M Altmusser. L 1471: Lenin and Philosophy and Oilier Essays IB Brewster, trans.). London New Left Hooks. (Original work published IV70I a it müsse It, L. and Bai.ihah. e.. 1970: Reading Capital (B. Brewster, ttans.). London: New Lcll Books. (Original work puhlishcd 146«). Dehriim, J. 1977: 0/Grannnaiology (G>C. Spivak. tians.). Baltimore. Ml): Johns Hopkins Univcishy Press. Foucault. M. 19B0: Power/Knowledge: Seiet led Intcrviewx and Odier Writings 1972-197? ((\ Gordon. cdj. (C Gordon. L Marshall. J. Mepham and K. Sopor. Irans.). New York: Pantheon. (Original work published 1972). Ghamsci. A. Vyi\. Selections from die Prison Notebook* (q. Uoare and G. Nowcll- Sniilh. timis.). New York: International. Mall. S. with Slack, J. and Ghossdlkg. L. {forIncoming): Cultural Studies. Loudon: M at mi IIa n. Hall. S 1*^7-1 'Marx's Notes On Method: A "reading" of the "IÖ57 Introduction"'. Working Papers in Cultural Studies. 6; pp. 132-70. Ijican. J 1977: Ecrits: A Selection (A. Sheridan, trans.). New Yoik: International. (Original work published l%6). Laclal*. e. iy77: Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory. London: New Lell Books. Laciau. E. and Moi.tfe, c. 1985: llegemonv and Socialist Strategy. London: New Led Books. Levi-Sirauss. c. 1972: Structural Anthropology (c. Jacobson and B.G. Scliocpf. trans.). London" Penguin. (Original work published I9S8). Marx. K. 196.': Early Writings (T.B. Botlumore. Hans.). London: C.K Walls. Marx. K 1970: Capital, vol. 3. London: Lawrence and Wlshari. Marx. k 1973: Grundrisse (M. Nicholaus. trans.). London; Penguin. (Original work published 1953). Marx. k and Enoels. p 1970: The German Ideology. London: Lawrence & Wishart. PouiantzaS. N 1975: Political Poncr and Social Classes (T. O'flagan. Irans.). London: New Lcll Books. (Original work published 1968). Thompson. e:.P. 1978: The Poverty of Theory und Other Essavs. New York: Monibly Review Press. Voiomnus. V.N. 1973: Marxism and die Philosophy of Language (L. Matcjka and LR. Tulunik. trans.1. New York: Seminar (Original work published 1930). British Cultural Studies and the Pitfalls of Identity Paul Gilroy It is only In Ihc last phase o( British imperialism ilia) ihe labouring classes pf the satellites and Ihe labouring elates ol Ihc metropolis have confiuiilcd one anuihei diiccllv "on native ground". Bui their (ales have long been mdelibl) intertwined The very definition Of'what it is lo be Briiish' - lite ceniiepiece of lhat ciiltutc now 10 be preserved Irom racial dilution has been articulated around Ibis absent-present centre. II their blood has not mingled extensively with yoim. their labour power has long *ince entered your economic hlond-sticam. Il is in the sugar you stir: il is in the sinews ol the infamous British sweet tooth": it U the lea leaves at the bottom ol the "British cuppa". (Stuari llalli Whcnevei I fell an inclination lo notional enlhusiasm I strove to suppress il as being harmful and wrong, alarmed h\ the warning examples of the peoples among whom wc Jews live. But plenty of otbci thing* remained over to make the attraction of Jewry and Jews inesisliblc many obscure emotional forces, which were ihc more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as cleat consciousness o( inner identity, the ".tic privacy of a common mental conMiuc-lion. And beyond this there was a perception lhat it was to my Jewish naluie alone that I owed two characteristics lhát had become indispensable to me in the difficult course ol my lile. Because I was a Jew I found myself (ice Irom man) prejudices which restricted others in the use of their intellect: and as a Jew I was prepared to join the Opposition and lb do without agreement with the 'compact maiotilv'. (Freud) lis short piece cannot hop? to provide a comprehensive exposition of ihe ncepl of identity, its surrogates and kin icrms in ihe diverse wrilines of Thi concc) cultural studies. Indeed, if the discrepant practices thai lake plaee under lite tattered banners of British cultural studies can he unified ai all. and that must remain in douht. exploring ihe concept of identity and its changing resonance in critical scholarship is nol Ihe best way to approach Ihe prospect of their unity. Reflecting upon idenlily seems to unleash a power capable of dissolving those tentative projects back itilo Ihe contradictory components from which Ihey were first assembled. Highlighting ihc iheme of identity readily flushes 36 Paul Gilroy Stilish Cultural Studies ana ihr ntjatls or tammy m out disagreements over profound political and intellectual problems. Il can send the aspirant practitioners of cultural studies scuttling hack towards the quieter sanctuaries of their old disciplinary affiliations, where the problems and the potential pleasures of thinking through identity arc less formidable and engaging. Anthropologists utter sighs of relief, psychologists rub their hands with glee, philosophers relax confident that their dials are over, sociologists mutter discontentedly about the illegitimate encroachments ol postmodernism while literary critics look hlunk and perplexed Historians remain silent These characteristic reactions from the moie secure positions of closed disciplines underline