Altmusser. L 1971; Lenin mul Philosophy and Oilier Ľaays (B Brewster, trans,).
London: Ne* LeR Hooks. (Original work published 19701 Ai.TtiussF.it, L. and Bauhak. E.. 1970: tfattfíng Capital (B. Biewsler. Hans.). London:
New Lcl! Books. (Original work published IVrVi) UtKBiUA, J  \977\ Of Üranimahdogy {G.C. Spivuk. Irans.). Baltimore. MI): Johns
Hopkins Univcishy Press. Foucault. M. 1980: Power/Knowledge: Seleaed lntcr\ie\w and Oilier Wntingx
1972-197? (C Ganjon, etlj. (C Gordon. L Marshall. J. Mcphum and K. Sopot.
Irans.). New York: Pantheon. (Original work published 1972). Gxamso. A. \91\. Selections from lite Prison Notebooks {Q. HOflnB and O. Nowcll-
Smllh, Irans.). New York: Inkriuilional, Hall. S. with Slack. 1. and Ghossolkg. L. (forthcoming): Cultural Studies. London:
M acini linn. Hall. S  IW% Marx* Noies On Method: A •reading" ul the "1857 Introduction"',
Working Pupen in Cultural Studies, b; pp. 132-70. I-acan. J  1977: EcritsA Selection (A. Sheridan, trans.). New Yorks International.
(Original work published 1966), LaClau. B. 1977: Politics ami Ideology in Maoist Theory. London: New l_eft Books. l.AfLAl.'. F. and Moi.tfr.C. 198.S: llcgemonv ami,Socialist Strategy. London; New Led
Bonks. Levi-Sirauss. C. 1972: StructuralAniltropnfagy (C. Jacobson and B.C. Schoepí.
Irans.). London Penguin. (Original work published 1958); Makx. K. 196.': Early Writing (T.B. Bollomore. Hans.). London: ('.A. Walls. Maícx. K   1970; Capital, vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wishart. Makx. K 1973; Grundrisse (M. Nicholaus. trans.). London; Penguin. (Original work
published 1953). Makx. K and Ľ no tas. p |^70: The iierman Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart. PoulantZas. N   1975: Political Poncr and Social Classes (T. O'llagan. Irans.).
London: New Led Hooks. (Original work published 1968). Thompson, E.P. 1978: The Poverty of Theory and Other Essays. New York: Monthly
Review Press. VoiusiNüv. V.N. 1973: AjWwmh und the Philosophy of Language {L. Matějka and
LR. Tulunik. irans.J. New York: Seminar (Original work published 1930).

2
British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of
Paul Gilroy
li is only in the last phase o( British imperialism that the labouring classes of the satellites and the labouring classes ol the metropolis have umfiuiilcd one anulhei diiccllv "on native ground'. But iheir (ates have long been indelihb intertwined The very definition of'what it b to by British' - Ihc centtepiece of that ctiltuic now to be preserved Írom racial dilution - has been articulated around this absent'present centre. K their blood has noi mingled extensively with youis.iheir labour power has long since entered yoUl economic blood-stream, ll is in the sugar you stir: il is in the sinews of the infamous British 'sweet tooth': U is the lea leaves at the bottom ol ihe 'British cuppa".
(Stuart llalli
Whcnevei I (ell an inclination lo national enthusiasm I Strove to suppress it as being harmful and wrong, alarmed by the warning examples ot ihc peoples among whom we Jews live. Bui piculs of othei tilings remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews irresistible many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful Ihe less ilicy troiild be expressed in wotds. as well as cleai consciousness of inner identity, ihe Safe privacy of a common mental consliuc-tioii. And beyond this there was a perception that it was to my Jewish nature alone that I owed two characteristics that had become indispensable to me in the difficult course of my life. Because I was a Jew- I found myself (ice from mans pre>udices which restricted oihers in the use o( their intellect: and as a Jew I was prepared lo join the Opposition and to «In without agreement with the -compact
maturity'.
(Fteud)
This short piece cannot hope it» provide a comprehensive exposition Of the concept of identify, its Surrogates mul kin terms in Ihe diverse writings of cultural studies. Indeed, if the iliscrcpnnt practices lhal lake place under the tatteted banners of British cultural studies can be unified ai all. and thai must remain in douhl. exploring the concept of identity and its changing resonance in critical scholarship is nul the best way to approach the prospect nf their unify. Reflecting upon idenlily seems i o unleash a power capable of dissolving those tentative projects back into Ihe contradictory componettis from which Ihey were first assembled. Highlighting ihc theme of identity readily flushes
Identity
58
36   Paul Gifroy
out disagreements over profound political and intellectual problems. It can send the aspirant practitioners of cultural studies scuttling back towards the quieter sanctuaries of their old disciplinary affiliations, where the problems and the potential pleasures or thinking through identity arc less formidable and engaging. Anthropologists utter sighs of relief, psychologists rub their hands with glee, philosophers relax confident that iheir trials are over, sociologists mutter discontentedly about the illegitimate encroachments of postmodernism while literary critics look blank and perplexed. Historians remain silent. These characteristic reactions from the more secure positions of closed disciplines underline that few words in the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary cultural analysis have been more flagrantly contested and more thoroughly abused than 'identity'.
