Page 162 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

150 INTERVIEW WITH STUART HALL

foundations of existing academic departments, existing intellectual
divisions, and disciplinary curricula. It becomes a kind of ‘received
knowledge’, instead of having a real critical and deconstructive edge to it.
But I don’t know what you do about that; I don’t know how you refuse
success. I think that in America, cultural studies is sometimes used as just
one more paradigm. You know, there are fifteen around, so this time I will
say that I have a cultural studies approach…. I understand why that
happens because, in a sense, there is a perspective there, despite its
eclecticism and relative openness. It has always been trying to integrate
itself into a perspective. That’s inevitable whenever you try to get people to
do research collectively because they have to collaborate while trying to
answer specific questions. So there is a thrust toward codification
inevitably, as the project develops and generates work. Let me put it this
way: you have to be sure about a position in order to teach a class, but you
have to be open-ended enough to know that you are going to change your
mind by the time you teach it next week. As a strategy, that means holding
enough ground to be able to think a position but always putting it in a way
which has a horizon toward open-ended theorization. Maintaining that is
absolutely essential for cultural studies, at least if it is to remain a critical
and deconstructive project. I mean that it is always self-reflectively
deconstructing itself; it is always operating on the progressive/regressive
movement of the need to go on theorizing. I am not interested in Theory, I
am interested in going on theorizing. And that also means that cultural
studies has to be open to external influences, for example, to the rise of new
social movements, to psychoanalysis, to feminism, to cultural differences.
Such influences are likely to have, and must be allowed to have, a strong
impact on the content, the modes of thought and the theoretical
problematics being used. In that sense, cultural studies cannot possibly
thrive by isolating itself in academic terms from those external influences.
So in all those ways I think there are good reasons, not just personal
predilections, for saying that it must remain open-ended. It is theorizing in
the postmodern context, if you like, in the sense that it does not believe in
the finality of a finished theoretical paradigm.

Editor’s Note
This article is drawn from interview sessions with Hall conducted by
S.Elizabeth Bird, Marilyn Smith, Patrick O’Brien and Kuan-Hsing Chen (on
postmodernism) at the University of Iowa School of Journalism and Mass
Communication in September 1985, and by Cary Nelson, Lawrence
Grossberg and others (on articulation) at the University of Illinois Unit for
Criticism and Interpretive Theory in August 1985. Transcriptions were
made by Kuan-Hsing Chen and Michael Greer.