that few words in the conceptual vocabulary of contemporary cultural analysis have been mote 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 to the pre-Socrotics. is gradually becoming belter known (Gleuson 1983: Hull 1992a; Calhoun 199-I). However, though il has received some attention in debutes over modernity and its anxieties, little critical attention has been directed towards the specific puzzle involved in accounting for identity's contemporary popularity. "I hough the philosophical pedigree of the term is usually appreciated by today's users, identity is invoked moic often in arguments that are primarily political rather than philosophical. I lu popular currency of the term may itself he a symptom of important political conflicts and a signal of the altered character of post modern politics especially in the overdeveloped countries. Another clue to this change is provided by the frequency with which the noun 'identity' appear* 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 ol culture and the relationship of culture to power. It introduces a sense of tultural politics as something more substantial than a Iceble echo of the political politics of days gone by. This cultural politics applies both lo the increased salience of identity as a problem played out in everyday life, and to identity as it is 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. I he 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 ol its appeal derives from a capacity to make supply connections between scholarly and political concerns lliese days, especially when an unsavoury climate created by the unanswerable accusation of [x>liiic.il correctness' makes loo many critical scholars, political thinkers and cultural activists hyper-sensitive about professional standards and the disciplinary integrity of their embattled work, identity has become an important idea precisely because of these bridging qualities. Il is a junction or hinge concept that can help to maintain the connective tissue that articulates political and cultural concerns. It has also provided an important means to both rediscover and preserve an explicitly political dynamic in serious interdisciplinary scholarship. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that the concept of identity belongs exclusively to critical thought, let alone to the emancipatory intellectual and 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 tbeir own interests, to improve their capacity to explain the world and to legitimate the austere sociol patterns that they favour. The crisis involved in acquiring and maintaining an appropriate form of national identity has appeared repeatedly its the principal focus of this activity. It loo mukes | special investment in (he idea of culture, for nations are presented as entirely homogeneous cultural units staffed by people whose hyper-simtlarily 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 am political aspirations. Clarion culls to comprehend identity and scl il to work often suggest that mere politics has been exhausted and should now be left behind in favour of more authentic and poweiful forms of self-knowledge and consciousness 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 who have sought an emergency exit from what they sec as the barren world of politics. Identity becomes a means In open up those realms of being and acting in the world which arc prior lo and somehow more fundamental than political concerns. Any lingering enthusiasm for the supposedly trivial world of politics is misguided, untimely and therefore doomed to he frustrating. Il also corrodes identity and can profitably he 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. I his iype of reorientation has occurred mosl 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 «//-scruliny for the discomfort and the promise of public political work which does not assume either solidarity or community but works instead to bring them into being and then to make them democratic That memorable question ends with a fateful and emphatically disembodied T. It refers to an entity, that is represented as both the subject ol knowing and a privileged localion of being.. When it sets out in pursuit of truth, this T can be made to speak authoritatively from everywhere while being nowhere if only the right methods are brought to bear upon its deployment. This fateful fiction has a long and important history in the modern world, its thinking und its thinking about thinking (Taylor 1989: Huraway 1991) This T can readily become a signature and cipher for numerous other problems lo which the sign 'identity' can help to supply the answers. For example, if we are commitlcd to changing and hopefully improving the world rather than simply analysing il. will political agency be possible if the certainly and integrity of that T base been compromised by its unconscious components, by tricks played upon it by the effects of the language through which it comes lu know itself or by the persistent claims of the body that will not easily accept being 38 PuulGUrov devalued in relation lu the mind and the resulting banishment to the domain of unreason? Is the T and the decidedly modern