Stuart Hall, Conjunctural Analysis and Cultural Criminology

Exemplifying conjunctural analysis continues in this chapter with a detailed look at PTC. Although similarly conjuncturally-focused to RTR, it was significantly different in several ways, crucially in being a sustained piece of empirical research designed to understand the harsh sentencing of three juveniles. This concrete starting point, validated by Marx’s methodological ruminations, guided the whole project’s movement from particular cases to the general crisis of hegemony they signified. The step-by-step outline of the book’s four parts demonstrates the constant movement from simple to more complex understandings, as more determinations are uncovered, via critique and re-theorising. Thus, the critique of the common sense understanding of the role of the police, courts and media that revealed an overreaction was replaced with the idea of ‘moral panic’ in Part I. However, this term proved insufficiently historical when put to the empirical test and so became re-theorised, in Part III, as a symptom of the ‘crisis of hegemony’ that began in the 1960s. This same methodological strategy is shown to be at work also in understanding the role of social anxiety in the reception of media messages, in Part II of the book, and in the ‘politics of mugging’ in the somewhat neglected concluding Part IV.

This chapter continues the exploration of key texts in cultural criminology. Specifically, it compares and contrasts two pairs of texts, one of each pair from outside cultural criminology and the other by one of cultural criminology’s founding figures. The first pair are ethnographies, since ethnography is a key methodology of cultural criminology; the second pair are focused on a core concept within cultural criminology, that of ‘carnival’. The general idea is to explore how well each text succeeds in its own terms, how compatible each is with conjunctural analysis, and whether the cultural criminology examples have managed to break new ground. The traditional ethnography used as the comparator for Jeff Ferrell’s cultural criminology offering Tearing Down the Streets (2001) is Carl Nightingale’s On the Edge (1993), chosen because it is much admired and widely cited by the cultural criminologists under investigation. Fortuitously, both the texts focused on carnival use Bakhtin as their theoretical starting point, thus enabling a direct comparison between a conjuncturally-focused text, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression by Stallybrass and White (1986), and one adopting a cultural criminology approach, Cultural Criminology and the Carnival of Crime by Presdee (2000). In both instances, in the ethnography and the carnival comparison, the cultural criminology texts fare less well than their comparator texts, partly because, like with both Hayward and Young in Chapter 4, theory and not the specificity of the particular is in command. There is also an unwillingness to start by critiquing existing approaches as a basis for building better explanations, which means that an unprincipled theoretical eclecticism holds sway. In the next chapter, Hall’s very different approach to theorising is the focus.

This chapter concludes the Brexit story. It starts by offering an explanation of the middle-class Conservative Brexiteers. The historical backdrop to their Leave votes is argued to be the multiple challenges to traditional middle-class authority that encompass an expansion of middle-class occupations, the culture wars going back to the 1960s and the loss of Empire. The historical narrative that ended with 9/11 in Chapter 8 is then continued, first with New Labour up until the coalition government of 2010, and then the subsequent period up until the Referendum. As austerity bites and political alienation grows, immigration and race become ever more salient. Given this, together with the denial of racism by everyone from politicians to convicted racists, space is devoted to the complex connections among ‘immigration, racism and xenophobia’ and how all this impacts ‘living with difference’. The chapter ends with a summary account of the multiple crises comprising the Brexit conjuncture.

The concluding chapter starts with a summary answer to the book’s opening questions about why another book about Hall might be of interest to criminologists at this point in time. It then makes the case for turning to the American election of 2020, a populist moment of global significance politically, for which a conjunctural analysis is designed. This also adds a comparative dimension to my Brexit analysis. Two contrasting Gramscian-inspired analyses of Trump’s populist electoral victory of 2016 provide a theoretical and political framework for the ensuing discussion. This highlights key issues of relevance to conjunctural analysis, namely, the relationship between Hall’s notion of ‘authoritarian populism’ and ‘left populism’, the role of the state, and what is entailed in theorising the complexity of a conjuncture. Additionally, the Hart (2020) analysis introduces the notion of ‘global conjunctural moments’, an idea that connects with Hall’s international framing of his discussion of the politics of difference. Following these analyses, I offer my own evaluation of Trump’s responses to the globally significant challenges of climate change, the refugee crisis, Black Lives Matter and the pandemic, how his multiple failures in these areas may have impacted the election result, and what we might expect ‘after Trump’.