The history of the term, which has a lengthy presence in social thought, and a truly complex philosophical lineage that goes back lo the pre-Socratics. is gradually becoming belter known (Gleason 1983: Hall 1992a; Calhoun 1994). However, though it has received some attention in debates over modernity and its anxieties, little critical attention has been directed towards the specific puzzle involved in accounting for identity's contemporary popularity. Though the philosophical pedigree of the term is usually appreciated by today's users, identity is invoked more often in arguments that are primarily political rather than philosophical. The popular currency of the term may itself be a symptom of important political conflicts and a signal of the altered character of postmodern politics especially in the overdeveloped countries. Another clue to this change is provided by the Irequcncv with which the noun 'identity' appears coupled with the adjective 'cultural*. This timely pairing is only the most obvious way in which the concept 'identity' directs attention towards a more elaborate sense of the power of culture and the relationship of culture to power. It introduces a sense of cultural politics as something more substantial than a feeble echo of the political politics of days gone by. This cultural politics applies both to the increased salience of identity as a problem played out in everyday life, and lo identity as it h managed and administered in the cultural industries of mass communication that have transformed understanding of the world and the place of individual possessors of identity within it.
The stability and coherence of the self has been placed in jeopardy in these overlapping settings. This may help lo explain why identity has become a popular, valuable and useful concept. Though the currency of identity circulates far outside the walls of the academy, much of its appeal derives from a capacity to make supply connections between scholarly and political concerns. These days, especially when an unsavoury climate created by the unanswerable accusation of 'pulilical correctness' makes loo many critical scholars, political thinkers and cultural activists hyper-sensilive about professional standards and the disciplinary integrity of their embattled work, identity has become an important idea precisely because of these bridging qualities. It is a junction or hinge concept that can help to maintain the connective (issue thai articulates political and cultural concerns. It has also provided an important means lo both rediscover and preserve an explicitly political dynamic in serious interdisciplinary scholarship.
It would be wrong, however, lo imagine lhat the concept of identity belongs exclusively to critical thought, let nlone to the emancipatory intellectual and
British Cultural Studies and the ľitjatts ot tfíenwy   fit
political projects involved in enhancing democracy and extending tolerance. Identity's passage into vogue has also been mirrored in conservative, authoritarian and right-wing thought, which has regularly attempted to use both enquiries into identity and spurious certainty about its proper boundaries to enhance their own interests, to improve their capacity to explain the world and to legitimate the austere social patterns thai they favour, The crisis involved in acquiring and maintaining an appropriate íorm of national identity has appealed repeatedly as the principal focus of this activity. It loo makes a special investment in the idea of culture, for nations ate presented as entirely homogeneous cultural units staffed by people whose hyper-similarity renders them
interchangeable.
Apart from these obviously political claims on identity, the concept has also provided an important site for the erasure and abandonment of any political aspirations. Clarion calls to comprehend identity and set it to work often suggest that mere politics has been exhausted and should now be left behind in favour of more authentic and powerful forms of self-knowledge and conscious-ness that are coming into focus. Thus, if the idea of identity has been comprehensively politicized it has also become an important intellectual resource for those win» have sought an emergency exit from what they see as the barren world of politics. Identity becomes a means to open up Ihose realms of being and acting in ihc world which arc prior to and somehow more fundamental than political concerns. Any lingering enthusiasm for the supposedly trivial world of politics is misguided, untimely and therefore doomed to be frustrating. It also corrodes identity and can profitably be replaced by the open-ended processes of self-exploration and reconstruction that take shape where politics gives way to more glamorous and avowedly therapeutic alternatives.
This type of reorientation has occurred most readily where reflection on individual identity has been debased by simply being equated with the stark question 'who am I?' This deceptively simple question has been used to promote an inward turn away from the profane chaos of an imperfect world It is a problematic gesture that all loo often culminates in the substitution Of an implosive and therefore anti-social form of «//.scrutiny [or the discomfort and the promise of public political work which docs not assume cither solidarity or community bul works instead lo bring them into being and then lo make them democratic. Thai memorable question ends with a fateful and emphatically disembodied T. It refers to an entity, lhat is represented as both the subject ol knowing and n privileged location of being, When it sets out in pursuit of truth, this 'I* can be made lo speak authoritatively from everywhere while being nowhere if only the right methods arc brought to bear upon its deployment. This fateful fiction has a long and important history in the modern world, its thinking and its thinking about thinking (Taylor 1989: Huraway 1991). This T can readily become a signature and cipher for numerous other problems to which ihe sign 'identity'can help lo supply the answers. For example, if we are committed lo changing and hopefully improving the world rather than simply analysing it. will political agency be possible if the certainty and integrity of that 'ľ have been compromised by its unconscious components, by tricks played upon it by the effects of the language through which it comes to know «self or by the persistcni claims of the body thai will not easily accept being
38    Paul Gitray
devalued in relation (o the mind and the resulting banishment to the domain of unreason? Is the T and the decidedly modem subjects and subjective« to which it points, n product or symptom of some underlying history, on effect of individual insertion into and constitution by society and culture? At what point or under what conditions might that T bring forth a collective counterpart, a 'we'? These are some of the troubling questions that spring to mind in a period when the previously rather contradictory idea of 'identity polities* has suddenly begun to make sense.
