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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.")


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