Stuart Hall, An Intellectual for Times of Reaction

In these troubling times, we should return to Stuart Hall, a remarkable political thinker and cultural analyst.

Stuart Hall (1932-2014), born in Jamaica and educated at Oxford University, was one of the key cultural theorists, Marxist sociologists, and leftist thinkers in the postwar era. Hall is particularly known for concepts like encoding/decoding and authoritarian populism, and for his interest in studying conjunctures (the totality of societal situations); he is also known for his critical analyses of Thatcherism in the 1980s and studies of popular culture, identity, and race/ethnicity, and for helping establish cultural studies as a distinctive subdiscipline.

As a Marxist, Hall was concerned with economic conditions, but in his works, he avoided a reductive class determinism or economism (the excessive causal emphasis on class and economics), allowing instead for the autonomy of the political field, the state, the media and realm of culture. The concept of conjuncture was important to him in this respect: Hall repeatedly tried—particularly in the late 1970s and 1980s—to understand the totality of Britain’s political, economic, cultural, and social situation. Rather than fall back on formulaic concepts, Hall attempted to ground his analyses in the “specificity of the present.”[1]

This analytical approach was inspired by Lenin’s emphasis on the importance of “concrete analyses of concrete situations,” and Hall also drew on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony and the Althusser’s concept of ideological state apparatuses and interpellation. Hall’s attempts to understand a society were always grounded in concrete facts “from below,” but sensitized to power relations and the effects of power within such relations. Hall also contributed to making Marxism more attuned to the political, cultural, and identitarian dimensions of social life; the Marxism he initially had encountered in the postwar period had been “a very economistic Marxism,” as Hall said in a later interview.[2]

Hall was also a prolific writer: A bibliography listing the titles of his works alone runs to 79 pages. In the 1950s, he cofounded the New Left Review, an influential journal that remains an arena for important debates to the global Anglophone left. Among his best-known publications is his 1978 book Policing the Crisis, written with four other scholars, which on the surface is a study of “law and order” politics in Britain in the late 1970s, but which is more deeply about ideology, conflict, control, and the effects of crisis on the state; Hall saw an increasingly heavy-handed British state rise up in the face of growing crisis. He also wrote dozens of articles and essays on everything from popular culture to ethnic identity and Thatcherism throughout his lengthy writing career.

Background

Hall spent the first part of his life in Jamaica. In his memoir, Familiar Stranger, he describes a middle-class upbringing in the capital city of Kingston. His father rose through the ranks of the (otherwise notorious) multinational United Fruit Company to become chief accountant; his maternal family considered themselves descendants of plantation and slave owners who admired the British (colonial) education system.[3] The young Hall was sent to the private secondary school Jamaica College, established in 1789 to educate the Caribbean colony’s elite children. There Hall received a “classically British formal education.”[4] A gifted student, in 1951 he received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship and was admitted to Merton College at Oxford. The nearly 700-year-old college was one of the British Empire’s central elite institutions of higher education—and one of the oldest universities in the world, if not the oldest.

Later in life, Hall emphasized that although his time at Oxford had been a formative intellectual experience, he disliked the overall “spirit of Oxford”: The university’s position in the national, and therefore imperial, system of power troubled him. In later interviews, Hall emphasized how “Oxford connections” lifted people undeservedly into elite positions in British society.[5] Perhaps precisely because of his ambiguity concerning Oxford’s “intellectual and cultural power,” and the “nerve-racking experience” of encountering a form of (culturally imposed) “absolute superiority” that he encountered there, Hall was drawn to leftwing politics during his student years. It was on the left that Hall found his second home. His was assuredly not a Soviet-style Marxism, but a “non-aligned left,” or a leftism that refused to take sides in the Cold War.[6] In the mid-1950s, there were still high hopes for the so-called Non-Aligned Movement and the possibility of a “‘third force’ in global politics.”[7] In 1955, the first Bandung Conference took place—named after the Indonesian city that hosted it—where representatives from 29 African and Asian countries met to discuss the possible role of a “third world” caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of the U.S. and Soviet empires, respectively. But the “utopian” vision of nonalignment failed to produce lasting results: “We didn’t foresee at all how the global imperatives of the Cold War would overwhelm the liberatory promise of decolonization,” Hall wrote.

As a colonial subject, Hall could not fit into establishment institutions with the same ease as his fellow cohort of English students. Even in Jamaica, one of his editors writes, Hall was well aware of the fact that he was the “blackest member of his own family,” and he later developed the term pigmentocracy to describe the role of color gradations in the structure of power relations in Jamaican society. His sense of ethnoracial otherness was, of course, even stronger in largely white England:

Three months at Oxford persuaded me that it was not my home. I’m not English and I never will be. The life I have lived is one of partial displacement. I came to England as a means of escape, and it was a failure.[8]

Even within Oxford’s leftwing political sphere, Hall felt a lack of affinity with the postwar hegemonic British Labour Party: “The ethos of Oxford Labour politics was unremittingly white and English.”[9] Instead, Hall was drawn into a group calling itself The Socialist Club, a gathering of “ex-Communists, Trotskyists and assorted socialists, as well as a variety of independently minded Labour supporters.”

The second half of the 1950s was a dramatic time, with the Soviet Union’s invasion of Hungary in 1956 and the Suez Crisis of the same year being two key events. Tariq Ali is careful to describe Hall not as a child of 1968—Hall was too old for the “year of revolution” to have played a formative role—but rather as a “1956-er,” when Western Marxists were forced to reckon with the Soviet invasion of Hungary but were also galvanized by the Suez Crisis and the British, French, and Israeli invasion of Egypt.

Hall became an important figure in what became known as “the new left,” which, among other things, attempted to chart out a course between Soviet communism and Western capitalism. For Hall, much of this meant throwing himself into intellectual activity. Journals remained important platforms. In 1957, together with Charles Taylor, later a renowned philosopher, Hall founded the journal Universities and Left Review (ULR). Two years later, ULR merged with another journal established by the historian E. P. Thompson, New Reasoner, to form New Left Review (NLR).

