Stuart Hall on the importance of practice in Cultural Studies

What is it about?

Stuart Hall´s contextualized articulation o fwriting and doing in other ways (since writing is a form of doing) is, in my opinion, a salient aspect of his understanding of intellectual practice. He himself has discussed this point in several texts, but particularly in the final paragraph of his “Cultural Studies and its theoretical legacies,” as he remarks: I come back to the critical distinctions between intellectual work and academic work: they overlap, they abut with one another, they feed of another, the one provides you with means to do the other. But they are not the same thing […] I come back to theory and politics, the politics of theory. Not theory as the will to truth, but theory as a set of contested, localized, conjunctural knowledges, which have to be debated in a dialogical way. But also as a practice which always thinks about its intervention in a world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect. Finally, a practice which understands the need for intellectual modesty. I do think there is a difference in the world between understanding the politics of intellectual work and substituting intellectual work for politics. (Hall [1992] 1996, 274–275)

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