8 sentences due tomorrow

2. Old and New Identities,
Old and New Ethnicities

STUART HALL

IN MY PREVIOUS TALK, I TRIED TO OPEN OUT THE QUESTIONS
about the local and the global from their somewhat closed, somewhat
over-integrated, and somewhat over-systematized formulations. My
argument was that we need to think about the processes which are
now revealing themselves in terms of the local and the global, in
those two spaces, but we also need to think of these as more contra-
dictory formulations than we usually do. Unless we do, I was con-
cerned that we are likely to be disabled in trying to think those ideas
politically.

I was therefore attempting – certainly not to close out the ques-
tions of power and the questions of appropriation which I think are
lodged at the very center of any notion of a shift between the dis-
positions of the local and the global in the emergence of a cultural
politics on a world scale – but rather to conceptualize that within a
more open-ended and contingent cultural politics.

At the end of the’ talk, however, I was obliged to ask if there is a
politics, indeed, a counter-politics of the local. If there are new
globals and new locals at work, who are the new subjects of this poli-
tics of position? What conceivable identities could they appear in? Can
identity itself be re-thought and re-lived, in and through difference?

It is this question which is what I want to address here. I have
called it “Old and New Identities, Old and New Ethnicities” and

CULTURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

what I am going to do first is to return to the question of identity
and try to look at some of the ways in which we are beginning to re-
conceptualize that within contemporary theoretical discourses. I shall
then go back from that theoretical consideration to the ground of a
cultural politics. Theory is always a detour on the way to something
more important.

I return to the question of identity because the question of identity
has returned to us; at any rate, it has returned to us in British politics
and British cultural politics today. It has not returned in the same old
place; it is not the traditional conception of identity. It is not going
back to the old identity politics of the 1960s social movements. But it
is, nevertheless, a kind of return to some of the ground which we
used to think in that way. I will make a comment at the very end
about what is the nature of this theoretical-political work which
seems to lose things on the one side and then recover them in a dif-
ferent way from another side, and then have to think them out all
over again just as soon as they get rid of them. What is this never-
ending theoretical work which is constantly losing and regaining
concepts? I talk about identity here as a point at which, on the one
hand, a whole set of new theoretical discourses intersect and where,
on the other, a whole new set of cultural practices emerge. I want to
begin by trying, very briefly, to map some of those points of inter-
section theoretically, and then to look at some of their political conse-
quences.

The old logics of identity are ones with which we are extremely
familiar, either philosophically, or psychologically. Philosophically,
the old logic of identity which many people have critiqued in the
form of the old Cartesian subject was often thought in terms of the
origin of being itself, the ground of action. Identity is the ground of
action. And we have in more recent times a psychological discourse
of the self which is very similar: a notion of the continuous, self-
sufficient, developmental, unfolding, inner dialectic of selfhood. We
are never quite there, but always on our way to it, and when we get
there, we will at last know exactly who it is we are.

Now this logic of identity is very important in a whole range of
political, theoretical and conceptual discourses. I am interested in it
also as a kind of existential reality because I think the logic of the
language of identity is extremely important to our own self-con-
ceptions. It contains the notion of the true self, some real self inside
there, hiding inside the husks of all the false selves that we present

42

OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES

to the rest of the world. It is a kind of guarantee of authenticity. Not
until we get really inside and hear what the true self has to say do
we know what we are “really saying.”

There is something guaranteed about that logic or discourse of
identity. It gives us a sense of depth, out there, and in here. It is spa-
tially organized. Much of our discourse of the inside and the outside,
of the self and other, of the individual and society, of the subject and
the object, are grounded in that particular logic of identity. And it
helps us, I would say, to sleep well at night.

Increasingly, I think one of the main functions of concepts is that
they give us a good night’s rest. Because what they tell us is that
there is a kind of stable, only very slowly-changing ground inside the
hectic upsets, discontinuities and ruptures of history. Around us his-
tory is constantly breaking in unpredictable ways but we, somehow,
go on being the same.

That logic of identity is, for good or ill, finished. It’s at an end for
a whole range of reasons. It’s at an end in the first instance because
of some of the great de-centerings of modern thought. One could dis-
cuss this very elaborately I could spend the rest of the time talking
about it but I just want to slot the ideas into place very quickly by
using some names as reference points.