Collective Thought

Hall was an exceptionally community-oriented thinker. His book Policing the Crisis counts five co-authors. Hall was one of the co-founders of the influential research center, the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham in the 1960s. He led the center for a decade from 1969 to 1979 and made it the birthplace of the so-called ‘Birmingham School of Cultural Studies’; forming a ‘school’ demonstrates a willingness to enter into reciprocal relationships with others.

Hall is an example of what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called the “collective intellectual.” Bourdieu used the term in contrast with the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of the “total intellectual,” who was happy to intervene, often on their own, in all manner of social and political issues. Bourdieu believed this was a fundamentally flawed way of conducting intellectual activity: The complexity of society demands associations of specialized thinkers, each of whom can shed light on a particular aspect of society. But more importantly, Bourdieu understood that powerful social forces were working to limit the autonomy of research; only research collectives would be able to “defend their own autonomy.”[10] Some of Hall’s former colleagues at CCCS refer to a feature of Hall that they call a “dialogical pedagogy” that was “fundamental to the work culture [Hall] established” at the Birmingham center.[11] Thinking happens along with others.

Interests

In the 1960s, Hall was a driving force behind what became known as cultural studies. In 1964, Hall cofounded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University, which he also directed from 1969 to 1979. Later in his life, Hall explained the shift towards cultural studies with a confrontation with a shortcoming of the Marxism of the time:

I got involved in cultural studies because I didn’t think life was purely economically determined. I took all this up as an argument with economic determinism. I lived my life as an argument with Marxism, and with neoliberalism. Their point is that, in the last instance, economy will determine it. But when is the last instance? If you’re analyzing the present conjuncture, you can’t start and end at the economy. It is necessary, but insufficient.

In an early articles from 1959, “Politics of Adolescence?”, Hall shows an emerging interest in, and sympathy with, youth culture.[12] While the British establishment viewed with growing alarm a number of “subcultural” youth phenomena like the “teddy boys” or conflicts between “mods” and “rockers”—later studied by the sociologist Stanley Cohen in a classic book as an example of “moral panic”—Hall took a more positive approach. For him, there is a progressive potential to be unearthed in youth culture, especially of the working class: “Instinctively, young working class people are radical.” Rare in the context of the 1950s, Hall tried to understand young people on their own terms. He saw in the anti-nuclear movement, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a sign that young people were not apathetic, but instead politically engaged, albeit outside political party structures and so accorded less recognition by the left at the time.

Encoding and decoding

This openness to the new led Hall to become one of the earliest serious analysts of television. The article “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” has become a classic in the field of media studies, with over 16,000 citations on Google Scholar, a clear sign of its enormous influence. Hall’s main idea is that cultural messages are packaged, or “encoded,” by a sender and then unpacked, or “decoded,” by an audience, but that this is a potentially fallible process, where the receiver may choose, or at least end up, interpreting the message in a way that violates the sender’s wishes. A sender may want to encourage a particular reading, but all messages carry with them a chance of being misunderstood, misread, or—better yet—read against the grain of original intent. Against the idea that the masses are fed mass-produced cultural products and absorb them in zombie-like fashion, Hall allows for the possibility that audiences can form their own interpretations and opinions.

“Race” and ethnicity

In a series of lectures on race, ethnicity, and the nation, delivered at Harvard University in 1993 but not published until 2017,[13] Hall proposes a discursive theorization of the concepts of race and ethnicity. He explores how “race is a cultural and historical, not biological, fact” and in which ways “race is a discursive construct, a sliding signifier.” But “race” as such has no real, underlying biological reality; racial categories have no meaning or “reality” in and of themselves but are charged with various associations in different social contexts. Physical signs—skin color, nose and facial shape, hair type, and so on—are saturated with social meaning, creating differential distributions of resources and power in various social orders across history. Race remains, however, a “myth,” as the anthropologist Robert Sussman later notes, and is hence a profoundly “unscientific idea,” which nevertheless has sociological implications by virtue of the power placed behind racial divisions, or discursive formations, that different societies operate with.

Hall also argues that notions of cultural differences, or ethnicity, today play much the same role as racial differences did in times past, and that ethnicity with its seemingly harmless emphasis on cultural traits nevertheless tends to “slide” onto an essentializing track—what Hall calls a “transcendental fix in common blood, inheritance, and ancestry, all of which gives ethnicity an originary foundation in nature that puts it beyond the reach of history.”[14] In this way, Hall clearly gave witness to the rise of what is sometimes called cultural racism.

Thatcherism

In 1979, the Conservative politician Margaret Thatcher became Prime Minister of Great Britain. Until her resignation in 1990, she led the country out of the social-democratic era regnant since the Second World War, where the great popular mobilization, “the people’s war,” had been replaced by “the people’s peace,” involving major welfare-state reforms such as free health care under the National Health Service (NHS), the nationalization of key industries, comprehensive social welfare benefits and relatively strong redistributive policies. The Thatcher era signified the end of this form of social-democratic ascendancy; it was a polarized time marked by the triumph of political reaction, from the heightened patriotic sentiment against a common enemy during the Falklands War with Argentina to Thatcher’s targeted campaign against striking coal miners in 1984-1985 and the privatization of state-controlled enterprises, aided by Thatcher’s own “neoliberal” think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, which she had co-founded the previous decade.

In Policing the Crisis, published the year before Thatcher came to power, Hall and his co-authors studied an apparently narrow criminological question: Why did a series of muggings in Britain become the subject of heated public debate, frenzied media reporting, and a subsequent tightening of the screws of criminal justice?[15] But the analysis burrowed deeper down to the root of the British state and social order.

