Page 31 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

INTRODUCTION 19

his mode of working that he should, at this point, wish to return to a
question which, from another point of view, would now seem superseded
or outmoded, in relation to current orthodoxies. Indeed, we would want to
suggest that Hall’s intellectual practice is, in this respect, quite exemplary.
Hall has never been interested either in ‘orthodoxy’ or in ‘theory’, and
‘theoretical orthodoxies’ (especially ones which, in absolutist terms, present
themselves as definitively superseding all that went before) have always
been anathema to him. In his presentation to the Illinois conference, quoted
earlier, Hall also referred to what he called the ‘necessary modesty of
theory’ in cultural studies. More polemically, in ‘Old and new identities’
(1991a) he remarks that ‘theory is always a detour [if a necessary detour—
DM/KHC] on the way to something more interesting’ (op. cit.: 42). In ‘On
postmodernism and articulation’ Hall says ‘I am not interested in Theory, I
am interested in going on theorizing…in the postmodern context’
(chapter 6: 150). This interest in theorizing the concrete historical issues
confronting us in any particular conjuncture would seem to us to be
essential to the spirit of, as Hall himself puts it in that interview, how and
why ‘cultural studies must remain open-ended.’
However, we want to suggest that what is particularly impressive and
important in Hall’s own approach is not only an open-endedness about the
future development of the discipline, but also a certain kind of open-
mindedness about its past—or rather about the process through which its
past is to be constituted—and about how debates ‘progress’ within cultural
studies, about how one set of ideas come to ‘disturb’ or displace another. The
question is, what happens to what is displaced? (see the comments above,
about the contemporary possibilities of a ‘return’ to the question of class in
cultural studies): is it to be entirely discarded or rejected? If so, we are
likely to enjoy a succession of exclusive orthodoxies, each enjoying a brief,
if absolute, intellectual reign, prior to being dethroned by the next
intellectually fashionable paradigm and itself removed to the dungeons
reserved for the intellectually passé. Hall simply does not operate in this
way: he has always refused the temptations of the easy point-scoring,
negative critical perspective, which is concerned to enhance its own
arguments by rubbishing those of others. His tendency has, rather, always
been to the most productive sort of eclecticism, in which he will always
look for the best, the most useful part—which can be taken from another
(often opposed) intellectual position and worked with (and on) positively.
It is a tendency towards a selective, syncretic, mode of inclusiveness,
dialogue and transformation—rather than to ‘critique’ and rejection of that
which is opposed to his own point of view or position. The politics of
discipleship or denunciation are equally anathema to him. As he puts it in
‘Cultural studies and the politics of internationalization’ (chapter 19), he
has always been opposed to the view that a given theorist’s work (his
example here is that of Raymond Williams) should be repudiated en bloc,