This is a time in which what (no longer even who) you are can count for a great deal more than anything that you might do. for yourself and for others. The slippage from 'who* to "what* is absolutely crucial. It expresses a reilication (thingilication)and fetishization of selí that might once have been captured by the term 'alienation*, which was itself a significant attempt to account for the relationship between the subject and the world outside it upon which tt relied. Today, social processes have assumed more extreme and complex forms, '('hey construct a radical estrangement that draws its energy from the rcificalion of culture and the fetishization of absolute cultural difference. In other words, identity is inescapably political, especially where its social workings - patterns of identification - precipitate the retreat and contraction of politics.
No inventory currently exists-either inside or outside the flimsy fortifications of existing cultural studies - of the ways in which identity operates politically and how it can change political culture, stretching political thinking so that modern secular distinctions between private and public become blurred and the boundaries formed by and through the exercise of power on both sides of that line are shown to be permeable. Before the preparation of that precious inventory can proceed, we must face how the concept of identity tangles together three overlapping hut basically different concerns. This suggestion involves a degree of over-simplification, but it is instructive lotry and separate out these tangled strands before we set about making their symploinalie interlinkage a productive feature of our own thinking and writing. Each cluster of issues under the larger constellation of identity has an interesting place in the chequered history of the scholarly and political movement lhat has come to be known as cultural studies.
The concept of identity points initially towards the question of the self. This is an issue that has usually been approached in the emergent canon of cultural studies via histories of the subject and subjectivity.1 We should note, however, that it has not been the exclusive properly of cultural studies' more theoretically inclined affiliates. These ideas and the characteristic language of inwardness in which they have been expressed are extremely complex and immediately require us to enter the wild frontier between psychological and sociological domains. On this contested terrain we must concede immediately that human agents are made and make themselves rather than being born in some already finished form. The force of this observation has had a special significance in the development of modernity's oppositional movements. Their moral and political claims have arisen from a desire to estrange social life from natural processes and indeed from quarrels over the status of nature and its power to determine history.
British Cultural SnafttS ano me rirjutu »i wnm/   .•*
Feminist thought and critical analyses of racism have made extensive use of the concept of identity in exploring how 'subjects* bearing gender and racial characteristics are constituted in social piocesses that arc amenable to historical explanation and political struggle. The production of the figures 'woman' and 'Negro' has been extensively examined from this point of view (de Beauvoit I960; Fauon 1986: Schiebinger 199.*). The emergence 0| these durable but licttve creations has heen understood in relation to ihe associated development of categories of humanity from which women and blacks have been routinely excluded. This kind Of critical investigation has endowed strength in contemporary political thinking about the modern sell and its contingencies. This is not solely a matter of concern to Ihe 'minorities' who have not so far enjoyed the dubious privileges of inclusion in this official
humanism.
The obligation to operate historically and thereby to undermine the idea of an invariant human nature that determines social life hus been readilv com bined with psychological insights. This blend provided not only a means to trace something of Ihe patterned processes of individual becoming but to grasp, through detailed accounts of lhat variable process, the kind of protean entity that a human agent might be (Ciccrlz 1985). The endlessly mutable nature of unnatural humanity can be revealed in conspicuous contrast between different historically and culturally specific versions of the boundedness of the human person. Labour, language and lived interactive culture have been identified as the principal media for evaluating this social becoming,
Each of these options stages the dramas of identity in n contrasting manner Each, for example, materializes the production and reproduction of gender differences and resolves the antagonistic relationship between men and women differently. All raise the question ol hierarchy and the status of visible differences, whether they are based on signs like age and generation, oi the modern, secular semiotics of "race* and ethnicity. The ideal of universal humanity certainly appears in a less attractive light once the unsavoury exclusionary practices that have surrounded its coronation at the centre of bourgeois political culture are placed on display. Nietzsche showed long ago how an archaeological investigation of the modern self could lead towards this
goal.
Identity can be used to query the quality of relations established between
superficial and underlying similarities in human beings, between their similar insides and dissimilar outside*. By criticizing Ihe compromised authority invested in that suspect, transcendant humanity, identity - understood hcte as subjectivity - presents another issue: the agent's reflexive qualities and unreliable consciousness of its own operations and limits. Posed in this way. the theoretical coherence of identity unravels almost immediately. The concept is revealed to be little more than a name given to one important element in the interminable struggle to impose order on the flux of painful social life.