Amid economic crisis, young black men came to constitute the “perfect” targets in this political moment, concentrating racialized and class-inflected fears around a potent category of social denigration, far beyond the real or “objective” threat muggings might pose to public safety. But Hall and his colleagues saw in the emergence of what they called a “racialized law and order politics”[16] the contours of a new social order, a new conjuncture, radically different from the social-democratic communitarianism characterizing the “golden age” of the welfare state in the three decades post-1945. In the moral panic surrounding street crime perpetrated by young black men, Hall and his colleagues saw the emergence of what they termed authoritarian populism. The book was prophetic, too, in its predictions of “the collapse of the social democratic consensus” and “the rise of the radical right.”[17]

Social democracy had been a successful political-economic arrangement, allowing broad sections of society to take part in economic productivity gains, while tamping down social contradictions; but as this order began to break down, it became increasingly clear that various “populist” moral crises—often revolving around crime and punishment—were being mobilized in its stead. With the essay collection, The Hard Road to Renewal, published in 1988, it is clear that “Thatcherism” stands for Hall as a key sociopolitical concept. Hall views Thatcher as an authoritarian populist: Thatcher seemed to need the heavy hand of the state to bolster her fluctuating popularity. The concept of authoritarian populism probably remains underspecified, which Hall also acknowledged. But the concept captures something essentially true, still relevant today: “It’s not quite fascism but it has the same structure as fascism does.”[18]

States today solve many of their problems by selecting an external enemy, or an internal enemy that is externalized, to hammer away at, either symbolically or materially, whether that means forcibly detaining families in camps on the Mexican border (under Trump), or deporting asylum seekers to Rwanda (advocated by three consecutive Tory Prime Ministers—Johnson, Truss, and Sunak), or engaging in repeated cycles of tough-on-crime rhetoric and law-and-order policies. Hall was an early and articulate exponent of this peculiar political dynamic, which seems to manifest itself all the more aggressively as states cede control of instruments of economic intervention.

Contradictions and Post-Neoliberalism

Hall had a unique social trajectory. He embodied a series of tensions and outright contradictions, related to class (a relatively privileged middle-class background in colonial, impoverished Jamaica), colonialism (a Caribbean immigrant in white Britain), ideology (a socialist amidst the Oxford intelligentsia), and theory (a culturally-oriented theorist stressing contingency among orthodox Marxists).

But contradictions can be productive. Hall remained a prolific, innovative intellectual for over half a century. He also combined the political and the academic in a way that runs counter to the ethos of contemporary academe. In times of political reaction, we should return to Hall—as someone who forged a way through academic spaces with his ideals not only intact but his intellectual tools sharpened, honed, and refined.

Towards the end of his life, Hall joined with others to publish The Kilburn Manifesto, an attempt to think beyond both Thatcherism and Blair’s New Labour. As in his writings in the late 1970s, where Hall sensed the withering away of social democracy, Hall here seemed to foretell the ways in which neoliberal dogmas would no longer seem quite so self-evidently true by the 2020s. Virtually no other political commentator was writing as early as the year 2015 about a world “After Neoliberalism?”, to quote the manifesto’s title, published at a time when neoliberalism seemed to reign supreme. Once again, Hall was five or ten years ahead of his time.

Although Hall searched for patterns and structures in the social order and was painfully aware of the crushing weight of power and domination in capitalist modernity, he nevertheless believed in the fundamental openness of history and the possibility of political change. For him, a conjuncture was always characterized by contingency. As Hall noted in one of his lectures: “If you don’t agree that there is a degree of openness or contingency to every historical conjuncture, you don’t believe in politics. You don’t believe that anything can be done.”[19] The world can always be remade.

Even when Hall presented his apparently bleak analyses, he often seemed to do so with a gleam in his eye and a faintly ironic smile—as if to suggest that even if everything is impossible, the situation is still far from hopeless.

This essay is an abbreviated, translated version of an essay forthcoming in Norwegian in an edited volume titled Sosial teori (Social Theory).

Book Recommendations

·       Selected Political Writings: The Great Moving Right Show and Other Essays (Duke University Press, 2017). An excellent synoptic overview over Hall’s political interventions and analyses.

·       Familiar Stranger. A Life between Two Islands (Duke University Press/Penguin, 2018). A moving portrait of a life lived in parallax between “two islands”: Jamaica and Britain. 

Footnotes

1 Gilbert, J. (2019). “This conjuncture: For Stuart Hall.” New Formations, 96(1), 5-37, p. 5.

2 Hall, S., Segal, L., & Osborne, P. (1997). “Stuart Hall: Culture and power.” Radical Philosophy 86 (Nov/Dec): 24-41.

3 For a full autobiographical account, see Hall, S. (2017). Familiar Stranger: A Life Between Two Islands. Durham: Duke University Press.

4 Morley, D. (2019) “General introduction.” In: Morley, D. (ed.), Stuart Hall: Essential Essays Vol. 2: Identity and Diaspora. Durham: Duke University Press, p. 1.

5 Jaggi, M. (2009). “Personally speaking: A long conversation with Stuart Hall,” p. 19.

6 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 235.

7 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 232.

8 Williams, Z. (2012). “The Saturday interview: Stuart Hall.” The Guardian, February 11, 2012.

9 Hall, Familiar Stranger, p. 253.

10 Bourdieu, P., Sapiro, G., & McHale, B. (1991). “Fourth lecture. Universal corporatism: The role of intellectuals in the modern world.” Poetics Today, 12(4), 655-669, p. 660.

11 Hall, S. (2019). Essential Essays, Volume 1: Foundations of cultural studies (Morley, D., ed.). Durham: Duke University Press Books, p. 339.