subjects and subjective* to which il points, a product of symptom ol some underlying history, an effect of individual insertion into and constitution by society and culture? At what point or under what conditions might that 'I' bring forth a collective counterpart, a 'we'' I hese .ire some <>! the troubling questions ih.it spring t" mind in .1 period when the previously rather contradictory idea of 'identity politics' has suddenly begun to make sense. This is a time in which what (no longct even who) you are can count for a great deal more than anything that you might do. for yourself and lor others. The slippage from 'who' to'what'is absolutely crucial. It expresses a reilicaiion (thingification) and fctishi/aiion of self that might once have been captured Ky ■he term 'alienation', which was itself a significant attempt to account (or the relationship between the subject and the world outside it upon which it relied. Today, social processes have assumed more extreme and complex forms. They construct a radical estrangement that draws its energy from the reilicaiion of culture and the (elishi/alion of absolute cullural difference In other words, identity is inescapably political, especially whcie its social workings patterns of identification - precipitate the retreat and Contraction of polities. No inventory currently exists - cither inside or outside the flimsy fortifications of existing cultural studies - of (he ways in which identity operates politically and how il can change political culture, stretching political thinking so that modern secular distinctions between private and public become blurted 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 ovcila|>ping hut basically different concerns. This suggestion involves a degree of over-simplification, but il is instructive to try anil separate out these tangled strands before we set about making their symptomatic interlinkagc a productive feature of our own thinking and writing. Lach cluster »»l ismics under the largei constellation of identity hn this contested terrain we must concede immediately Ihat human agents arc 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 moi.il and political claims have arisen from a desire 10estrange social hie from natural processes and indeed frinn quarrels over the status of nature and its power to determine history. British ( ititttr.ii flumes ann me nt/tii "/ man.....* Feminist thought ami critical analyses of racism have made extensive use of the concept of identity in exploring how 'subjects' hearing gender and racial characteristics are constituted in social processes that arc amenable to hiMoi ical explanation and political struggle. The production of the figures 'woman' and "Negro' has been extensively examined from this point of view tdc Beauvoir I960: Fanon 1986: Schicbingcr 199.*) The emergence i>f these durable but ficlivc creations has been understood in relation to the associated development of categories of humanity from which women and blacks litis c been routinely excluded. This kind ol critical inveMii'alion has endowed strength in contemporary political thinking about the modern sell and its contingencies This is not solely a nutter of concern to the minorities who have not so far enjoyed the dubious privileges of inclusion in this official humanism. T he obligation to operate lustoi ically ;md thereby to undermine the idea of an invariant human nature lhal determines social life has been readily com bined with psychological insights. Ihis blend provided not only a means to trace something of the patterned processes of individual becoming but to grasp, through detailed accounls of that variable process, the kind of protean entity that a human agent might be (Cicerl/ 1985) I he endlessly mutable narurc of unnatural humanity can be revealed in conspicuous contrast between different historically and culturallv specific versions o| the boundedness of (he 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 ol identity in a contrasting manner Each, for example, materiali/es 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, ot the modem, secular semiotics of ■race' and ethnicity. Ihc ideal of universal humanity certainly appears in a less attractive light once the unsatouts exclusionary practices that have surrounded its coronation at the centre of bourgeois political culture are placed on display. Niel/sche 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 outsidrs By criticizing the compromised authority invested in that suspect, transcendam humanity, identity - understood here as subjectivity presents another issue: Ihc agent's reflexive qualities and unreliable consciousness of its own operations and limits. I'oscd in this way. the theoretical coherence of identity unravels almost immediately. The concept is revealed to be little more than a name given lo one important element in the interminable struggle to impose order on the flux of painful social life The impossible modern quest foi stahlc and integral selfhood points towards the second theme that has been (con)fuscd in the compound inner logic of identity. This is Ihc equally complicated question ol sameness. It too has psychological and psychoanalytic