Skip to main content

1.26 Cultural Studies Paradigms & Legacies

In both "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms" and "Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies," Hall explicates one of cultural studies' primary aims — to grasp the relationship between culture and society — by holding several contradictory theoretical and political perspectives in tension: structuralism/culturalism, base/superstructure, ideology/culture, conditions/consciousness. Hall calls for "living with this tension," in the latter piece. From my reading, it seems part of why cultural studies must live with this tension is because of what Hall calls "the displacement of culture." What exactly does Hall mean by the displacement of culture — that we must work through textualities, but that "textualities are never enough"? And what does this insight allow us to do? 

Hall ends "Theoretical Legacies" with a passage on contemporary (1990s?) American cultural studies — the "crude work" of merely connecting power to culture, "emptied of any signification." These paragraphs made me think of the importance of theoretical struggle (for instance, his own against Althusser's thought). Earlier, Hall outlines the privileged objects of study for cultural studies: "culture, ideology, language, the symbolic," and narrates how these objects came to that position out of an engagement with/challenge to Eurocentric marxism. Do these objects of study (culture, ideology, language, the symbolic) remain at the center of today's cultural studies? If so, how have the questions we ask around them changed, if at all? Additionally, If the "only theory worth having is the one you have to fight off," the one whose engagement produces necessary problems which demand to be addressed, what are the theoretical paradigms against which cultural studies are presently struggling?


*I use "cultural studies" here in a way that assumes it is a coherent, singular project, a notion that is productively troubled by many of our readings (especially Giroux), but I still use it for the sake of ease (to say nothing of the question of whether cultural studies as a project even exists absent a presence outside of the university institution, or absent a political dimension or "edge.")


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

On Journals and Prose

My two questions from this week have emerged from the Judith Butler piece, A 'Bad Writer' Bites Back , both centered around the journal, Philosophy and Literature —which Butler describes as the self-proclaimed “arbiter of good prose.”  I agree with Butler’s staunch defense of questioning common sense and provoking “new ways of looking at a familiar world”, and was reminded of David Harvey’s quote in the introduction to his Companion to Marx’s Capital : “Real learning always entails a struggle to understand the unknown.”   Butler describes Philosophy and Literature as a “culturally conservative academic journal” which naturally led me down a longer-than-anticipated visit to the journal's website . I was greeted with a video presented by the Philosophy and Literature’s editor Garry L. Hagberg, who rails against the “jargon infested” work that litters the journal’s field, locating Philosophy and Literature in clear opposition to such bothersome clutter.  However, Hagberg...
Post a Comment
Read more

Articulation_by_Abby Escatel

 In "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance," Stuart Hall is concerned with complicating Marxist theory's tendency to overgeneralize and universalize its claims that are specifically located within a European history of labor. Questions concerning slavery, coloniality, unfree/forced labor come to the fore and force Marxist theorists to grapple with the need to be specific in their contextualization and historicization of particular moments, ruptures and conjunctures. My questions are as follows:  1. How do we move forward with Marxism while taking into account the component of "unfreedom" when conceptualizing class, labor, and labor power? How does the "proletariat" fail to account for the lived realities of racialized bodies?  2. It seems as though Hall is also saying that race is not all encompassing and also shouldn't be overgeneralized/universalized. In short, labor and race are both always already at work. As a scholar who ce...
Post a Comment
Read more

Week 5

  What are the differences between Gramsci’s concept of the “organic intellectual” and Hall’s “public pedagogy?”   On the topic of the diasporic intellectual, Kuan-Hsing Chen mentions that “Some of the diasporic intellectuals I know of have exercised their power, for better or worse, back home, but you have not. And some of them are trying to move back, in whatever way. So, in that sense, you are very peculiar” (503). Although Hall felt some reconnection with the Carribean through the Black diasporic population in Britain, he insists that cultural identity is not fixed but “comes out of very specific historical formations, out of very specific histories and cultural repertoires of enunciation, that it can constitute a ‘positionality’, which we call, provisionally, identity” (503). Individuals can negotiate, rearticulate, recontextualize their different identities, but how does this rearticulation work at an institutional-level?   Thelma
Post a Comment
Read more