12 Hall, S. (1959) “Politics of adolescence?”. Universities & Left Review, 6 (Spring 1959), 2-4.

13 Hall, S. (2017). The Fateful Triangle: Race, Ethnicity, Nation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

14 Hall, The Fateful Triangle, pp. 108-109.

15 Hall, S., Critcher, C., Jefferson, T., Clarke, J., & Roberts, B. (1978/2013). Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order (2nd ed.). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

16 Hall et al., Policing the Crisis, p. 396.

17 Hall, S. (1985). “Authoritarian populism: A reply to Jessop et al.” New Left Review May/June I/151: 115-124, p. 116.

18 Jaggi, “Personally speaking”, p. 35.

19 Media Education Foundation (2021). “Studying the Conjuncture - Stuart Hall: Through the Prism of an Intellectual Life” [video transcript].

The Eyeless Gaze on Gaza 

We know the facts about the war on Gaza. But facts alone don't make for actionable truth.

We live in a hyper-factual age, where we know more, with greater speed, about more things than ever before in history.

But this has been offset by the counter-emergence of an opposite movement: post-factuality. Free-floating conspiracies now proliferate on the strength of their social-semiotic, not factual, contents: it doesn’t matter whether Haitian immigrants eat cats in Springfield (they don’t, of course), as Trump claimed in the September 2024 presidential debate; what matters instead is that espousing this claim reinforces a tribe of believers united around a leader. There is a kind of everyday religiousness to post-factuality, where new dogmas spring up and fall away—from Pizzagate to the “stolen election” to Springfield’s cats—even amidst a glut of information.

But the hyper-factual deluge of information has another paradoxical effect: the paralysis of political will.

We might call this the Hamlet effect. In Shakespeare’s play, Hamlet knows well what he must do—and yet he’s unable to act, caught instead in volitional stasis. Hamlet points to our late-modern predicament where “enterprises of great pith and moment” nevertheless “lose the name of action” (Act 3, Scene 3)—for though we, like Hamlet, know that we have “cause and will and strength and means” to act, we nevertheless “let all sleep” (Act 4, Scene 4). We are paralyzed, despite objective grounds for action.

To make sense of this, it might be helpful to introduce a distinction between facts and truth.

Facts record what in some sense “really happened,” bracketing for a moment the impossibility of pure, unmediated facts (recall that the word “fact” derives from the Latin fabricere, which means exactly what it sounds like: facts are in some sense “fabrications” or constructions). We can think of facts as attempts—always potentially problematic and contestable, to be sure—to capture instances of happenings in reality.

Truth goes deeper and farther. Truth is that which is actualized out of the virtual, roiling chaos of formless data and is registered or inscribed on the symbolic order. The true makes out of mere factuality the basis for social action.

When climate scientists meticulously amass data about rising temperatures and changing atmospheric conditions, they are accumulating so many facts about climate change; their frustration results from the fact that so little of this work seems to penetrate into the sphere of truth, in which the world might act upon an increasingly unassailable factual record. We have the facts about climate change; what we lack is the next move into the higher-order domain of actualized truth.

The Sightless Seers

In 1936, Aldous Huxley published a novel, Eyeless in Gaza, whose plot has nothing to do with the real-world, geographical Gaza, but whose metaphorical title derives from Milton’s 1671 poem, “Samson Agonistes” (Samson the Champion), in which Samson is described as being “Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with slaves.”

So, who today might be “eyeless in Gaza”?

The historian Yuval Harari, writing in Haaretz, sees the story of Samson as being directly applicable to the plight of Israeli hostages, for Samson is the “tale of a Jewish hero kidnapped to Gaza, where he was held in dark captivity by the Philistines, and severely tortured.” The philosopher Slavoj Žižek, meanwhile, drawing on the same narrative strand, thinks both Israel and Hamas are “blinded by their acts”: “Hamas expected to deliver Palestinians from the Israeli yoke,” which, clearly, it failed to accomplish, while Israeli right-wing policies are tragically “reinforcing anti-Semitism all around the world”—and, paradoxically, as the journalist Amos Harel notes, “endangering Israel’s security,” despite its intentions to the contrary.

But a third option presents itself: perhaps it is we, the world’s onlookers to the war on Gaza, who are eyeless. Though in full possession of our ocular faculties, we have failed to register what is happening there at the level of symbolic inscription and make it part of our “truth,” to be acted upon in bringing about an end to the war.

There is to be sure a great deal of factual recording of events on the Gaza Strip—even though we should consider just how muted the Western media’s response has been to its essential disbarment from the enclave. In February 2024, more than 50 journalists called for “free and unfettered access to Gaza for all foreign media,” addressing both Israel and Egypt. But the media have largely been remarkably silent about their enforced absence. Instead, the media appear content to rely on second-hand information, official Israeli accounts, semi-verifiable first-person accounts, and on-the-ground video recordings harvested from social media.

Maybe, then, it is the Western media that is “eyeless in Gaza,” happily relying on the vision of others. This also allows for a certain degree of disavowal. Since Western media outlets have not themselves been able to verify their second-hand reports, they can engage in a degree of journalistic hand-washing: their very absence permits the continuous sowing of doubt about Palestinian casualty figures, for instance, from the “Hamas Ministry of Health”—a rhetorical game that Dominic de Villepin, the former French foreign minister, resoundingly critiqued on French radio recently.

But if the New York Times, or the London Times, or El País, or Süddeutsche Zeitung, or Le Figaro, or Corriere della Sera, had their own reporters on the ground in Gaza, would the war end more quickly? If CNN set up its cameras in Rafah, could the IDF continue its actions with relative impunity? Israel does seem to depend on its warfare not being seen by and through the Western media’s own gaze. And one consequence of Israel’s bombardment is to make it so unsafe that few Western media organizations can send their reporters to conduct reporting of their own. A cessation in hostilities in Gaza might also mean the beginning of a concerted Western media presence there, with all the dangers to power this entails.

But this is perhaps placing too much faith in facts. Might not the problem instead be a lack of actualized truth rather than facts as such? Information has flowed, thanks to non-Western outlets like Al Jazeera, the UN’s continuous reports, NGOs like Doctors without Borders, and the more than 100 Palestinian journalists killed so far. We know largely what has taken place; the overall factual picture is relatively clear.