It is not possible to hold to that logic of identity after Marx because
although Marx does talk about man (he doesn’t talk about women
making history but perhaps they were slotted in, as the nineteenth
century so often slotted women in under some other masculine title),
about men and women making history but under conditions which
are not of their own choosing. And having lodged either the in-
dividual or collective subject always within historical practices, we as
individuals or as groups cannot be, and can never have been, the sole
origin or authors of those practices. That is a profound historical de-
centering in terms of social practice.

If that was not strong enough, knocking us sideways as it were,
Freud came knocking from underneath, like Hamlet’s ghost, and
said, “While you’re being decentered from left to right like that, let
me .decenter you from below a bit, and remind you that this stable
language of identity is also set from the psychic life about which you
don’t know very much, and can’t know very much. And which you
can’t know very much by simply taking thought about it: the great
continent of the unconscious which speaks most clearly when it’s
slipping rather than when it’s saying what it means.” This makes the

43

“%0•..,*,

CULTURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

self begin to seem a pretty fragile thing.
Now, buffeted on one side by Marx and upset from below by

Freud, just as it opens its mouth ‘to say, “Well, at least I speak so
therefore I must be something,” Saussure and linguistics comes along
and says “That’s not true either, you know. Language was there
before you. You can only say something by positioning yourself in
the discourse. The tale tells the teller, the myth tells the myth-maker,
etc. The enunciation is always from some subject who is positioned
by and in discourse.” That upsets that. Philosophically, one comes to
the end of any kind of notion of a perfect transparent continuity
between our language and something out there which can be called
the real, or the truth, without any quotation marks.

These various upsets, these disturbances in the continuity of the
notion of the subject, and the stability of identity, are indeed, what
modernity is like. It is not, incidentally, modernity itself. That has an
older, and longer history. But this is the beginning of modernity as
trouble. Not modernity as enlightenment and progress, but moderni-
ty as a problem.

It is also upset by other enormous historical transformations which
do not have, and cannot be given, a single name, but without which
the story could not be told. In addition to the three or four that I
have quoted, we could mention the relativisation of the Western
narrative itself, the Western episteme, by the rise of other cultures to
prominence, and fifthly, the displacement of the masculine gaze.

Now, the question of trying to come to terms with the notion of
identity in the wake of those theoretical decenterings is an extremely
problematic enterprise. But that is not all that has been disturbing the
settled logic of identity. Because as I was saying earlier when I was
talking about the relative decline, or erosion, the instability of the
nation-state, of the self-sufficiency of national economies and conse-
quently, of national identities as points of reference, there has simul-
taneously been a fragmentation and erosion of collective social iden-
tity.

I mean here the great collective social identities which we thought
of as large-scale, all-encompassing, homogenous, as unified collective
identities, which could be spoken about almost as if they were sin-
gular actors in their own right but which, indeed, placed, positioned,
stabilized, and allowed us to understand and read, almost as a code,
the imperatives of the individual self: the great collective social iden-
tities of class, of race, of nation, of gender, and of the West.

44

OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES .

These collective social identities were formed in, and stabilized by,
the huge, long-range historical processes which have produced the
modern world, just as the theories and conceptualizations that I just
referred to very briefly are what constituted modernity as a form of
self-reflection. They were staged and stabilized by industrialization,
by capitalism, by urbanization, by the formation of the world market,
by the social and the sexual division of labor, by the great punctu-
ation of civil and social life into the public and the private; by the
dominance of the nation state, and by the identification between
Westernization and the notion of modernity itself.

I spoke in my previous talk about the importance, to any sense of
where we are placed in the world, of the national economy, the
nation-state and of national cultural identities. Let me say a word
here about the great class identities which have stabilized so much of
our understanding of the immediate and not-so-immediate past.

Class was the main locator of social position, that which organized
our understanding of the main grid and group relations between
social groups. They linked us to material life through the economy
itself. They provided the code through which we read one another.
They provided the codes through which we understood each others’
languages. They provided, of course, the notions of collective action
itself, that which would unlock politics. Now as I tried to say pre-
viously, the great collective social identities rise and fall and it is
almost as difficult to know whether they are more dangerous when
they are falling than when they are rising.

These great collective social identities have not disappeared. Their
purchase and efficacy in the real world that we all occupy is ever
present. But the fact is that none of them is, any longer, in either the
social, historical or epistemological place where they were in our con-
ceptualizations of the world in the recent past. They cannot any
longer be thought in the same homogenous form. We are as attentive
to their inner differences, their inner contradictions, their segmenta-
tions and their fragmentations as we are to their already-completed
homogeneity, their unity and so on.