The impossible modern quest for stable and integral selfhood points towards the second theme that has been (con)fused in the compound inner logic of identity. This is Ihe equally complicated question ol sameness. It too has psychological and psychoanalytic aspects. In this second incarnation, identity becomes visible as the point where a euueern with individual subjectivitv opens out into an expansive engagement with the dynamics of identification: how t mc
27
22
mu     ruui KJiiiuy
subject or agenl may come lo see itself in others, to be itself through iis mediated relationships with others and to set others in itself. Dealing with an agent's consciousness of sameness unavoidably raises the fact of otherness and the phenomenon of difference. Politics enters here as well. Difference should not be confined exclusively to the gaps we imagine between whole, stable subjects. One lesson yielded up by the initial approach lo identity as subjectivity is that difference exists within identities - within selves - as well as between them. This means that the longed-for integrity and unity of subjects is always fragile.
In many of the political movements where the idea of a common identity has become a principle of organization and mobilization, there is an idea of interplay between "inner* and 'outer' differences that must be systematically orchestrated if their goals are 10 be achieved. For example, differences within u group can be minimized so that differences between that group and others appear greater. Identity can emerge from the very operations it is assumed lo precede and facilitate. The investment in ideas of essential difference that emerges from several different kinds of feminist thinking, as well as from many movements of the racially oppressed and immiscrated. confirms that deeper connections have been supposed to reside unseen, hidden beneath or beyond the superficial, non-essential differences that they may or may not regulate.
Identity as sameness can be distinguished from identity as subjectivity because it move«; on from dealing with the formation and location of subjects and their historical individuality into thinking about collective or communal identities: nations, genders, classes, generational, 'racial' and ethnic groups. Identity can be traced back towards its sources in the institutional patterning of identification. Spoken and writien language*, memory, ritual and governance have all been shown to be important identity-producing mechanisms in the formation and reproduction of imagined community. The technological and technical processes that create and reproduce mentalities of belonging in which sameness features have also come under critical scrutiny. Exploring the link between these novel forms of identification and the unfolding of modernity has also provided a significant stimulus to politically engaged interdisciplinary research (Gillis 1994). So far. Benedict Anderson's groundbreaking discussion of the role of print cultures in establishing new ways of relating to the power of the nation-stale and experiencing nationality has not acquired a postmodern equivalent. The mediation and reproduction of national and posinational identities in Cyberspace and on virtual paper await a definitive interpretation. The changing resonance of nationality and the intermittent allure of subnational 3nd supranational identities demand that we note how theorizing identity as sameness unfolds in tum into a concern with identifications and the technologies that mediate and circulate them. We must acknowledge the difficult work involved in thinking about how understanding identification might transform and enrich political thought and action.
Analysis of communal and collective identity thus leads into the third issue encompassed by identity: the question of solidarity. This aspect of identity concerns how both connectedness and difference become bases on which social action can be produced. This third element moves decisively away from the subject-cen t red approach that goes with the first approach and the inter-subjective dynamic that takes shape when the focus is on the second. Instead,
where the relationship hetween identity and solidarity moves to the centre-stage, another issue, that ol the social constraints upon the agency of individuals and groups, must also be addressed. To what extent can we be thought of as making ourselves? How do we balance a desire to affirm the responsibility that goes with accepting scU-crcation as a process and the altogether different obligation to recognize the historical limits within which individual and collective subjects materialize and act? This reconciliation usually proceeds through an appeal to supra-individual identity-making structures. These may be material, discursive or some heuristic and unstable combination of lhem both. Attention to identity as a principle of solidarity asks us to comprehend identity as an effect mediated by historical and economic structures, instantiated in the signifying practices thiough which they operate and arising in contingent institutional settings that both regulate and express the coming together of individuals in patterned social processes.
Apart from its extensive contributions to the analysis of nationality, 'race' and ethnicity, the term 'identity' has been used to discern and evaluate the 'institution of gender difference and of differences constituted around sexual-jities. These unsynchronized critical projects have sometimes coexisted under the ramshackle protection that cultural studies has been able to construct. Conflicts between them exist in blent and manifest forms and have been identified by several authoritative commentators as a key source ol the intellectual energy (and perversely as a sign o| the seriousness) in some cultural studies writing (Hall 1992b). These tensions have also been presented as part of a corrective counternarrative that has been pitched against some inappropriately heroic accounts of political scholarship and pedagogv in the institutional wcllsprine Of cultural studies: the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Sludies at Birmingham University, Undermining those overly pastoral accounts of the Birmingham experience that might obstruct the development >»f today's cultural sludies by mystifying it and sanitizing its embattled origins may be useful. However, those conflicts - which are usually presented as phenomena that arose where the unity of class-oriented work supposedly crumbled under the impact of feminisms and anti-racist scholarship - are nnl\ half the story.
