No description available.

This essay will primarily focus on the 2016 US election, including its ideological, socioec-onomic and political circumstances. Evidently, this context relates to numerous ‘political disconnects,’ phenomena which are all too obvious in contemporary American culture and society. In this respect, the narrow victory of a TV celebrity, businessman, and right-wing nationalist, who now serves as the 45th President of the United States, can be seen as an apt expression of the ideological divisions by which American culture and politics have been marked for quite some time. Perhaps, then, liberal commentators and intellec-tuals should not have been all that surprised about the election’s outcome. For although former President Barack Obama was successful in getting reelected in 2012, his eight years in office also saw the rise of the Tea Party movement and a Republican Party which has increasingly drifted to the right. While this essay is certainly concerned with such po-litical divisions – divisions, that is, which separate ‘blue states’ from ‘red states,’ Demo-crats from Republicans, liberals from conservatives, and the so-called left from the new right – I prefer to concentrate on a different (but perhaps equally challenging) type of disconnect. What I mean is the disconnect between today’s left (or, more precisely, what I have termed the ‘cultural left’) and large segments of the American working and lower middle class. Here, regarding the 2016 election, I will analyze the Clinton campaign’s cu-rious inability to effectively articulate issues like class injustice and socioeconomic ine-quality. While this may seem to be mostly an ‘American’ issue, I am convinced that the class problem and the question of inequality go well beyond the US context and are in many ways related to the general upsurge of the new right, a phenomenon which can be observed in numerous European countries as well.

No description available.

No description available.

The term ‘New Right’ refers to a strand of Conservative politics emerging in the UK during the 1970s, and flourishing mainly under Margaret Thatcher (Beech 2016: 23). The Conservative Party continued to dominate British politics until 1997, when a period of 13 years of Labour governments, from 1997 until 2010, would follow, with Tony Blair pursuing an arguably rather EU-friendly course. When the Conservatives came back to government in a coalition in 2010 and subsequently won the 2015 general election, however, Prime Minister David Cameron tried to renegotiate the relationship with the EU before implementing the election promise to hold a referendum, which resulted in the pro-Brexit vote last June and Cameron’s resignation. Cameron’s successor, Theresa May, formally notified the EU of the UK’s intention to leave on 29 March 2017, while the ultimate consequences of last year’s referendum result – though still uncertain to say the least – are gradually taking shape. The question arises how this could have happened and why these developments seem to have taken many politicians, analysts, scholars and other observers by surprise. While the Conservative party was in government, it was comparatively easy to see where their priorities lay – but their time in opposition constitutes a veritable ‘black-box’ in terms of research on the evolving discourse. This paper will argue that to understand whether the Brexit referendum really came out of the blue or indeed has been a long time coming, it is necessary to explore how the Conservative party’s discourse has developed during their time in opposition. This paper thus sets out to investigate how the Conservative discourse on Europe has developed during the 13 years of opposition, hoping to generate a better understanding of Conservative positions and policies today. The current challenges epitomised by the growing popularity of ‘New Right’ thinking must be traced back in time to unearth their origin and to help explain their growing popularity.

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.

No description available.

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.

No description available.