Page 32 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

20 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

just because it can be identified as having significant absences or
deficiencies (for instance, in relation to questions of race and feminism, in
Williams’ case). That kind of (all too common) combative polarization of
intellectual ‘debate’, in which one either ‘advocates’ everything, as a
disciple of a certain intellectual position, or automatically ‘refuses’ and
denies it in its entirety, once it has been found wanting in some particular
respect, offers little prospect of getting us anywhere, and it is greatly to
Hall’s credit that he offers us such a good model of an alternative
intellectual practice.
Speaking of continuities and their virtues (and positive usages), it is
perhaps worth, in conclusion, noting a certain continuity, or parallel,
between Hall’s career trajectory and that of the other two key figures in the
history of cultural studies, Williams and Hoggart, with whom Hall’s name
is customarily linked. Like Williams and Hoggart, Hall has always had a
commitment to the politics of education itself, and especially to the
education of the less privileged. As he explains in one of the interviews
here, for him, a large part of the motivation for his move from teaching
graduate students at CCCS (up until 1979) to teaching non-traditional
undergraduates via the Open University (where he has worked since) was
the attempt to take the most advanced ideas from the intellectual work of
CCCS and to try to make them work as a form of ‘popular pedagogy’.
Quite apart from all his other achievements, Hall’s work at the Open
University, in this respect alone, offers the finest testament to his ability to
make the crossing of boundaries, in all their forms, a matter of intellectual
adventure and innovation.
In ‘Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ Hall argues that cultural
studies always needs to hold both theoretical and political questions ‘in an
ever irresolvable, but permanent, tension’ (shades perhaps of Althusser’s
conception of moments of what he called ‘teeth-gritting harmony’),
constantly allowing ‘the one to irritate and bother and disturb the other’,
because ‘if you lose that tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual
work, but you will have lost intellectual practice, as a politics’. As so often
with Hall, the key to this perspective is Gramsci, and, in particular,
Gramsci’s conception of the role of the ‘organic intellectual’. In his own
actions, Hall has demonstrated his commitment to living out the
contradictions of the role of the ‘organic intellectual’ identified by Gramsci
—the commitment to being at the very forefront of intellectual, theoretical
work and, simultaneously, the commitment to the attempt to transmit the
ideas thus generated, well beyond the confines of the ‘intellectual class’.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Ahmad, A. (1994) In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures, London: Verso.