Page 224 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

Chapter 10
Opening the Hallway

Some remarks on the fertility of Stuart Hall’s
contribution to critical theory

John Fiske

If we had to characterize Stuart Hall’s contribution to the development of
cultural studies in one word, that word would be ‘open’. His work
typically opens up what had seemed to be closed off; his project is always
open-ended, always in progress and thus always open to the contributions
of others; he constantly opens doors through which people may pass and
meet, sometimes surprisingly as when he brings Lévi-Strauss through one,
Gramsci through another and shows that the conversation between them is
richer than the monologues in their own rooms. And his political energies
never deviate from his aim of opening up the strategies of the power bloc to
critical inspection, and opening up the democratic processes to those who
would use them to advance democracy.
Though scrupulously situating his work within a marxist tradition, he is
in constant and productive disagreement with the rigidly determinist and
reductionist strands within it. He brings Laclau into conversation with
Althusser and demonstrates that the way that contributors to Screen
developed Althusser’s theory of ideology into a closed and totalizing system
was tactical and not necessary: indeed, the concept of the ‘not necessary’ is
one that he uses often and productively to open up mechanically
deterministic accounts of the overdetermining structural relations that
Althusser describes so convincingly. By showing that the structural pressure
exerted by these relations is not the same as necessary determination, Hall
opens up the closed system of Screen’s Althusserianism and finds spaces for
engagement that its totalizing tendency denies: he shows that the relations
that are formed are the result of social agency in historically contingent
conditions, and that social agency can be exerted by formations of the
people as well as by those of the power bloc. He detaches ideology from
any necessary exclusive articulation with the interests of the dominant
classes and shows that subordinate social groups can, and do, produce
ideologies that function for them as does Ideology-with-a-capital for the

This article is based on ideas initially developed in John Fiske and Jon Watts’ ‘An
articulating culture: Hall, meaning and power’, in the 1986 Journal of
Communication Inquiry’s Special Issue on Stuart Hall.