In assessing the importance of the concept of identity to the development o| cultural studies, it is important to ponder whether thai concept - and the agenda of difficulties for which it supplies a valuable shorthand - might ha\e played a role in establishing the parameters within which those conflicts were contained and sometimes made useful. I am not suggesting that the term 'identity' was used from the start in a consistent, rigorous or self-conscious way to resolve disagreements or to synchronize common problems and problematics. But raihcr that, with the benefit of hindsight, it is possible to imagine a version Of the broken evolution of cultural sludies in which thinking about identity - as subjectivity and sameness - can be shown to have been a significant fuctor in the continuity and integrity of the project as a whole. 11 may be that an interest in identity and its political workings in a variety of different social and historical sites provided a point of intersection between the divergent intellectual interests from which a self-conscious cultural studies was gradually born. I will suggest below ťhat a tacit intellectual convergence around problems of identity and identification was indeed an important
HZ    rum uiirov
catalyst for cultural studies, and by implication, that identity's capacity to synthesize and connect various enquiries into political cultures and cultural politics is something Ihm makes it a valuable asset even now-something worth struggling with and struggling over.
There is an elaborate literature surrounding all ihtee aspects of identity sketched above, li includes work in and around the Marxist traditions that contributed so much to the vision, verve and ethical conimilments demonstrated in British cultural studies' early interventionist ambitions. Much feminist writing has also made use of the concept of identity and generated a rich discussion of the political consequences of its deployment (Fuss 1990: I laraway 1990; Kiley 1990). But before that generation of feminist scholar-activists was allowed to lind its voice, the themes of identity as sameness and solidarity emerged in the political testing ground provided by the uigent commentary on the changing nuture of class relations: conflict, solidarity and what we would now call identity. A new understanding of these questions was being produced as new social and cultural movements appeared to eclipse the labour movement, and old political certainties evaporated under pressure from the manifest barbarity of classless societies, a technological revolution and a transformed understanding of the relationship between the overdeveloped and underdeveloped parts of the planet that had been underlined by decolonization and muss migration. These half-forgotten debates over class are a good place to consider subjectivity, sameness and solidarity because they look place beyond the grasp of body-coded difference in a happy interlude when biology was not supposed, mechanically, to be destiny and classes were not understood to be discrete bio-social units. No one dreamed back then of genes that could predispose people to homelessness or drug abuse.
If a deceptive oblique stroke was sometimes placed between the words "culture' and 'identity*, this was done to emphasise that the latter was a product of the former - a consequence of anthropological variation. This literature on class encompassed research into both historical and contemporary social relations. It was governed by political impulses that were not born from complacent application of anachronistic Marxist formulae but rather from an acute comprehension of the political limits and historical specificity of Marxist theory. This stance suggested that class relations weie an integral part of capitalist societies but that they were not, in themselves, sufficient to generate a complete explanation of any political situation Insights drawn from other sources were needed to illuminate the process in which the English working class had been born and in order to comprehend the more recent circumstances in which it might be supposed to be undergoing a protracted death. The subtle and thoughtful concern with elass and its dynamics yielded slowly and only partially to different agendas set by interpretation of countercultural movements and oppositional practices that had constituted new social actors and consequently new politicized identities. Women, youth, 'races' and sexual-llies: under each of these headings interest in subjectivity, sameness and solidarity developed the order of priorities that had taken shape as a result of exploring class. Partly, this was because an important divergence existed between political movements and consciousness in which the body was an immediate and inescapable issue and those where the relationship to pheno-
typical variation, though certainly pteseni. was more attenuated, arising, as it were, at one remove.
Historical materialism as a political an J philosophical doctrine was strongest where the poliiicization o( the body and Che consequent grasp of embodiment as the guaruntor of shared identity were weakest. The reluctance to engage biology or the semiotics of the body produced a heavy theoretical investment in the idea of labour as a universal category that could transcend particularity and dissolve differences. Willingness lo accept the exclusion of the body from the domains of rational cognition and sei e nt i lie inquiry was thought lo establish the hallmark of intellectual enterprise. I he abstraction 'labour power' was offered as a means lo connect the actions and experiences of different people in ways that made the kind of body in which they found themseUesa seenndan and often superficial issue. Marx's cryptic observation that there is a 'historical and moral element' thai affects the differential price paid for the labour power of different social groups suggests otherwise and is an important clue lo comprehending how these superficial differences could resist the embrace of n higher unity. This unity was situational. Consciousness of solidarity and sameness as well as collective class-based subjectivity grew from common submission to the regime of production nnd its distinctive conceptions ol lime. right and properly.
Edward Thompson's I *>i»3 Making of the English Working CfaSS broke with the complacent moods of mechanical materialism and product ivism and re* formulated class analysis in an English idiom lhal supplied later cultural studies with vital political energy and a distinctive ethical style. Recognizing the strongly masculinist flavour of this important intervention should take nothing away Írom contemporary attempts to comprehend how ii could have grown as much from the context supplied by < N I), the New Left and 'practical political activity of several kinds, jlhail undoubtedly prompted me [Thompson] to see the problems of political consciousness and organisation in certain ways.' (Thompson 1980: \A). Thompson's famous statement of ihe dynamics of class formation is relevant here:
Wc cannot have love without lovers, nor deference whhnut squites and laroui-eis. And class huppens when tome men. .is a result ol common expediences (inherited oi «.haicdh (eel and .irliculatc the idcniitv of their inteiesis as between themselves, and against oilier men whose iiiicr«ts arc different fiom (and usually opposed to) I heirs.