aspects. In this second incarnation, identity becomes visibk as the point where a concern with individual subjectivity opens out into an expansive engagement with the dynamics of identification: how one iu rum y>ui subject or ageni may come lo sec itself in olhcrs. lo be itself through iu mediated relationships with others and to see 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 lo Ihe gaps we imagine between whole, stable subjects. One lesson yielded up by the initial approach to 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 thai must be systematically orchestrated if their goals arc to be achieved. For example, differences within a 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 immiscraled. confirms that deeper connections have been supposed to reside unseen, hidden beneath or beyond the superficial, nonessential differences that they may or may not regulate. Identity as sameness can be distinguished from identity as subjectivity because n moves 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 hack towards its sources in the institutional patterning of identification. Spoken and written languages, 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 Ihe 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 lo the power of the nation-state and experiencing nationality has not acquired a postmodern equivalent. The mediation and reproduction of national and postnaiional identities in cyberspace and on virtual paper await a definitive interpretation. The changing resonance of nationality and the intermittent allure of summational and supranational identities demand that we note how theorizing identity as sameness unfolds in lum 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; Ihe 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-centred approach that goes with the llrst approach and the inter-subjectivc dynamic that takes shape when the focus is on the second. Instead. where ihe relationship between 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 sclf-crcalion as a process and the altogether dilferent obligation to recognize the historical timits within which individual nnd collective subjects materialize and act? This reconciliation usually proceeds through an appeal lo supra-individual identity-making structures. "I~hesc may he material, discursive or some heuristic and unstable combination of them both. Attention lo identity as a principle of solidarity asks us lo 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 iis extensive contributions to the analysis of nationality, 'race' and ethnicity, the teim "identity' has been used to discern and evaluate the 'institution of gender difference and of differences constituted around sexual-jilics. These unsynchronized critical projects have sometimes coexisted under the ramshackle protection that cultural studies has been able to construct. Conflicts between them exist in latent and manifest forms and have been identified by several authoritative commentators as a key source ol the intellectual energy (and perversely as a sign of 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 wellspring of cultural studies: the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. Undermining those ovcrl\ pastoral accounts of ihe Birmingham experience that might obstruct Ihe development of today's cultural studies by mystifying it and sanitizing its embattled origins may be useful. However, those conflicts - which are usually presented as phenomena thai arose where the unity of class-orienlcd work supposedly crumbled under ihe impact of feminisms and anti-racist scholarship - aie Onlj half ihe story. In assessing ihe importance of ihe concept of identity lo the development ol cultural studies, il is important lo ponder whether that concept - and the agenda of difficulties for which il supplies a valuable shorthand - might hn\e played a role in establishing the parameters within which those conflicts were contained and sometimes made useful. I am noi suggesting lhai the term 'identity' was used from the siari in a consistent, rigorous or self conscious wnv to resolve disagreement or lo synchronize common problems and piohlcin-alics. Bui rather that, with the benefit of hindsight, il is possible to imagine a version of Ihe broken evolution of cultural studies in which thinking about identity - as subjectivity and sameness - can be shown lo have been a significant fuctor in ihe continuity and integrity of the project as a whole. 