Content area
Full text
When Stuart Hall died in 2014, many tributes and memorial activities were planned by organisations, institutions and publications that felt they owed him a debt. New Formations was no exception, and the editorial board spent some time reflecting on an appropriate tribute. Stuart himself, as many of us knew, had little interest in seeing his work codified or memorialised for its own sake. But there was one injunction that many of us were familiar with from that work, his example, and from frequent personal and political conversations with him.
The importance of thinking about 'the conjuncture', of 'getting the analysis right', was one that Stuart frequently emphasised to his students and interlocutors. The importance of mapping the specificity of the present, of situating current developments historically, of looking out for political threats and opportunities, was always at the heart of Stuart's conception both of 'cultural studies' as a specific intellectual practice, and of the general vocation of critical and engaged scholarship in the contemporary world. For cultural studies in particular, he understood this approach as steering a course between the two extremes that he saw as characterising too much work in the field. At one end of a continuum, he saw a tendency to theoreticism: overly abstract speculation, engaged in theoretical innovation for its own sake, rather than for any obvious analytical gain. At its most extreme this tendency manifests itself as a pure speculative philosophy that only uses cultural 'objects' as illustrations for its generalised theses. At the other end, he also decried an excessive particularism - textual analysis, descriptive ethnography - that made no effort to situate or explain its objects of study with reference to any wider set of social relations or historical tendencies. He was careful not to imply that all - or even most - contributions to cultural studies should be seeking to map an entire 'totality' of social relations at a given moment. But he did insist on the crucial importance of the question 'what does this have to do with everything else?' when examining any phenomenon, however minute.
This shouldn't be interpreted as a rigid prescription, and New Formations certainly publishes work that occupies every point on this continuum, and several others. New Formations is not specifically a...