(pp.8-9)
This is not lite place lo attempt some hasly resolution of the difficult issues implicit in this formulation, such as the base and superstructure relationship. ihe tension between different forms of consciousness and Ihe epistemologieal valency of immediate experience. Nor is this an appropriate moment in which lo try and chart the convoluted debates arising from the need lo conceptualise the material effects of ideology and the materializing capacities of discourse (Butler 1993). Thompson's celebrated formulation links identity to selfhood. self-interests and political agency. TO say that his politicized notion of identity derived from an engagement with powers which operate outside of and sometimes in opposition to those rooted in production, for example, in the residential community, would be mo simple. An interest in Identity was not
3
03208625
44    Paul Gilroy
injected into Ihe thinking of the labour movemenl and its scholarly advocates by an alternative feminist historiography. An explicit and implicit concern with the political mechanisms of identity emerged directly if not spontaneously from complex analyses of past class relations. This work by Thompson and others was produced in a continuous dialogue with Ihe urgent obligation u> understand the present by seeking its historical precedents. Almost without being aware of the fact, these analyses reached beyond themselves, not towards an all-encompassing holy totality but. in the name of discomforting complexity, towaids deeply textured accounts of bounded and conrlictual consciousness that could illuminate contemporary antagonisms.
Though he makes use of the Idea of identification rut he t than the concept of identity, something of the same political and imaginative enterprise can be detected in the closing pages of Raymond Williams's The Long Revolution (1961:354). Grasping for the 'new creative definitions' through which that oppositional process might be maintained if not completed. Williams wrote of 'structures of feeling - the meanings and values which are lived in world and relationships' and 'the essential language - the created and creative meanings - which our inherited reality teaches and through which new reality forms and is negotiated |p 293) Williams's conclusion seeks lo make the individualization effect of contemporary society into a problem. It is not therefore surprising thai he avoids ihe ambiguities of identity - a term which has a strongly individualistic undertone. However the theme of political identity as an outcome ol conllictual social anil cultural processes rather than some fixed invariant condition is clearly presem:
ihe reasonable man ... who is lie exactly'.' And then who is left (or thai broaU empty niaigm. the "public opiniun u( the day'?
I think WC arc all in this margin: it is what we have learned and where we live. Bui unevenly, tentatively, we get a sense o! movement, and ihe meanings and values extend.
|p. 354-5)
It look me a long lime lo appreciate how ihe founding texts of my own encounter with linglish cultural studies could be seen lo converge around ihe (hematics of identity. The key to appreciating this architecture lay in Ihe ideas of nationality and national identity and the related issues of ethnicity and local and regional identity. Structures of feeling and the forms of consciousness lhal they fostered were nationally bounded. Similarly. lor Thompson, the magical happening of class was something that could only be apprehended on a national basis. Along with Thompson's Making of ihe English Working Class and Williams's The Long Revolution. Richard lloggarl's The Uses of Literacy (1957) can be positioned so that it triangulates the rather elhnoeentric space in which cultural development and cultural polities came lo be configured as exclusively English national phenomena. Though each of these critical Hunkers had his own suhnntional. regional and local sensitivities and obligations, culture and its political forms were comprehended by all of them on the basis that nationality supplied. To he sure. Ihe nation was often recognized as riven with the antagonist relations that characterized the struggle to create and maintain the domination of one group by others. But the boundaries of the nation formed (he essential parameters in which these conflicts look shupc.
British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity    45
Though by no means always celebratory in lone, none of these important texts conveyed a sense of Britain and British identity being formed hy forces, processes that overflowed from the imperial crucible of ihe nation-slate. Williams's fleeting mentions of jazz or lloggarl's scarcely disguised apprehension about the catastrophic consequences of uniform 'faceless' internationalism (his eode for the levelling effects of American culture) suggest other conclusions and reveal their authors* direcl interest in what might be worth protecting and maintaining amidst the turmoil of Ihe posl-war reconstruction of British social life.
Each of these founding tcxls in the cultural studies canon can be read as a study ol becoming: as an examination of class-based identity in process -transformed by historical forces thai exceed their inscription in indi\ idual lives or consciousness and. at the same lime, resisting lhal inevitable transformation.
