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nothing short of the emergence of a transformed political logic (ibid.:
236). Hall offers a series of useful points in regard to the pursuit of this
political logic. Personal liberty need not be seen, for example, as a pri-
mary and triumphant western value, but instead it has become, as the
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30 The Uses of Cultural Studies
right for all peoples to live their life from within , a cosmopolitan value .
Likewise everyone participates in forms of cultural belongingness , thus
multi-culturalism poses the question of finding a framework for resolv-
ing conflicts between different cultural groups without this requiring the
assimilation to a wider norm. He continues, [t]he specific and particu-
lar difference of a group or community cannot be asserted absolutely
without regard to the wider context provided by all the others to whom
particularity acquires a relative value (ibid.: 235). That is, if we all
recognise the particularity of our cultural values then that requires us to
find a wider context beyond these particulars so that others might make
their demands. Would this wider context constitute a revised universal-
ism? Hall answers this by reminding us that identity itself is dependent
on the relation to others in that (and here he draws on Laclau s psycho-
analytical vocabulary) the subject is formed (and exists) through a sense
of incompleteness. The universal is part of my identity in so far as I am
formed, very much, by the lack of those others to whom I m obliged to
relate (Hall, 2000b). This is to say that we are all the same in that what
we lack is also a constitutive part of what we are, even as we disavow it
as difference. Others are an integral, necessary part of who we are.
This suggests a differently understood horizon of univeralism. Hall
warns against the dangers of using the difficulty this poses as a reason to
return to the old Enlightenment ideals which were, after all, opposed at
every point to difference . But can the universal become a fluid and
emergent terrain of agreement, a space for becoming in difference? An
incomplete horizon which stitches your particular together with mine ?
Universality is rendered a negotiative, open-ended process. It is incom-
plete because it can t be filled in with an unchanging historical content .
It too is formed in relation to the particulars which it repels or excludes;
thus as Hall quotes Laclau the universal is incommensurable with the
particular but it cannot exist without the particular (Hall, 2000a: 235).
It is forced to bend as new demands are put to it. But because there can
be no definitive content we have to be willing to resist the attraction of
a return to absolutes. The universal becomes a point of obligation,
recognition and negotiation. Is this what is meant by commonness in dif-
ference? Or, more specifically, can this mark out the means by which
there is an extending, deepening, and thus replenishment, of
democracy? And is the multi-cultural, as the terrain upon which, in a
heightened sense, commonness is now sought, a possible vehicle for
pursuing this new democratic logic as an ongoing struggle without final
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Stuart Hall and the Inventiveness of Cultural Studies 31
resolution (ibid.: 235)? That this is unrealised works positively rather
than negatively (as closure), as a process of politicisation, rather than
depoliticisation, and all of its attendant ills. This would suggest, then,
that for Hall the multi-cultural question provides the possibility for
expansive democratisation, not as an end in itself, as something that can
be, once and for all, done and can be completed, but as a condition for
the renewal of radical politics itself. This process of enlargement takes
place as groups are pulled into the political process by virtue of their
demands for recognition, so that many new public spheres come into
being, with the effect that democracy is made more open, heteroge-
neous, a fluid horizon of negotiation.
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