11 may be that an interest in identity anil ils political workings in a variety of differeni social and historical sites provided a poinl of intersection between the divergent intellectual interests from which a self-conscious cultural studies was gradually born. I will suggest below tliat a tacit intellectual convergence around problems of identity and identification was indeed an important catalyst fur cultural studies, and hy implication, that identity's capacity to synthesize and connect various enquiries into political cultures and cultural politics is something (hut makes it a valuable asset even now-something worth struggling with and struggling over. There is an elaborate literature surrounding nil thiee aspects of identity sketched above. It includes work in and around the Marxist traditions that contributed so much to the vision, verve and ethical commitments demonstrated in British cultural studies' early interventionist ambitions. Much feminist writing has also made use of the concept of idcntily and generated a rich discussion of the political consequences of its deployment (Fuss I WO: I laraway 1990; Riley 1990). Rut before thai generation of feminist scholar-activists was allowed to find its voice, the themes of identity as sameness and solidarity emerged in the political testing ground provided by the urgent commentary on the changing nature 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 anil a transformed understanding of the relationship between Ihc overdeveloped and underdeveloped parts of the planet thai had been underlined by decolonisation and mass migration. I hese 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 homelcssness or drug abuse. If a deceptive oblique stroke was sometimes placed between the words 'culture' and 'identity*, this was done to emphasize 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 (he political limits and historical specificity of Marxist theory. This stance suggested that class relations were an integral pari of capitalist societies but lhat they were not. in themselves.sufficient 10 generate a complete explanation of any political situation Insights drawn from othei sources were needed to illuminate the process in which the English working class had been horn and in order to comprehend the more recent circunv stances in which it might be supposed to be undergoing a protracted death. The subtle and thoughtful concern with class and its dynamics yielded slowly and only partially 10 different agendas set by interpretation of countercullurat movements and oppositional practices lhat had constituted new social actors and consequently new politicized identities. Women, youth, 'races' and sexuai-ities: under each of these headings interest in subjectivity, sameness and solidarity developed the order of priorities thai 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 nn immediate and inescapable issue and those where the relationship to pheno- typical variation, though certainly present, was more attenuated, amine, as it were, at one remove. Historical materialism as a political and philosophical doctrine was strongest where (he politicization ol the body and (he consequent grasp of embodiment as ihe guarantor of shared identity were weakest. Ihc reluctance to engage biology or the semiotics of (he body produced a heavy theoretical investment in the idea of labour as a universal category lhat could transcend particularity and dissolve differences. Willingness to accept the exclusion of Ihc body Ironi Ihe domains of rational cognition and scicn(iOc inquiry w as thought to establish the hallmark of intellectual enterprise Ihe abstraction 'labour power' was offered as a means to connect the actions and experiences of different people in ways lhat made the kind of body in which they lound themselves a secondor) and often superficial issue Marx's cryptic observation that there is a 'historical and moral element' that affects (he differential price paid for the labour power of different social groups suggests otherwise and is an important clue to comprehending how these superficial differences could resist the embiace of a higher unity, lliis unity was situational. Consciousness of solidarity and sameness as well as collective class-based subjectivity grew from common submission (o the regime of production nnd its distinctive conceptions ol time, light and propedy, I-dwurd Thompson's l%3 Making of the English Working CrVm broke with the complacent moods of mechanical materialism and productivism and reformulated class analysis in an Fnglish idiom thai supplied later cultural studies with vital political energy and a distinctive ethical style. Recognizing the strongly masculinist flavour of this important intervention should lake nothing away from contemporary attempts to comprehend how it could have grown as much from the context supplied) by ("NO. the New Left and practical political activity of several kinds, (thai) undoubtedly prompted me [Ihomp-son| to see the problems of political consciousness and organisation in certain ways.' (Thompson 19X11: U). Thompson's famous statement of the dynamics of class formation is relevant here: We cannot have lose without lovers, nor deference without squires and labourers. And class happen* when mine men. .is a ic'iilt ol common experiences (inherited or shared), feel nnd .irticulatc I lie identity ol their inteiests as between llicmsclvcv nnd against other men whose iniereslv are dtllcicnl liorn (anil usually opposed lo) their*. ipp This is not (he place tn attempt some hasty resolution of (he difficult issues implicit in (his formulation, such us the base and superstructure relationship, the tension between different forms ol consciousness and Ihe cpi Memo logical valency of immediate experience. Nor is this an appropriate moment in which to try and chart the convoluted debates arising from the need to conceptualize Ihe material effects of