Page 164 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

152 LAWRENCE GROSSBERG

It is difficult to identify a single position, concern, tradition or method in
Hall’s work, or to assign specific arguments to a single theoretical level or
‘empirical’ arena. The ‘multi-accentuality’ of his work is magnified by his
commitment to modes of collective intellectual work and authorship
(1988b). His ‘author-ity’ extends far beyond those texts he himself has
authored; he is as much a teacher and an activist as a writer. As a founding
member of the New Left in England and the first editor of the influential
New Left Review, as one of those crucially responsible for the definition
and institutionalization of ‘cultural studies’ during his tenure at the
Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, and as a leading
figure in the attempt to forge a new marxism—both intellectual and
practical—since moving to the Open University, his work embodies an
ongoing project, realized in an explicit dialogue with others and
characterized above all by a modesty and generosity, as much in his
descriptions of people in concrete historical situations as in his
considerations of other positions. Anyone who has had the pleasure of
hearing or meeting Hall knows the special quality of his presence, a
presence that combines his political and intellectual passion with the
commitment to human decency that pervades all his interactions. 1
In fact, Hall’s own discursive practice exemplifies those commitments.
His engagement with other writers embodies a ‘critical dialogue’: he
simultaneously borrows and distances himself from them, struggling with
their texts, re-inflecting them into his own understanding of history as an
active struggle. History and theory—both enact an ongoing process of
what Gramsci called ‘destruction and reconstruction’ or, in Hall’s terms,
‘de-and re-articulation’ (although Hall tends to use ‘articulation’ when
talking about cultural or signifying practices). While many increasingly
acknowledge the need for theoretical complexity, Hall elaborates and
concretizes that demand as he moves from the more abstract to the more
concrete. He rarely claims that the questions he addresses are sufficient,
merely that they are often ignored. He does not offer his answers as
authoritative; he seeks rather to open up new fields of exploration and
critical reflection, to put on the agenda of the left whatever is being kept
off, to challenge that which we take for granted. His theoretical advances
are offered, not as the end of a debate, but as the ongoing attempt to
understand the complexity, contradictions and struggles within the
concrete lives of human beings. Yet the model of his practice—as a writer,
teacher, theoretician, cultural critic and political strategist—and the middle
ground he constantly tries to occupy, can be extended beyond the debates
he addresses. It is this commitment to struggle, at all levels, which
constitutes the centre of his current position and the theme of his latest
work.
Nevertheless, Hall does write from a particular position, defined in part
by his own social and intellectual history. The latter is likely to be