Cultural Studies’ identity lies in an unresolved tension between theory and politics

Evidence

The question is what happens when a field, which I’ve been trying to describe in a very punctuated, dispersed, and interrupted way, as constantly changing directions, and which is embraced as a political project, tries to develop itself as some kind of coherent theoretical intervention? Or, to put the same question in reverse, what happens when an academic and theoretical enterprise tries to engage in pedagogies which enlist the active engagement of individuals and groups, tries to make a difference in the institutional world in which it is located? These are extremely difficult issues to resolve, because what is asked of us is to say “yes” and “no” at one and the same time. It asks us to assume that culture will always work through its textualities—and at the same time that textuality is never enough. … Nevertheless I want to insist that until and unless Cultural Studies learns to live with this tension, a tension that all textual practices must assume—a tension which Said describes as the study of the text in its affiliations with “institutions, offices, agencies, classes, academies, corporations, groups, ideologically defined parties and professions, nations, races, and genders”—it will have renounced its “worldly” vocation. That is to say, unless and until one respects the necessary displacement of culture, and yet is always irritated by its failure to reconcile itself with other questions that matter, with other questions that cannot and can never be fully covered by critical textuality in its elaborations, Cultural Studies as a project, an intervention, remains incomplete. If you lose hold of the tension, you can do extremely fine intellectual work, but you will have lost intellectual practice as a politics. … Cultural Studies has drawn the attention itself, not just because of its sometimes dazzling internal theoretical development, but because it holds theoretical and political questions in an ever irresolvable but permanent tension. It constantly allows the one to irritate, bother, and disturb the other, without insisting on some final theoretical closure. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 253

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines what Hall means by Cultural Studies as a project: holding theory and politics in permanent tension without demanding closure.
• XREF: Connects to Said’s ‘worldliness’ of texts and to Gramscian concepts of hegemonic struggle that thread through Hall’s whole corpus.