ideology nnd (he materializing capacities of discourse (Hullcr 1993). Thompson's celebrated formulation links identity lo selfhood, self-interesis and political agency. To say lhat his politicized no(ion ol ideniily derived from an engagement with powers which operate outside of and sometimes in opposition to those rooted in production, for example, in (he residential community, would be loo simple. An interest in identity was not 44 Paul Gilroy Briiiih Cultuial Studies and the Pitfall* of Identity 45 injected into (he thinking of the labour movement ami ils 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 I'hompson and others was produced in a continuous dialogue with (he urgent obligation lo 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 conllictual consciousness that could illuminate contcmpoiary antagonisms. Though he makes use of the idea of identification rulhei 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 leaches and through which new reality forms and is negotiated (p 29.1) Williams's conclusion seeks to make the individualization effect ol contemporary society into a problem. It is not therefore surprising that he avoids the ambiguities of identity - a term which has a strongly individualistic undertone. However the theme of political identity as on outcome ol conllictual social and cultural processes rather than some fixed invariant condition is clearly present: i he riMMinnhlc man ... who is lie exactly? And ihcn who is left lor thai tmnid empty iii.ii mi Hie 'public upiniun uf the Jay'? I think we ate all in this margin: it is what we have lediitcd and where wc live. Hui uruvcnlv. tentatively. wc gel a sense of movement, and ilie meanings and values extend (p. 354-5) It look me a long lime to appreciate how (he founding texts of my own encounter with English cultural studies could be seen to converge around the (hematics of identity. The key to appreciating this architecture lay in the 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 that they fostered were nationally bounded. Similarly, for Thompson, the magical happening of class was something that could only be apprehended on a national basis. Along with Thompson's Making of the English Working Class and Williams's The Long Revolution, Richard I Inggnrl's The Uses of Literacy (1957) can be positioned so that it triangulates the rather ethnocentric space in which cultural development and cultuial politics came to be configured ns exclusively English national phenomena Though each of these critical thinkers had his own suhnational. regional and local sensitivities and obligations, culture and its political forms were comprehended by all of them on the basis that nationality supplied. To be sure, the nation was often recognized as riven with the antagonist relations that characterized the struggle lo create and maintain the domination of one group by others. But the boundaries of the nation formed the essential parameters in which these conflicts look shape. Though by no means always celebratory in lone, none of these important texts conveyed a sense of Hritain and British idenlity being formed by forces, processes that overflowed from the imperial crucible of the nation-stale. Williams's fleeting mentions of ja2z or Hoggarl's scarcely disguised apprehension about the catastrophic consequences of uniform 'faceless' intcrnation alism (his code for the levelling effects of American culture) suggest other conclusions and reveal their authors' direct interest in what might he worth protecting and maintaining amidst the turmoil of the post-war leconstruction of British social life. Each of these founding texts in the cultural studies canon can be tcad as a study ol becoming: as an examination of class-based idenlity in prinrcss -transformed by historical forces lhal exceed their inscription in iiuli\ 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 that has been the festive site of cultural studies' reconciliation to a huntme-bedecked structure of feeling thai its democratic, libertarian and reconstructive aspirations once threatened lo contextuali/e if not exactly overturn The significantly different political alignments and hopes of these writers, as well as their contrasting stances within the generative political context lhat the New Left supplied for their attempts to grapple with class, popular culture and communications (Thompson 1981), should not be played down. That Ihe direction of Hoggarl's investigations was parallel to those ol 'Thompson and Williams whs signalled in Ihe force of his opening question 'Who arc Ihe working classes?'