From Facts to Truth

The problem lies in transforming mere facts into actionable truth. We don't need more facts about Gaza; rather, we need to recognize and internalize Gaza's truth, embedding it into the West's symbolic order, where it has long been absent. Only when facts are integrated into the symbolic order can they become actionable truths.

While Ukraine rightly received an outpouring of sympathy after Russia's 2022 invasion, leading to some of the largest military and fiscal aid packages in the post-Cold War era, the fate of Gaza’s civilian population has been met with something of a collective shrug by the major Western states. Instead, tens of billions of dollars (and hundreds of millions of euros) worth of financial support and munitions packages have flowed to Israel. While the defense of Ukraine quickly became the West's truth, Gaza remains ignored, even as more than 40,000 Palestinians have died since the terrible October 7th attacks.

This war would end in short order if the UN Security Council decided to send peacekeepers to police and protect the Gaza Strip, or if the U.S. cut aid to Israel. Perhaps it would help, too, if networks like CNN could safely conduct round-the-clock (and non-embedded) broadcasting from the enclave. But even with all eyes on Gaza, we still need mechanisms for turning sight into action.

The facts are clear—the truth, less so.

Ethnonationalist Bloat, or Where Does a Country’s “Feeling of Fullness” Come From? 

Anti-immigration movements often speak of their country being full. But with the right policies, there's plenty of room for everyone.

“We’ve had enough!” — “There’s no more room!” — “They’re to blame for the housing shortage!” — “They’ve taken all our jobs.” — “Our country is full.”

Variations on these anti-immigration slogans can be heard in one form or another across much of the Western world. In 2013, a director of the Confederation of Norwegian Enterprise (NHO), an employers’ association, asserted that “Norway has no more room for Swedish people,” then a sizeable labor migrant population engaged in low-paid service jobs in Norway. In the run-up to the Brexit referendum, The Guardian’s liberal columnist Zoe Williams published a commentary responding to claims that “a lack of room” in Britain was driving a necessary tougher stance on immigration. More recently, New York’s mayor Eric Adams pronounced to an audience in Mexico that “there is no more room in New York” for arriving migrants, before adding, in a cynical twist: “Our hearts are endless, but our resources are not.” Meanwhile, under the headline, “No more room for refugees in Germany?”, the broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported that the “country's municipalities say they cannot take any more” Ukrainian refugees. In Ireland, in the wake of anti-immigrant rioting, Dublin’s city authorities announced that it had “run out of room for refugees,” the Financial Times reported.

The sense that a country is “full” or “running out of space”—for foreigners, asylum seekers, refugees, (im)migrants, or ethnic minorities—has very little to do with physical space. Instead, it has everything to do with symbolic space, that part of the inner mind where shared, internalized mental representations reside—the interior collective consciousness, containing norms and categories, concepts and precepts, where friends and foes are allocated their proper place and the boundaries of group-identity are drawn, maintained, and policed.

Policing (ethnicized) national group-identity is extremely important to one particular ideological demographic, which we can call ethnonationalists.  Ethnonationalists are people who believe in the—innate or cultural, it makes little difference—superiority of a privileged folk-group, or ethnos, which is said to enjoy the right to legitimate domination over a particular nation-state.

Now, the problem that ethnonationalists face in a globalized world of economically, culturally, and physically interdependent, interconnected societies is that their own favorite ethnos is constantly at risk of being overrun, dislocated, weakened or polluted (as the anthropologist Mary Douglas would say) by the disturbing, contaminating presence of some undesirable Other.

And so the ethnonationalist’s work of policing the bounds is a Sisyphean labor, going on endlessly and demanding the constant mobilization of state, political, cultural, and cognitive apparatuses to defend against intrusion—whether at the outer limit (in the form of “protecting our borders”) or in some more intermediate form (by “protecting our culture,” or “our ways of life”, or “our jobs,” or “our welfare state,” or “our neighborhoods,” or “our women”—it is remarkable how quickly ethnonationalists draw near the sexual taboo of “miscegenation”).

But when ethnonationalists speak of the fullness of their country, they are not expressing a belief about the physical parameters of the country: After all, most countries are full…of nothing—that is, “empty” natural, underdeveloped or underconcentrated spaces. Instead, these ethnonationalists are projecting a sense that symbolic space is precisely being “overrun” by a disturbing presence.

Philosophers of an ontological bent sometimes pose the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?”. Ethnonationalists give this probing existential question a twist of their own: “Why should we accept that there be ‘something rather than nothing,’ that is, why should we accept the intrusion of a foreign Other into a ‘crowded’ symbolic space that we, in more honest moments, must readily admit is layered atop what really amounts to plentiful physical space?”. Contra the ethnonationalists, the fear of overcrowding, of being crowded out, is not a sensation that has its basis in physical or geographic realities but is a symbolically freighted fear, anxiety or outright delusion, carried forth by the apprehension that one’s favored ethnos might be displaced, or just slightly diminished, even if this in real terms would only represent a very moderate dilution of their power or privilege.

The Distension of the Symbolic

So where does this xenophobic “feeling of fullness” come from? Whence this ethnonationalist bloat spreading across the West this past decade?

The correlation between a country’s physical fullness and an overarching sense of “societal fullness” is weak if not nonexistent. On the contrary, there are societies that are highly dense and yet seem capable of being run along quite cosmopolitan lines. Singapore comes to mind, with its more than 8,000 people per square kilometer and concomitantly vibrant multicultural welter of peoples (which is not to discount its authoritarian governance system). 

And then, on the other hand, you have countries like Iceland, with an average of 4 people per square kilometer, and which has in the past been known to pursue a quite restrictive immigration policy: in 2017, at the height of the “Syrian immigrant crisis,” Iceland was reported to have “accepted fewer than 600 refugees” since 1956. Just as Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel famously announced, “Wir schaffen das!” (We can do this!), allowing nearly a million Syrian refugees in under the banner of a cosmopolitan Willkommenskultur (“Welcoming culture”), Iceland only granted 16 Syrians asylum in 2016.