They are not already-produced stabilities and totalities in the
world. They do not operate like totalities. If they have a relationship
to our identities, cultural and individual, they do not any longer have
that suturing, structuring, or stabilizing force, so that we can know
what we are simply by adding up the sum of our positions inrela-
tion to them. They do not give us the code of identity as I think they

45

it. WMKQ%i ‘”‘

CULTURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

did in the past.
It is a moot point by anybody who takes this argument directly on

the pulses, as to whether they ever functioned in that way. Perhaps
they never functioned in that way. This may be, indeed, what the
narrative of the West is like: the notion that we told of the story we
told ourselves, about their functioning in that way. We know that the
great homogenous tunction of the collective social class is extremely
difficult for any good historian to actually lay his or her finger on. It
keeps disappearing just over the horizon, like the organic commu-
nity.

You know the story about the organic community? The organic
community was just always in the childhood you have left behind.
Raymond Williams has a wonderful essay on these people, a range
of social critics who say you can measure the present in relation to
the past, and you know the past because back then it was much
more organic and integrated. When was “back then”? Well, when I
was a child, there was always some adult saying, “When I was a
child, it was much more integrated.” And so, eventually, some of
these great collectivities are rather like those people who have an
activity of historical nostalgia going on in their retrospective recon-
structions. We always reconstructed them more essentially, more
homogenously, more unified, less con.tradictorily than they ever
were, once you actually know anything about them.

That is one argument. Whatever the past was like, they may have
all marched forth, unified and dictating history forward, for many
decades in the past. They sure aren’t doing it now.

Now as I have said, the question of how to begin to think ques-
tions of identity, either social or individual, not in the wake of their
disappearance but in the wake of their erosion, of their fading, of
their not having the kind of purchase and comprehensive explan-
atory power they had before, that is what it seems to me has gone.
They used to be thought of – and it is a wonderfully gendered
definition – as “master concepts,” the “master concepts” of class.

It is not tolerable any longer to have a “master concept” like that.
Once it loses its “master” status its explanatory reach weakens,
becomes more problematic. We can think of some things in relation
to questions of class, though always recognizing its real historical
complexity. Yet there are certain other things it simply will not, or
cannot, decipher or explain. And this brings us face to face with the
increasing social diversity and plurality, the technologies of the self

46

OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES

which characterize the modern world in which we live.
Well, we might say, where does this leave any discourse on social

identity at all? Haven’t I now abolished it from about as many sides
as I could think of? As has been true in theoretical work over the last
twenty years, the moment a concept disappears through the left hand
door, it returns through the right hand window, but not in quite the
same place. There is a wonderful moment in Althusser’s text where
he says “1 can now abolish the notion of ideas.” And he actually
writes the word “ideas” and draws a line through it to convince him-
self we need never use the word again.

In exactly the same way, the old discourse of the subject was
abolished, put in a deep container, concrete poured over it, with a
half-life of a million years. We will never look at it again, when,
bloody hell, in about five minutes, we are talking about subjectivity,
and the subject in discourse, and it has come roaring back in. So it is
not, I think, surprising that, having lost one sense of identity, we find
we need it. Where are we to find it?

One of the places that we have to go to is certainly in the con-
temporary languages which have rediscovered but repositioned the
notion of the subject, of subjectivity. That is, principally, and pre-
eminently, the languages of feminism and of psychoanalysis.

I do not want to go through that argument but I want to say some-
thing about how one might begin to think questions of identity from
this new set of theoretical spaces. And I have to do this program-
matically. I have to state what I think, from this position, identity is
and is not as a sort of protocol, although each one could take me a
very long time.

n makes us aware that identities are never completed, never fin-
ished; that they are always as subjectivity itself is, in process. That
itself is a pretty difficult task. Though we have always known it a
little bit, we have always thought about ourselves as getting more
like ourselves everyday. But that is a sort of Hegelian notion, of going
forward to meet that which we always were. I want to open that
process up considerably. Identity is always in the process of formation.

Secondly, identity means, or connotes, the process of identification,
of saying that this here is the same as that, or we are the same
together, in this respect. But something we have learnt from the
whole discussion of identification, in feminism and psychoanalysis,
is the degree to which that structure of identification is always con-
structed through ambivalence. Always constructed through splitting.

47

I

CUL TURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

Splitting between that which one is, and that which is the other. The
attempt to expel the other to the other side of the universe is always
compounded by the relationships of love and desire. This is a dif-
ferent language from the language of, as it were, the Others who are
completely different from oneself.

