Hall held agonistic debate as essential and hostility to orthodoxy as constitutive.

Evidence

One key part of his argument, in trying to dislodge the emerging, triumphalist Grand (Theoretical) Narrative of this fast-developing field, was to recognize that, rather than developing along any smooth pathway toward a set of revealed truths, the forms of Cultural Studies developed in Birmingham had always themselves been driven by the “theoretical noise” of intense (and often fractious) debate between multiple contestatory discourses. This, he argued, was essential to the intellectual project, which he understood as being founded in a necessarily “agonistic” process of debate, which is fundamentally inimical to the final establishment of any form of intellectual orthodoxy. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 128

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the concept of a necessarily ‘agonistic’ intellectual project, defining its resistance to orthodoxy.
• XREF: Parallels the Frankfurt School’s insistence that critical theory resists codification and doctrinal conformity, and Adorno’s method of critique.