Or take Australia: it has an average of 3 inhabitants per square kilometer, even less than that of Iceland. Much of that area uninhabitable, of course, at least without significant technological and infrastructure investments. But even so, by any stretch of the imagination, Australia is a nearly completely empty country—and yet it practices some of the most hardline immigration politics in the southern hemisphere. Think only of the Christmas Island internment camp, or the semi-pornographic television series, Border Security:  Australia’s Front Line, that glorifies a tough-on-immigrants stance in a frenzied (ethnonationalistic) spectacle of sovereignty.

So the paradox is: You can be an almost totally physically empty country, like Iceland and Australia, and be highly restrictive on immigration—or you can be a very or moderately densely populated country, like Singapore or Germany, and (at least at times) practice a relatively liberal immigration policy. Of course, the two are likely to be somewhat correlated: The chances are, the welcoming countries will be more densely populated precisely because they practice a more liberal attitude towards foreigners. Still, the point remains: Iceland was “too full” to accept more than 16 Syrian asylum seekers in 2016, and yet in actual, objective terms, Iceland is one of the emptiest countries in the world. Australia is “too full” to accept “boat refugees” and therefore “had to” intern them—under horrific conditions—on Christmas Island for years on end and to great international censure.

To Purge and Protect

Ethnonationalist bloat, to repeat, has nothing to do with physical space. It has everything to do with symbolic space, which must, in the ethnonationalist imaginary, be purified and purged at regular intervals and kept clear of dangerous infiltration by foreign elements. Anxious ethnonationalists are always prepared to declare themselves full, as if having imbibed on too much cosmopolitanism or engorged themselves on diversity: they wish nothing more than to enjoy the emptiness of their real physical spaces, a pristine mirror replicating the purity of an (imaginary) symbolic space unsullied by intruders. 

Of course, this stance is fake: Many ethnonationalists are all too ready to enjoy the fruits of the global order. They may eat Chinese food, watch Egyptian movies and South Korean TV shows, head “south” on their holidays, buy imported consumer goods from Thailand and Bangladesh, or hire foreign-born or ethnic-minority laborers to work in and around their homes (as the Harvard sociologist Matthew Desmond shows in his book, Poverty, America, middle-class professionals in the U.S. are reluctant to upset the country’s class/race order in part because they benefit from the low-cost service provision it enables)

If ethnonationalists are less willing to admit people from these countries in as their equivalent neighbors, in the fully theological sense of that word, we should not accept, even for a moment, the narratives of fullness that abound. Instead, it is the ethnonationalist imaginary that is full—filled with dangers and threats, which are often pure inventions of minds distended with undigested figments.

When an ethnonationalist declares their country to be full, they are projecting symbolic space onto physical space. It is up to us to disentangle the two and show what can still be accomplished—through the combined efforts of people of good will—in the real, material world.

***

First published on Substack.

Ontocide: The Despair of Gaza 

Ontocide destroys the will to care about things in the world. Together with politicide and genocide, it forms the “dark triad of occupation”: destroy the state, the people, and meaning as such.

Gaza is being decimated. There are reports of polio virus found in Gaza’s sewage by the World Health Organization (WHO). Mountains of garbage are piling up as basic services have collapsed. The UN reports that clearing 40 million tons of rubble may take 15 years, with housing stock not rebuilt until 2040 at an estimated cost of $40 billion. And as of July 2024, some 39,000 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza. The real body count may prove much higher, given the significant destruction of civil infrastructure by Israel’s armed forces, making recovering and registering fatalities difficult, with thousands likely buried beneath the rubble of the bombed-out enclave.

That the War on Gaza may one day be classified as genocidal by the International Criminal Court (ICC) seems increasingly likely as international legal institutions dare to condemn Israel’s government. Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the UN’s top court, determined that Israel’s “continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory” was “illegal” and should end as “rapidly as possible” (even as the Court limited their scope to East Jerusalem and the West Bank). In May 2024, the ICC prosecutor applied for arrest warrants against Hamas’s leadership as well as Benjamin Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant.

The Israeli sociologist Baruch Kimmerling has described Israel’s policies as a form of politicide, involving the “gradual but systematic attempt to cause Palestinians’ annihilation as an independent social, political and economic entity.” If politicide involves the denial of statehood and/or destruction of the basic trappings of an autonomous polity (including, as Max Weber pointed out long ago, the right to collect taxes which serves as the fiscal basis of the state), then genocide is the deathly acceleration and lethal concentration of a state’s firepower against the Other, the maturation of a still-nascent germ at the core of politicide.

Less commented upon than the “polity-destroying” (politicidal) or “people-destroying” (genocidal) nature of war and occupation, however, is the Gaza War’s deeply damaging effects on the continued belief in existential meaning and hope. This overwhelming destruction of meaning can be said to constitute what we can call ontocide (from the Greek, ὄντως [ontos] or “being”): Like any besieged, bombed, and starving population, Gazans are not only being killed and displaced in the thousands but are also facing a destruction of belief in the future, of meaning-in-existence, and of certainty that their personhood will advance into the future, under reasonably safe and secure conditions, respectful of their human dignity. Ontocide is the killing of belief in existence as such, the destruction of faith that the world, and the people who live in it, will go on, achieved through the concentrated intensification of multiple, overlapping agonies. Needless to say, ontocide is a terrible crime, because it tends to grind down the survivors—and all genocides in modern history have left survivors to pick up the pieces.

