Readings is motivated by a basic question: what does Hall’s archive tell us about his cultural, intellectual and political formation and development and with what transformative effects for our reading of his work? One of the extraordinary aspects of Hall’s intellectual life is the mobility of his thought – his ability to engage with new discourses and paradigms, across numerous disciplines and on manifold social, cultural and political phenomena. Whilst this can appear as a series of ruptures or breaks, there are also continuities and trajectories of thought that can be traced through.
To consider these in the archive is, in part, a programme of discovery: discovery of unpublished works, or of works that have been missed or overlooked that illuminate how Hall developed or formulated ideas and interventions at specific moments. In part, it is a programme of reconsideration, to read the published work with and against the archive – to find those materials that throw light on how Hall was working, with whom, and in what environments, in the development of his ideas; to ‘radically contextualise’ (to borrow a phrase from Larry Grossberg) to illuminate the ‘conjunctures’ that Hall interpreted and intervened in.
Hall invited us to consider his work as a project of dialogical intervention – suggesting that we must be alert to both his location and his positioning, in relation to interlocuters, terrains, and conjunctures. In that task we are aided by Hall himself: through a number of essays, interviews, and his memoir, we are provided with insights into how he was consistently making interventions in specific discourses and debates, at historically specific moments, or conjunctures, as he understood them.
It is consideration of these reflections by Hall that form the basis of our seminar series.
We began in November with Les Back, who brought Stuart into the room with us, playing back extracts from the interview that we know of as ‘At Home and Not at Home’, included in the Essential Essays volumes edited by David Morley. This interview remains one of the best introductions to Stuart Hall as a living intellectual, encompassing Hall’s reflections of a life in its formation, but as he addresses various present moment.
Les invited us to consider the tonality and texture of Stuart’s voice, and those elements of the interview – the rhythm of his speech, the pauses, and the laughter (in its range of qualities) – that cannot be captured in a typescript, but that provide further insight into Stuart’s history (and his relationship to that history).
You can access the transcript here and an audio recording below.