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.This article was published as a CCCS stencilled paper in1975, but it was originally prepared as part of a report on TV for UNESCO in1971.One has to deduce UNESCO s brief from the discussion, but it seems tohave required the consideration of how television might be enlisted to supportthe popularization or dissemination of high art Culture.The article makesskilled, confident and early use of semiotics and its various formulations in thework of Barthes, Wollen and Pierce.It also radically rewrites Hall s position fromThe Popular Arts.Rather than arguing for better television through the adap-tation of high art, for instance, Hall argues that the UNESCO briefmisunderstands the relation between the medium and the culture.Popular televi-sion is the centre of this relation and to persist in attempting to integrate thedomains of art and popular television is anachronistic.He concludes: Television invites us, not to serve up the traditional dishes of culture more effec-tively, but to make real the Utopian slogan which appeared in May 1968,60 THE BRI TI SH TRADI TI ONadorning the walls of the Sorbonne, Art is dead.Let us create everyday life (1975: 113).This flamboyant final flourish is perhaps a little of its time, but thedeployment of the phrase everyday life is strategic, invoking the enterprise ofcultural studies.In the same year, 1971, a paper Hall delivered to the British SociologicalAssociation, Deviancy, Politics and the Media , displays the influence of struc-turalism and semiotics.To support his attack on American media research, Halluses the work of Lévi-Strauss, Barthes, Althusser and Gramsci.These two papersprovide evidence of Hall s early interest in European theory, much of it unavail-able in English translation, and certainly not widely deployed within thedisciplines from which cultural studies was emerging.9 Indeed, part of Hall s rolewithin cultural studies has been as a conduit through which European struc-turalist theory reached British researchers and theorists; in the United Statesduring the 1990s he was to serve a similar role for British transformations of thattheory.A substantial proportion of Hall s writings are available as chapters withinreaders published through the CCCS and the Open University, or as individualarticles or chapters.He is an editor of many readers, and the co-author of prob-ably the most thorough and magisterial application of cultural studies theory sofar, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order (Hall et al.1978).In this book, Hall s own background (West Indian) must have played a part inrecovering the issue of race as one of concern to cultural studies.Surprisingly,perhaps, issues of race and empire were not at the forefront of British culturalstudies work in its early years (see the discussion of this in Chapter 7), nor at theforefront of Hall s own published work during his time at the CCCS.The analysisof the media, the investigation of practices of resistance within subcultures, andthe public construction of political power in Britain were his overriding concernsat that time.More recently, issues of representation and identity in which raceand ethnicity play a prominent role have dominated his published work (Hall andDu Gay 1996; Morley and Chen 1996).There is some debate about the political and cultural placement of Hall scontribution.Jon Stratton and Ien Ang have discussed him as the epitome of the diasporic intellectual (1996), someone capable of interrogating their culturefrom positions that are both within and outside their society.On the other hand,Chris Rojek (1998) has presented an argument which ties Hall s political philos-ophy to a long-standing stream of British antinomianism and thus to an entirely British intellectual history.Perhaps Stratton and Ang cover both angles withtheir argument that Hall problematizes Britishness from within.According totheir reading of Hall s work, he has foregrounded the Britishness of culturalstudies while nevertheless questioning the current definitions of British national61 FI RST PRI NCI PLESidentity
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