He Made It Possible

It is what Stuart Hall made possible. That is the thought that predominates, which has resonated ever since his passing on 10 February 2014. For generations of thinkers, Hall offered ways to think about what it means to be an intellectual, performing, in this regard, the role of what Antonio Gramsci names “‘permanent persuader’” (10). Hall kept us thinking about our thinking, “persuading” us time after time to do our work—in a very particular way, no less. In Gram-sci’s terms, Hall serves as a “constructor, organiser,” of our thinking, he was “not just a simple orator” (10). In his writing he “constructed” new modes of intellectual and political inquiry, through his presentations (Hall was an engaging and artful “orator”) and because of the ways in which he conducted himself in almost every academic or political encounter, Hall used his work to demonstrate the complicated, if indissoluble, link between his intellectual endeavors and his political commitment.

Hall offered a distinct way for intellectuals to “organize” their thinking—about politics, for radical political possibilities—and, as Gramsci puts it, their “active participation in practical life”: politics and intellectuality were always closely related, but they could not, without considerable thinking, be made commensurate with one another (10). It is for this reason that Hall always maintained that there was a “gap between theory and practice,” an equivocal nonequivalency, between politics and theory that could only be overcome by “developing a practice in its own right”(1990a, 18). Politics is, a priori, a theoretical act; there is no theory that does not inscribe within it a politics. It would be difficult to name the difference, exactly, and it was always necessary to do both, but Hall cautioned against collapsing politics and theory into one another. Negotiating between theory and praxis is, as Hall says in an explication of Gramsci’s importance to British cultural studies, “an extremely difficult road, not resolving the tensions between those two requirements, but living with them” (2013, 281). In order to do politics, Hall recognizes, neither theory nor praxis can be privileged over the other. The tension between theory and praxis demands that the only way to do politics is to “live” with this difficulty—the impossibility of resolving the tension. To do politics in this way is to not only grasp the constitutive nature of the tension. It is to approach the tension as a source of political possibility: it can sharpen political critiques and engender more-effective political strategies. It is always a potential source of creativity with the singular criterion that the tension must not only be lived (with) but thought.

It is for this reason that Hall spoke to the importance of the philosophical work that makes politics possible. Writing of the struggle to produce this “practice in its own right” at the University of Birmingham’s Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS), Hall is emphatic about the need for theory and Gramsci’s centrality to that work: “We took to heart the Gramscian injunction that the practice of an organic intellectual would have to be to engage with the philosophical end of the enterprise, with knowledge at its most testing. Because it mattered, we had to know more than they knew about our subject at the same time as we took responsibility for translating that knowledge back into practice—the latter operation was what Gramsci calls ‘common sense.’ Neither the one nor the other alone would do” (1990a, 18). This essay is one of Hall’s clearest and most sustained delineations of the intellectual, figured, as it almost always is, as Gramsci’s “organic intellectual.”¹ The organic intellectual is that thinker deeply rooted in her or his community and bound, through political commitment, to that community, and who recognizes that, in order to fulfill the work of the intellectual, the demands of activism would have to be complemented—equaled—by attention to theory. Activism and theory stand in a complicated relation to each other, always in need of translation (theory is not practice; “knowledge” must be translated “back into practice”). Translation is what takes place in the “gap.”² Politically...