. His thoughtful and stimulating book eluboraled Ihe distinguishing features of working-class English cultural identity. They were apprehended with special clarity even as they were assailed by Ihe insidious lorccs of Americanism and commercialism: as they yielded 'place to new' in a process he understood exclusively in terms nl diminution and loss: the debilitating mass trends of the day*. The diseased orgnns of a vanishing working-class culture were anatomized in a sympathetic conservationist spirit. This mournful operation captured Ihe pathological character of their extraordinary post-1945 transformation. Hoggarl's inleresi in the class-based division of ihe social world inlo them' and 'us' and his enthusiasm lor the 'live and let live' vernacular tolerance lhal thrived Ihcre could not be sustained once the insertion of post-colonial settler-cili/ens was recognized as a fundamental element in the transformation of Britain that alarmed and excited him. Immigration would become something lhal tested out the integrity and character of national and class identities in ways lhat he was not able to imagine. Hoggarl's interesting speculations about the lack of patriotism in ihe working class, their spontaneous anti-authoritarianism and 'rudimentary internationalism'sounded hollow I his was not only because complications introduced into the analysis of class and nationalism by the existence of a "domestic' fascism (Moslcy |94h) were somewhat brushed over but. more importantly, because he was entirely silent about the social and political problems lhat mass black settlement was thought to be introducing inlo the previously calm and peaceable urban districts of England and Wales, ll is not illegitimate to point to the narrowness of 46 PaulGUnn british Cultural Sftudut antl me niU'tis or loentuy ** Hoggarls OOMenu or. in the light of the subsequent patterning ol British racial politics, to remind ourselves thai his enigmatic silences on ih.M subject could be used to undermine the authority of his pronouncements overall. This is not just a question of hindsight. Before Hoggart's great book was published. Kenneth Little's Negroes in Britain (1947) had included a section entitled 'the coloured man through modem English eyes' (pp. 240-68). Michael Ranlon's The Coloured Quarter f1955.) - which had preceded Hoggart into print by sonic (wo years - had drawn explicit attention to Ihe problems precipitated bv large-scale Negro immigration' into 'the large industrial cities of the North and the Midlands, in particular Leeds. Sheffield and Birmingham' (p. 69). By this time, the morality and injustices of the British colour bar had been extensively discussed in a wide range of publications including the Picture Posi (Kee 1949), I he moral and physical health status of 'colonial coloured people' had been given a good public airing by this lime nnd associated panics over the prolileration of half-caste children. Negro criminality and vice were all established media themes when I loggarl's book was published'. I.earie Constantino (1955) attempted to sum up the situation when, as Marold Macmillan has revealed, the Conservative government discussed the possibility of using keep Britain white' as its electoral slogan (Macmillan 1973; 7.V-4). Constant inc'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 at length. It is a valuable reminder to anyone who would suggest that a sensitivity to the destructive effects of racism did not arise until after the 1958 race riots* in London's Nulling Hill and Nottingham (sec Pilkinglon 1988): Aller practically iweniy-five years' residence m bngland. where I have nude innumerable while fucmlv I Mill ihink it would be just to say ili.n almost ihe entire population o( Britain really expect the coloured man tn live in an inferior area devilled lo coloured people, and noi 10 have tree and open choice of a living place. MoM British people would he quile unwilling for a black man to enter their home, nur would ihey wish to work with one as a colleague, nor to stand shoulder lo shoulder will) one at a factory bench. This intolerance is far more marked in lower grades of ["nglish society than in higher, and perhaps it dutigurcs the lower middle il.i-.Mrs mosi of all. possibly because rcspeciahilily is so dear to them Hardly anv Englishwomen and not more than a small proportion of Englishmen would sit at a restaurant table with a coloured man or woman, and interracial marriugc is considered almost universally lo be nut of ihe question. (Constaniine 1955:67) Repositioned against the backdrop of this minoriiarian history, it seems impossible to 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 10 render those uncomfortable political issues invisible. The same fate aw-ailcd the unwanted 'eoluured immigrants' lo whose lives the problems of "race* in Britain became perversely attached. B may be loo harsh to judge his inability to perceive the interrelation of 'race', nationality and class as a form of myopia induced by an indifferent ethnoeentrism and complacent crypto-nalionalism. but that is exactly how n seemed to me as a sludenl of cultural studies on the twentieth anniversary of Ihe publication of The Uses of Literacy. What is more important lo me now. almost twenty years latei si ill. is Ihe possibility that the distinctive sense ii\ cultural politics created by those precious New Left initiatives supplied critical resources to the investigation of identity And further, that mingled with insights drawn from other standpoint*, these very resources encouraged us lo sec and lo transcend the hmils of the quietly nationalistic vision advanced by British cultural studies' imaginary founding fathers. Thankfully these days, the writing of contemporary cultural history has become a less self consciously ethnocentric affair