ABSTRACT
Stuart Hall (1986:60) once described the purpose of theory as helping us get a bit further down the road. This is an apt metaphor, not only for the politics of theory as it intersects the real world of historical forces and everyday life, but also for the theory of politics, for our own ongoing intellectual work. The fruitless arguments between those who see such work as a continuous dialogue and those who see it as a discontinuous series of wars are better replaced with an image of work-whether the work of everyday life or the work of intellectuals-as travel (transformation) and of travel as work (commutation). This allows us to see the complexity of intellectual alliances and disputes: sometimes people travel with you, or near you, or against you; sometimes they help you, or distract you, or interrupt you, or redirect you; sometimes we take a wrong turn, or a detour, or a deadend; sometimes we are ‘hijacked’ (Hall, 1988) by another position and sometimes we are the ‘hijackers’. The image suggests the inevitability (and, indeed, the pleasurable and enabling possibilities) of different and temporary alliances, built upon different grounds, along different dimensions, with different intensities, as we move in different directions, without ever knowing precisely where we are heading. The following comments, then, are meant to serve as a signpost for an intersection of trajectories available to cultural studies; they chronicle my thoughts at the present moment in an ongoing, collective effort1 to think through (disentangle, criticize, and reconstruct) the problems of, and possibilities for, studying the contemporary cultural formations.