Ontocide is taking place in Gaza. By April 2024, after 200 days of war, some 75,000 tons of explosives had been dropped on Gaza—more than the bombing of Dresden in 1945. The result of this atrocity is pure negativity and despair: As someone has written on the walls of Gaza’s European Hospital: “We don’t care anymore about anything.” And who can blame them? The Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem has collected eyewitness testimonials from Gaza’s population, which vividly demonstrate the deep despair into which the enclave’s civilians have been thrown. One 30-year-old man “recounted how his entire family was killed while sheltering in a Rafah warehouse, after repeatedly being displaced”:

Since then, I’ve been alone in the world. I lost my family. I have no home and no future. I cry every day. I go to sleep alone and wake up lonely and lost…My mother really wanted me to get married. We hoped the war would end and we’d go back to our lives, but they killed my mother, my father and everyone else in my family. They killed everyone…My life is black now. I don’t think I’ll ever get over the trauma.

The Doctors without Borders psychologist Davide Musardo has recorded similarly harrowing eyewitness accounts from the ground:

Children maimed, with burns or without parents. Children having panic attacks, because physical pain triggers psychological wounds when pain reminds you of the bomb that changed your life forever. […] ‘I haven’t had a glass of fresh water for months. What kind of life is this?’ another patient asked me…I have seen people break down when receiving news of another evacuation order. Some people have changed places as many as 12 times in eight months. ‘I won’t move my tent anymore, I might as well die,’ I have heard people say. […] In Gaza, one survives but the exposure to trauma is constant. Everything is missing, even the idea of a future. For people, the greatest anguish is not today – the bombs, the fighting and the mourning – but the aftermath. There is little confidence about peace and reconstruction, while the children I saw in the hospital showed clear signs of regression.

To repeat: “Everything is missing, even the idea of future.”

Despair is a weapon of war, and ontocide is a tool for destroying hope and meaning, instilling existential emptiness in the Other.

Are not Gazans today slowly being turned into a kind of “living dead,” husks of humanity for whom little remains but bleak despair, with those fortunate enough to survive the 500-, 1000- or 2000-pound bombs, mostly supplied by the United States, left to attempt to reconstitute fragments of meaning in a totally abyssal, meaningless world? For these seemingly lucky ones, trauma is too weak a word; for them it is as if the world itself has ended.

For the survivors of genocide, the problem of existential meaning can prove intractable. Adorno famously wrote that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Finding or reclaiming meaning after the destruction of meaning—the subjective experience of ontocide—is among the primary difficulties facing survivors. There can be great cruelty in having survived the guns and bombs—only to find that nothing matters, that “we don’t care anymore about anything,” as the anonymous graffiti in the Gazan hospital writer phrased it. Speaking to B’Tselem in February, a 45-year-old Palestinian mother of nine said: “We’re exhausted. We’re broken and have no strength left…I don't know where else we can run. We’ve been displaced four times. I don’t know what fate awaits us.”

When 24-year-old Muhammed Bhar, a Gaza resident with Down’s syndrome, was bitten by an Israeli army dog during a military raid on his family’s apartment, according to a BBC report, and found two weeks later, dead and on the floor by his displaced family, the question of despair naturally sets in: We find ourselves thrown into an abyssal horror story, that of a totally defenseless, innocent disabled person mauled in the course of a military raid. As his brother Nabila described to the BBC: “This scene I will never forget…I constantly see the dog tearing at him and his hand, and the blood pouring from his hand…It is always in front of my eyes, never leaving me for a moment. We couldn't save him, neither from them nor from the dog.”

Reclaiming existence after existence as such has been shattered is a near-insurmountable task. Think only here of Samuel Beckett’s famously paradoxical phrase: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Politicide smooths the way to genocide, and genocide naturally pairs with ontocide—its natural consequence for those escaping lethal destruction. The triplet of politicide, genocide, and ontocide might even be said to constitute the dark triad of occupation: destroy the state, destroy the people, destroy meaning as such.

Faced with this “dark triad,” the question confronting the international community is raised poignantly by two volunteer medical doctors returned from the Gaza Strip: “We must decide, once and for all: are we for or against murdering children, doctors and emergency medical personnel? Are we for or against demolishing an entire society?”

To this we can add: Are we for or against the destruction of belief in meaning as such? How can those who must go on, still go on? And what chance for poetry “after Gaza”?

The Nexus of the Presidency 

Overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance: What matters more is the nexus of forces the President surrounds himself with.

On Friday, the New York Times Editorial Board called for Biden’s resignation from the 2024 presidential race. Recognizing that a call for “ending his candidacy” was an extraordinary step, the Times still lamented “the president’s performance,” noting: “Even when Mr. Biden tried to lay out his policy proposals, he stumbled.”

The somewhat hysterical anti-Biden reactions to the Biden-Trump presidential debate on CNN suggest that we still have an essentially olympic and theatrical relationship to politics, that is, a politics of performance and (implicit) athleticism.

But overemphasizing Biden’s verbal gaffes and stammering risks falling prey to a reactionary politics of the performance.

In the age of hyperindividualized politics, what counts, seemingly, is measuring the figure of the Leader, according to the ideals of the individual performer—a bit like a contestant on America’s Got Talent, or an athlete in an olympic sport evaluated by judges, like gymnastics or figure skating. As the comedian Jon Stewart said, to much laughter from his audience: “Both of these men should be using performance-enhancing drugs.” And while this is a good line for a stand-up comedian, it nevertheless reveals the essentially performative-dramaturgical nature of politics in the West today. 

Clearly, criticizing this hyperindividuality has its limits. The President of the United States is often thought to be the most powerful individual in the world, and there is a performative, “personal suitability” element to the job. To take but one example: The President stands at the apex of a nuclear weapons force that includes more than 400 nuclear-armed Minuteman intercontinental ballistic missiles, 14 Ohio-class submarines carrying up to 20 nuclear ballistic missiles, and 66 nuclear-armed bombers; in theory, the President has the power to wipe out all of humanity at the push of a button. On a smaller scale, the U.S. president wields the authority to assassinate single persons using drone strikes: President Obama, for instance, ordered 563 drone strikes during his two-term presidency, killing “between 384 and 807 civilians” in Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen; and Trump nearly started a regional conflagration in the Middle East in 2020 when he ordered the airstrike that killed the Iranian general, Qasem Soleimani in Baghdad. The President also has the power to (attempt to) break individual dissidents, as the case of Julian Assange’s 14-year ordeal shows. All of this means that personal suitability and individual characteristics are not totally irrelevant. 

