Hall treated his essays as conjunctural interventions, not canonical truths

Evidence

By the late 1990s, after Sage had begun to publish much of the work that Stuart and his colleagues were by then writing at the Open University, he was in negotiation with them to produce an edited collection of his work and then, separately, about their plans for a four-volume collection of critical commentary. Ultimately both of these projects ran into the ground, largely as a result of his unwillingness to prioritize that kind of self-curatorial work over the more pressing demands of his ongoing involvement in questions of public policy and politics in relation to multiculturalism and questions of identity and diaspora, and in contesting the damaging effects of the continuing hegemony of neoliberalism in the United Kingdom. Besides, there was also the matter of his own ambivalence about the retrospective status of his essays—which were, in fact, always produced for a particular occasion, in a specific context, rather than representing any kind of eternal truths. As he once put it to me in correspondence about yet another inconclusive proposal to collect his work for publication, “I just don’t write the kind of academic article which is easily canonisable.” 44 He always said that, as they were always written in and for a specific context, were he to republish any of his older essays, it would require a great deal of time and work for him to update them, so as to recontextualize them in relation to the new conjunctures in which they would appear. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 46

Categorization

• DEFINE: Explains ‘conjunctural’ engagement — essays written for specific political moments rather than timeless claims.