This often unspoken fascination with the workings of identity has several additional facets. It does not always initiate the tacit collusion with F.nglishness thai has been the festive site of cultural studies' reconciliation to a bunting-bedecked structure of feeling that its democratic, libertarian and reconstructive aspirations once threatened to coiitexlunti/e if not exactly overturn
The signilicanlly different political alignments and hopes of these writers, as well as (heir contrasting stances within Ihe generative political context that ihe New Left supplied for their attempts lo grapple with class, popular culture and communications (Thompson 1981), should not be played down. That the direction of Boggart's investigations was parallel to those of Thompson and Williams was signalled in Ihe force of his opening question 'Who arc the working classes?'. Bis ihoughlful and stimulating book elaborated the distinguishing features of working-class English cultural identity. They were apprehended w-ith special clarity even as they were assailed by the insidious forces of Americanism and commercialism: as they yielded 'place to new' in a process he understood exclusively in terms of diminution and loss: 'the debilitating mass trends of the day*. The diseased organs of a vanishing working-class culture were anatomized in a sympathetic conservationist spirit. This mournful opern-tion captured the pathological character of their extraordinary post-1945 transformation.
lloggarl's interest in the class-based division of ihe social world into them' and 'us' and his enlhusiasm for ihe 'live and lei live' vernacular tolerance that thrived there could not be sustained once the insertion of post-colonial seltler-citizens was recognized as a fundamental element in the transformation of Britain that alarmed and excited him. Immigration would become something that tested out the integrity and character of national and class identities in ways that he was not able lo imagine. Boggart's interesting speculations about the lack of palriolism in ihe working class, their spontaneous anti-authoritarianism and 'rudimentary internationalism' sounded hollow. I his was not onlv because complications introduced into the analysis of class and nationalism by the existence of a 'domestic' fascism (Moslcy 1946) uere somewhat brushed over but. more importantly, because he was entirely silent about the social and political problems lhal mass black settlement was thought to be introducing into the previously calm and peaceable urban districts of England and  Wales,  ll is not  illegitimate to point to the  narrowness of
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Hoggari s concerns or. in ihc light of ihc subsequent patterning oi Urilish racial polilics. lo remind ourselves thai his enigmatic silences on lhal subject could be used lo undermine ihe authority of his pronouncements overall.
This is noi just a question of hindsight. Before lloggarťs greal book was published. Kenneth Utile's Negroes in Britain (1947) had included a section entitled 'the coloured man through modem English eyes' (pp, 240-68). Michael Banlon's The Cohnrc/I Quarter (1955) - which had preceded Hoggart into print by some two years - hud drawn explicit altention in (he problems precipitated by large-scale 'Negro immigration' into "die large industrial cities of Ihe North and the Midlands, in particular Leeds, Sheffield and Birmingham' (p. 69). By Ihis lime, the morality and injustices of the British colour bar had been extensively discussed in a wide range of publications including Ihc Picture Post (Kee 1949). The moral and physical health status of "colonial coloured people" had been given a good public airing by this time and associated panics over the proliferation of half-caste children. Negro criminality and vice were all established media themes when I loggarľs book was published-'.
I.earie Constantino (1955) attempted to sum up the situation when, as Harold Macmillan has revealed, the Conservative government discussed the possibility of using keep Britain white' as its electoral slogan (Macmillan 1973: 7,t-4). Consiantine's insightful view of Ihe class and gender topology of English racism in the same period that produced The Uses of Literacy is worth quoting al length. Il is a valuable reminder to anyone who would suggest lhal a sensitivity lo Ihe deslruclive effects of racism did not arise until after the 1958 •race riots' in London's Nulling Hill and Nottingham (see Pilkington 1988):
Aficr pracltcally iweniy-five years' residence in lingland. whcie I have made innumerable white friends. I Mill think il would he jusl to say lhat almost Ihe entire population of Hriiain really expect the coloured man lo live in an inferior are« devuicd lo coloured people, nnd no) lo have Iree and open choice of a living place. Most British people WOtltd be quite unwilling for a black man to cnicr their home, nor would they wish to work with one as a colleague, nor to stand shoulder lo shoulder Willi one al a factory hench. This intolerance is far more marked in lower grades ol English socieiy ih.in in higher, and perhaps it disfigures ihe lower middle classes mosi of nil. possibly because respectability is so dear to them Hardly any F.nglishwomcn and no| more than a small proportion of Englishmen would sit al a restaurant table with a coloured man oi woman, and inter-racial marriage is considered almos! universally lo be QUI »il ihc question.