This is the Other that belongs inside one. This is the Other that one
can only know from the place from which one stands. This is the self
as it is inscribed in the gaze of the Other. And this notion which
breaks down the boundaries, between outside and inside, between
those who belong and those who do not, between those whose his-
tories have been written and those whose histories they have de-
pended on but whose histories cannot be spoken. That the unspoken
silence in between that which can be spoken is the only way to reach
for the whole history. There is no other history except to take the
absences and the silences along with what can be spoken. Everything
that can be spoken is on the ground of the enormous voices that have
not, or cannot yet be heard.
. This doubleness of discourse, this necessity of the Other to the self,

this inscription of identity in the look of the other finds its artic-
ulation profoundly in the ranges of a given text. And I want to cite
one which I am sure you know but won’t remember necessarily,
though it is a wonderful, majestic moment in Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, when he describes himself as a young Antillean, face to
face with the white Parisian child and her mother. And the child
pulls the hand of the mother and says, “Look, Mama, a black man.”
And he said, “For the first time, I knew who I was. For the first time,
I felt as if I had been simultaneously exploded in the gaze, in the vio-
lent gaze of the other, and at the same time, recomposed as another.”

The notion that identity in that sense could be told as two histories,
one over here, one over there, never having spoken to one another,
never having anything to do with one another, when translated from
the psychoanalytic to the historical terrain, is simply not tenable any
longer in an increasingly globalized world. It is just not tenable any
longer.

People like me who came to England in the 1950s have been there
for centuries; symbolically, we have been there for centuries. I was
coming home. I am the sugar at the bottom of the English cup of tea.
I am the sweet tooth, the sugar plantations that rotted generations of
English children’s teeth. There are thousands of others beside me that
are, you know, the cup of tea itself. Because they don’t grow it in

48

OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES

Lancashire, you know. Not a single tea plantation exists within the
United Kingdom. This is the symbolization of English identity –
mean, what does anybody in the world know about an English
person except that they can’t get through the day without a cup of
tea?

Where does it come from? Ceylon – Sri Lanka, India. That is the
outside history that is inside the history of the English. There is no
English history without that other history. The notion that identity
has to do with people that look the same, feel the same, call them-
selves the same, is nonsense. As a process, as a narrative, as a dis-
course, it is always told from the position of the Other.

What is more is that identity is always in part a narrative, always
in part a kind of representation. It is always within representation.
Identity is not something which is formed outside and then we tell
stories about it. It is that which is narrated in one’s own self. I will
say something about that in terms of my own narration of identity in
a moment – you know, that wonderful moment where Richard II
says, “Come let us sit down and tell stories about the death of
kings.” Well, I am going to tell you a story and ask you to tell one
about yourself.

We have the notion of identity as contradictory, as composed of
more than one discourse, as composed always across the silences of
the other, as written in and through ambivalence and desire. These
are extremely important ways of trying to think an identity which is
not a sealed or closed totality.

Now we have within theory some interesting ways of trying to
think difference in this way. We have learnt quite a lot about sexual
difference in feminist writers. And we have learnt a lot about ques-
tions of difference from people like Derrida. I do think that there are
some important ways in which Derrida’s use of the notion of the dif-
ference between”difference” and II differance,” spelt with an 11 a,” is
significant. The “a,” the anomolous “a” in Derrida’s spelling of dif-
ferance, which he uses as a kind of marker that sets up a disturbance
in our settled understanding of translation of our concept of dif-
ference is very important, because that little IIa,” disturbing as it is,
which you can hardly hear when spoken, sets the word in motion to
new meanings yet without obscuring the trace of its other meanings
in its past.

His sense of II differance/’ as one writer has put it, remains sus-
pended between the two French verbs lito differ” and lito defer,”

49

..

CUL TURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

both of which contribute to its textual force, neither of which can
fully capture its meaning. Language depends on difference, as 5aus-
sure has shown: the structure of distinctive propositions which make
up its economy. But where Derrida breaks new ground is in the
extent to which”differ” shades into”defer.”

Now this notion of a differance is not simply a set of binary,
reversible oppositions; thinking sexual difference not simply in terms
of the fixed opposition of male and female, but of all those anomol-
ous sliding positions ever in process, in between which opens up the
continent of sexuality to increasing points of disturbance. That is
what the odyssey of difference now means in the sense in which I am
trying to use it.