And yet: We ought to think more about the way a President acts as a nexus of complex interlocking forces involving a machinery of politics that draws upon the energies of thousands of individuals: An incoming president must, for example, make “about 4,000 political appointments” in a short period of time after taking up office. As the philosopher Slavoj Zizek reminds us, via Hegel, the King should be an idiot, an “idiotic dotter of the i’s.” It is when the Leader “embodied the rational totality”—Stalin comes to mind—that we are really in trouble and run the risk of a figurehead who involves themselves in every aspect of the polity.

Thinking in terms of nexus, not personal character—and what kinds of forces will be mobilized within this nexus—should occupy our time far more than the current hyper-stress on individuality indicates.

So what kind of nexus of forces did the two presidents hint at in the debate?

First, Biden pulled leftward and attacked Trump for his vehement class politics. It is telling in the extreme that Biden’s very first statement went straight for Trump’s class/economic jugular: “[H]e rewarded the wealthy. He had the largest tax cut in American history, $2 trillion,” Biden said. The 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act (TCJA) is the most important Trump policy that hardly anyone seems to remember.

Remember that Biden is the first sitting U.S. president who has attended an ongoing strike: In September 2023, he “visited a picket line in Michigan in a show of loyalty to autoworkers.” And as Bernie Sanders points out in his most recent book, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism, Biden in 2020 understood the need to “adopt policies that could create some degree of excitement within the progressive community.” He can be made to understand it again.

Second, Biden suggested a much more fiery and self-assertive (potentially progressive) Democratic Party, with barbs against Trump that matched the 45th president’s own historic aggressiveness. In one memorable utterance, Biden said of his opponent, “You have the morals of an alley cat,” after having accused him of “having sex with a porn star”—words one never expected to hear in a U.S. presidential debate. Biden dismissed  Trump’s ramblings coolly: “I’ve never heard so much malarkey in my whole life.” And when Trump accused Biden, surreally, of being “a very bad Palestinian,” Biden rightly riposted that he had “never heard so much foolishness.”  He sliced against Trump’s alleged remark that the war dead of World War I were “losers and suckers,” and attacked Trump’s far-right allegiances for his infamous, and chilling, remark after the Charlotesville “Unite the Right Rally” that there were “fine people on both sides.”

Biden’s gloves were off, which is the only way of dealing effectively with Trump: One must, within limits and while maintaining one’s dignity, confront Trump at his own rhetorical level. Silk-glove politics will not work against Trump the street brawler. For all of Biden’s verbal bumbling and stumbling, it remains the case that Trump, as Biden rightly said, “has no idea what the hell he’s talking about”: He is the ultimate empty signifier, the opportunist par excellence, who turns wherever the winds of political fortune will take him.

Trump did not do himself any favors among black or other minority voters when describing the former as “the black people”—a syntactic construction seeming to confirm suspicions that his relations to minority voters are still entangled in the racist policies of his father’s real-estate business in the 1970s, when black would-be tenants found themselves barred from Fred Sr.’s buildings.

Third, on the geopolitical front, Biden’s statements suggested business as usual, and stasis, with more deaths and killings on the horizon. It was clear he had no meaningful policy for Ukraine—short of delivering ATACMS missiles and the like—capable of pulling the country out of its stalemate, if not outright war of attrition, with the more populous Russia. Trump, conversely, could credibly score major points on his observation that “[t]hat’s a war that should have never started” and his view that “they’re running out of people, they’re running out of soldiers, they’ve lost so many people.” His pathos-filled line, “It’s so sad,” even seemed half-authentic.

On Palestine, Biden’s ghoulish side came to the fore. He claimed to have denied Israel nothing except “2,000-pound bombs” because “[t]hey don’t work very well in populated areas. They kill a lot of innocent people. We are providing Israel with all the weapons they need and when they need them.” This pseudo-noble attitude is an outright lie: The news agency Reuters has revealed that the U.S. has in fact sent some 14,000 MK-84 2,000-pound bombs. Biden’s latter claim, however, is more or less accurate: He has provided Israel with all the weapons they want (though “need” implies that the destruction of Gaza is rational, not wanton): “6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker-buster bombs, 2,600 air-dropped small-diameter bombs,” according to Reuters. The dead and mutilated among the ruins of Gaza cry out against Biden’s presidency.

Two other elements stand out from that night': The lack of an audience—and yet Biden for some reason walking out on to the stage pointing and smiling, as if to an invisible or spectral audience—with the consequence that both candidates looked like Zoom-call lecturers at the height of the pandemic, speaking out into the abyss of virtual space; and the absurdity of the two candidates comparing their golf game, in what is surely the most “privileged male senior citizen” moment in U.S. presidential politics.

The absence of an audience is hard to square with the democratic process: Even if we all know that the audiences in televised debates are likely highly selective and, in some sense, “rigged,” maintaining this minimal fiction, it turns out, is still important to what I would call, borrowing a term from the culinary arts, the “mouthfeel” of democracy. Without even this veneer of public participation, the (Baudrillardian) simulacra-like tendencies of modern democratic politics reach an almost unbearable degree.

***

In short, for Biden, the debate performance amounts to a familiar picture: An unhinged or impotent foreign policy (on Gaza and Ukraine, respectively), and yet with a domestic policy that can, with enough popular mobilization, be pulled leftward. In his most recent book, Bernie Sanders boasts of having “succeeded in pushing Biden in a more progressive direction” back in 2020. The question is whether the left in America can succeed in doing so again—that is, in reshaping the nexus of forces that Biden represents, more so than obsessing over his personal characteristics, such as they are.

[First published on The Theory Brief (Substack).]