When thinking about Stuart Hall’s theoretical legacy, ‘power’ is probably not the first term that comes to mind. Concepts like representation, racism, ethnicity, encoding/decoding, articulation, conjunctural analysis etc. more readily suggest themselves and structure our reception of his work. Yet nonetheless, when taking a closer look, his entire oeuvre may be said to be permeated, on different levels, by themes that touch upon the issue of power, not least in connection with the concepts listed above. The latent omnipresence of power in Hall’s thinking is perhaps most readily detectable on the meta-level on which he situates and positions himself as a cultural-studies scholar, and it is this level that hence will be addressed first. In the second section, Hall’s view of power on the economic, social and state levels will be considered, particularly by pointing out his indebtedness to Antonio Gramsci’s conception of hegemonic power. In an attempt to let Hall speak for himself as much as possible, the section will provide quite a few quotes, many of which will be taken from the collaboratively written Policing the Crisis, in order to shed some light on his – and his co-authors’ – ideas about power. The third section attempts a systematisation of the issues raised, particularly by integrating a Foucauldian perspective on power, which was nearly as important for Hall as the Gramscian. The last section will conclude by returning to the beginning, reconsidering Hall’s self-positioning within the power/knowledge nexus that structures the discourse of cultural studies.

In the past decades, political theory and philosophy have seen the canonization of a new conceptual difference, whose roots have been traced back to a number of thinkers, but whose main theoretical elaboration can be said to have begun with the Centre de recherches philosophiques sur le politique founded by Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe in 1980 and closed in 1984: the difference between la politique and le politique, or between ‘politics’ and ‘the political’. As Chantal Mouffe (2005a: 8f), borrowing Heidegger’s vocabulary, has pointed out, the two terms operate on different levels: whereas ‘politics’ refers to the ‘ontic’ level and designates the empirical ‘facts’ of political organization – practices, institutions, discourses, etc. – ‘the political’ implies a philosophical inquiry at the ‘ontological’ level, asking, as Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (1981: 12) put it, about the ‘essence of the political’. While, in theorists as diverse as Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière, Slavoj Žižek, Claude Lefort, Roberto Esposito, Ernesto Laclau, and many others – most of them located on the political left – this inquiry has yielded very different results, they all agree on the basic necessity to make this distinction between conventional politics, on the one hand, and a more profound dimension concerning the institution of the social itself, on the other. Similarly, virtually all the thinkers mentioned are in agreement as to the state of the political in the contemporary world: they all see it as in danger of being ignored, repressed or neutralized in the context of what they criticize as increasingly ‘post-political’ and ‘post-democratic’ social arrangements. This critique of today’s post-politics is a powerful and important one. In the following, I want to argue that the work of Stuart Hall to some extent shares in – in fact, anticipates, since most of the relevant theories were developed after 1989 – this critical discourse. More specifically, I will 1) bring out and discuss Hall’s critique of post-politics; 2) elaborate upon his own understanding of the political, which is implicit in this critique and elsewhere in his writings – I will argue that Hall’s thought can be considered as belonging to what the sociologist Oliver Marchart (2010) has termed ‘the moment of the political’, insofar as it is a product of and response to our ‘post-foundational condition’, emphasizing as it does conflictuality, contingency and the groundlessness of society; 3) and finally, building on this, I will briefly talk about the conclusions concerning (ontic) politics that the post-foundationalism Hall shares with most of the other theorists I have mentioned leads him to, which are very different from those arrived at by philosophers such as Badiou, Rancière or Žižek and closer – partly via the shared engagement with Gramsci – to those of Mouffe and Laclau or Lefort.

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When I first came across Stuart Hall’s engagement with Gramsci in his analysis of Margaret Thatcher’s struggle for power, I was excited by how much his theoretical framework provided new perspectives to reflect on my own experiences of social and political struggles. Here was somebody who analysed social change in its contradictory fluidity as something in the making. Not from ‘out there’, but as someone acting on it. It haunted me how valuable his approach was for understanding the unexpected outcomes and victories of social movements – not only for a better understanding of history and society, but also with a view to actively partaking in these movements and shape them. In this paper, I will demonstrate the strength of Hall’s approach for highlighting the chances of social movements to achieve their alternative goals although they fight from a position of weakness against powerful adversaries. I have been (and still am) an active part of the two movements I want to explore. First, I will discuss the success of the squatters and their allies in defending ‘their’ houses in Hamburg’s St. Pauli Hafenstraße, where I still live, in the 1980s and 90s, and, second, the current2 struggle of the refugee group ‘Lampedusa in Hamburg’ for the right to stay in Germany despite the ‘Dublin’ regulations which force refugees to stay in those countries where they first arrived. Both of these struggles had to engage with and counter stereotypical representations. Both of them, as I will show, started by addressing “immediate troubles” and led to a deeper understanding that another world is not only needed, but also possible – “an entirely new form of civilization” (Hall 1987: 21). Therefore, I think it is worthwhile to engage with them.