That is about difference, and you might ask the question, where
does identity come in to this infinite postponement of meaning that
is lodged in notion of the trace of something which still
retains its roots in one meaning while it is, as it were, moving to
another, encapsulating another, with endless shiftings, slidings, of
that signifier?

The truth is that Derrida does not help us as much as he might
here in thinking about the relationship between identity and differ-
ence. And the appropriators of Derrida in America, especially in
American philosophical and literary thought, help us even less. By
taking Derrida’s notion of differance, precisely right out of the
tension between the two textual connotations, “defer” and” differ,”
and lodging it only in the endless play of difference, Derrida’s
politics is in that very moment uncoupled.

From that moment unrolls that enormous proliferation of extreme-
ly sophisticated, playful deconstruction which is a kind of endless
academic game. Anybody can do it, and on and on it rolls. No
signifier ever stops; no-one is ever responsible for any meaning; all
traces are effaced. The moment anything is lodged, it is immediately
erased. Everybody has a great time; they go to conferences and do it,
as it were. The very notion of the politics which requires the holding
of the tension between that which is both placed and not stitched in
place, by the word which is always in motion between positions,
which requires us to think both positionality and movement, both
together, not one and the other, not playing with difference, or
“finding nights to rest under” identity, but living in the tension of
identity and difference, is uncoupled.

We have then to go on thinking beyond that mere playfulness into

50

“”‘!l=__!!!,as””,;,””‘T

OLD AND NEW IDENTITIES

the really hard game which the play of difference actually means to
us historically. For if signification depends upon the endless reposi-
tioning of its differential terms, meaning in any specific instance
depends on the contingent and arbitrary stop, the necessary break. It
is a very simple point.

Language is part of an infinite semiosis of meaning. To say any-
thing, I have got to shut up. I have to construct a single sentence. I
know that the next sentence will open the infinite semiosis of mean-
ing again, so I will take it back. 50 each stop is not a natural break.
It does not say, “I’in about to end a sentence and that will be the
truth.” It understands that it is contingent. It is a positioning. It is the
cut of ideology which, across the semiosis of language, constitutes
meaning. But you have to get into that game or you will never say
anything at all.

You think I’m joking. I know graduate students of mine who got
into this theoretical fix in the seventies, one enormous French theore-
tician after another, throwing them aside, until they could not commit
a single word to paper at all because to say anything was to open
oneself to the endless sliding of the signifier. So if they said, what I
think Derrida really, in – really – ooh – start again, yes, start again.

Meaning is in that sense a wager. You take a bet. Not a bet on
truth, but a bet on saying something. You have to be positioned
somewhere in order to speak. Even if you are positioned in order to
unposition yourself, even if you want to take it back, you have to
come into language to get out of it. There is no other way. That is the
paradox of meaning.

To think it only in terms of difference and not in terms of the
relational position between the suturing, the arbitrary, overdeter-
mined cut of language which says something which is instantly
opened again to the play of meaning; not to think of meaning al-
ways, in supplement, that there is always something left over, always
something which goes on escaping the precision; the attempt of
language to code, to make precise, to fix, to halt, etc.; not to think it
in that way is to lose hold of the two necessary ends of the chain to
which the new notion of identity has to be conceptualized.

Now I can turn to questions of politics. In this conception of an
identity which has to be thought through difference, is there a gener-
al politics of the local to bring to bear against the great, over-riding,
powerful, technologically-based, massively-invested unrolling of
global processes which I was trying to describe in my previous talk

51

CULTURE, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

which tend to mop up all differences, and occlude those differences?
Which means, as it were, they are different -but it doesn’t make
any difference that they are duferent, they’re just different.

No, there is no general politics. I have nothing in the kitbag. There
is nothing I can pull out. But I have a little local politics to tell you
about. It may be that all we have, in bringing the politics of the local
to bear against the global, is a lot of little local politics. I do not know
if that is true or not. But I would like to spend some time later talk-
ing about the cultural politics of the local, and of this new notion of
identity. For it is in this new.frame that identity has come back into
cultural politics in Britain. The formation of the Black diasporas in
the period of post-war migration in the fifties and sixties has trans-
formed English social, economic and political life.

In the first generations, the majority of people had the same illu-
sion that I did: that I was about to go back home. That may have
been because everybody always asked me: when was I going back
home? We did think that we were just going to get back on the boat;
we were here for a temporary sojourn. By the seventies, it was per-
fectly clear that we were not there …