the whole body of sociologists and social psychologists which said sociology is a sign this funny thing that Holger and his friends are doing over there which is just interpretative literary criticism, etc is fine if human scholars humanist scholars want to do it but we hope that they're not going to tell us about the world about society, etc because there are methods by which society is studied there are methods by which positivistic sciences of the social are constituted and we must have a distance between themselves and ourselves. That's 1964. By 1968, positivism was out of business. Out of business. It didn't exist. They couldn't have written a letter like that because the certainties were no longer there. So one has to be satisfied with a kind of weak thought. A kind of weak thought.