Critical thinking opens fixed political programs to inspection without discarding them

Evidence

HALL: New Times is the name of an intervention which a number of people made in the journal Marxism Today in a series of essays, partly on economic questions, partly on cultural questions. It could be read as an intersection between a radical political project and a selective number of themes in postmodernism. It takes on certain debates about the nature of the advanced capitalist economy, and about the nature and effect of globalization on that. More than that, it metaphorically renders the enormous breaks and caesuras going on around us in the political life of the world. It registers a series of “New Times” as the conjuncture in which we are living, and in which many of the guides and metaphors of the past, many of the theoretical paradigms that have come to be held in a rather doctrinal way, many of the political programs and strategies of reform, are thrown open to inspection. Not tossed away, necessarily, but thrown open to inspection in a kind of critical reflection which, as it were, confesses that most of the time most of the people don’t quite know where they are or where they are going. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 261

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what the ‘New Times’ intervention is and what ‘conjuncture’-style open inspection means for Hall.
• XREF: The ‘conjuncture’ framing and critical reflection connect to Hall’s wider famous essay on cultural studies and the politics of theory.