(Constaniine 1955:67)
Repositioned against ihe backdrop of this minoritarian history, il seems impossible lo deny that Hoggarl's comprehensive exclusion of 'race' from his discussion of postwar class and culture represented clear political choices. Mis work certainly exemplifies a wider tendency lo render Ihose uncomfortable political issues invisible. The same fate awaited the unwanted 'coloured immigrants' In whose lives ihe problems of 'race' in Britain became perversely attached. It may be too harsh to judge his inability lo perceive ihe interrelation of "race', nationality and class as a form of myopia induced by an indifferent ethnocentrism and complacent crypto-nalionalism. bul lhal is exactly how il seemed to me as a student of cultural sludies on the twentieth anniversary of the publication of 77ie Uses of Literacy-
British Cultural AHirtiö ana tne miaits oi taeniuy   m
What is more important lo me now, almost twenty years latei Stilt is Ihe possibility thai the distinclivc sense of cultural politics created by those precious New Left Initiatives supplied critical resources lo ihe Investigation <'f identity. And further, that mingled with insights drawn from other Standpoints, these very resources encouraged us to sec and lo transcend the limits of the quietly nationalistic vision advanced hy British cultural studies' imaginary founding lathers.
thankfully these days, the wniing r>l contemporary cultural history has become a less self-consciously ethnocentric affair than il was in the 19505, Stuart Mall uncompromisingly insisted thai, contrary to appearances, race was an integral and absolutely internal feature of British political culture and national consciousness; Hall made a solid bridge nol so much from scholarlv nationalism lo internationalism but towards a more open, global under standing of where Britain might be located in a decolonized and pos I-imperial world order defined by ihe cold war. Hall's consistent political engagements with the identily-|re)producing actions of Britain's mass media allocated substantial space lo the issue of racism and used it as a magnifying glass through which to consider ihc unfolding of authoritarian forms lhat masked Iheir grim and joyless character wilh a variety of populist motifs.
Particularly when appreciated in concert wilh the interventions of Edward Said, whose study of the Orient as an object of European knowledge and power endowed cultural studies with new heart in the late 1970s. Hall's work has supplied an invigorating corrective to ihe morbidity and implosivcness ol figures like Williams. Thompson and Hoggari. Said and Hall are both ihinkers whose critiques of power and grasp of modern history have been enriched by iheir own experiences of migration and some ambivalent personal intimacies with Ihe distinctive patterns of coloninl social life in Palestine and Jamaica; Boih draw explicitly upon the work of Antonio Ciramsei and implicitly on the legacy of ihe itinerant anglophile Trinidadian Marxist CUR. James. Willi the supplementary input or these intellectual but non-academic figures, cultural studies' evaluations of identity were comprehensively complicated by colonialism as well as the enduring power ol a different. non-European or marginal modernity lhat had been forged amidst the cultures of terror lhal operate al ihe limits of a belligerent imperial system.
The nation-state could not remain the cenlral legitimizing principle brought to bear upon ihc analysis of the cultural relations and forms thai subsumed identity. Il was not only that core unils of modern government and production hud been constituted Trom Iheir external activities and in opposition lo forces and flows acting upon them from the outside. Henceforth, identities deriving from ihe nation could be shown to be competing with subnatiomil (local 01 regional) and supranational (diaspora) structures of belonging and kinship.
The main purpose of this inevitably cursory and oversimplified genealogy ol identity is not lo rake over the fading embers of the -Birmingham School' or to endorse a specific canon for cultural studies* institutional expansion II has been to prompt enquiries into what cultural studies' commuted scholarship might have to offer lo contemporary discussions, nut of culture, but ol mulliculture and multicultural/»«. Today, the volatile concept of identity belongs above all to the important debate in Which multicullurnlmri is being
51
ho    raut tjiirov
redefined outside the outmoded conventions that governed i Is earlier incarnations, especially in the educational system. I he obvious reply to this demand -for a new theory of multicultural society that can yield I timely strategy for enhancing tolerance and respect - renounces innocent varieties of orthodox pluralism and starts afresh by rethinking cultural difference through notions of hierarchy and hegemony. This is surely valuable bul can only be a beginning. Mulliculturalism in both lirilain and the United Stales has retreated from reexamining the concept of culture in any thoroughgoing manner and drifted towards a view of 'separate but equal* cultures. These parcels of incompatible activity may need to be rearranged in some new compensatory hierarchy or better still, positioned in wholesome telalions of reciprocal recognition and mutual equivalence that have been denied hitherto by (he unjust operations of power which is not itself comprehended in cultural terms. In this approach. power exists outside of cultures and is therefore able to distort the proper relationship between them. The Iktsi remedy for this unhappy state of affairs is supposedly to be found in strengthening political processes and modernity's neutral civic identities so lhal cultural particularity can he confined and regulated in appropriately private places from which the spores of destructive incommensurability cannot contaminate the smooth functioning of always imperfect democracy. A political understanding of identity and identification -emphatically not a reilied identity politics - points to other more radical possibilities in which we can begin to imagine ways for reconciling the particular and the general. We can build upon the contributions of cultural studies to dispose olthe idea that identity is an absolute and to find I he courage necessary lo argue that identity formation - even body-coded ethnic and gender identity is a chaotic process thai can have no end. In this way. we may be able to make cultural identily a piemise ol political action rather than a substitute for it.
Noles
1    This was a sitong component of ihc early analyses of subculture produced by Pnul Willis, lain Chambers. Dick llehdige and Angela Nie Robbie. See also Probyn 11994),
2    Foi u preliminary survey of the English political discussion of nice during litis period. see Carler et ál. (1487). Sec also Smith (1986) and Rich (1986).
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