than il wa\ in the 1950s Stuart Hall uncompromisingly insisted that, contrary to appearances, race was an integral and absolutely internal feature of British political culture and national consciousness: Mall mode a solid bridge not so much from scholaib naiionalism to iulcrnationalism but towards a more open, global under standing of where Britain might be located in a decolonized and post-imperial world order defined by Ihe cold war. Hall's consistent political engagements with the idenlily-(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 ihe unfolding of authoritarian forms that masked their grim and joyless character wilh h variety of populist motifs Particularly when appreciated in concert with the interventions of Edward Said, whose study of the Orient as an objeel of European knowledge and power endowed cultural studies with new heart in the lale 197f»s. Hall's work has supplied an invigorating corrective to the morbidity and implosiscne" .>t figures like Williams. Thompson and H**ggnit. Said and Hall are both thinker, whose critiques of power and grasp of modern hislory have been enriched by their own experiences of migration and some ambivalent personal intimacies with the distinctive pal terns of colonial social life in Palestine and Jamaica. Both draw explicitly upon ihe work of Antonio Clramsci and implicitly on the legacy of the Itinerant anglophilc Trinidodian Marxist t*.1. R James With the supplementary input of 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 that had been forged amidst the cultures of terror thai operate at the limits of a belligerent imperial system. The nalion-siale could not remain the central legitimizing principle brought to bear upon Ihe analysis of the cultural relations and forms that subsumed identity. Il was not only that core units of modern government and production hud been constituted from their external activities and in opposition lo foiccs and flows acting upon them Irom the outside. Henceforth, identities deriving from the nation could be shown to be competing with sunnation.il (local M 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 ha< been to prompt enquiries into what cultural studies' committed scholarship might have lo offer lo contemporary discussions, noi of culture, but ol mulliculiure and muliiiculluraliim. Today. Ihe volatile concept of identity belongs above all to Ihe important debate in which mullieulluriiiwn is being ha rutu tjnrov dmmj'i lllllMriM JIIMMI' •<>■•■ illl • tlfUHJ *-/ ■>•.....> redefined oulsidc Ihc outmoded conventions thai governed its earlier iih.iim.i-(ions, especially in Ihc educational system. I he obvious reply lo this demand -for a new theory of multicultural society that can yield a 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 but can only be a beginning. Multiculturalism in both Britain and the United Stales has retreated from reexamining the concept of culture in any thoroughgoing manner and drifted , towards n view of 'separate but equal' cultures. These parcels of incompatible activity may need to be rearranged in some new compensator hierarchy or better still, positioned in whole some telations of reciprocal recognition and mutual equivalence that have been denied hitherto by the unjust opcrnlionsof i power which is not itself comprehended in cultural terms. In I his approach, power exists outside of cultures and is therefore able to dislort the proper relationship between them. The l>est remedy lor this unhappy slate of affairs is supposedly to be found in strengthening political processes and modernity's neutral civic identities so that cultural particularity can Ik confined and regulated in appropriately private places from which the spores of deslruelive incommensurability cannot contaminate the smooth functioning of always imperfect democracy. A political understanding of identity and identification -emphatically not a rcilied 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 mspnse olthe idea that identity is an absolute and to find the courage necessnry lo argue that identity formation even body-coded ethnic and gender identity - is a chaotie process thai can have no end. In this way. we maybe able lo make cultural identity a premise ol political action rather than a substitute for it. i Notes 1 This was a strong component ol Ihc early analyses ol suhcullurc produced by Paul Willi*. Inin Chambers. Dick llerxlige ami Angela McRobbic See also Probwi 11994). 2 For a preliminary turvcv of ihc l-.nglish political discussion of race during this period, sec Carter el a). (1987) Sec also Smith (1986) and Rich (1986) t References Banton. M., 1955: lite Coloured Quartet. London: Jonathan Cape. BUIUK, J. I99.V Bodies that Mailer. New Yolk: Roultedgc. Cm itot'n. C. (ed.). 1994: Sih tal theory ami the Politics «•/ Identity. Ox lord: Haul Btadtwefl, C*«U*. D.. Ha*jus.C- and Josiii. S.. 1987: -'Iht 1951-55 Conservative Government and ihc R.Kulu.ition of Black Immigration'. Immigrants and Minorities. 6(3). i riNi . L. 1955:1'nlunr Bar. I ondon Stanley Paul. Di Beauvoi*. S . I960: the Strand .Sn. I ondon: Four Square Books. Fanon. F.. 1986: Black Skin. While Masks. 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