Stuart Hall

• Maybe most influential theorist of British cultural studies
• his trajectory reflects that of 20th century theorists:
  • from the New Left of 1960’s to engagement with poststructuralism in the 1970s to cultural politics of 1980s and 1990s
    • British New left: from sole economic factors to more complex understanding of people’s allegiances, attitudes and beliefs
• Interested in popular culture (as [[Raymond Williams]], also participated in the formation of British cultural studies)
• worked at different universities, lastly at Open University. Collaborative work was the norm.
• charismatic teacher, inclined to the essay rather than the book form.
• dialogic and multivoiced inception of cultural studies. a discipline that is always deconstructing itself.
• wariness of codification of cultural studies, but some principles can be identified:
  • commitment to the political relevance of intellectual work
  • theoretical need for alternatives to Marxism’s limitations
  • analysis of the hegemonic practices that bound social groups to dominant social forms (institutionally, intellectually, economically, emotionally)
  • analysis of forms of resistance to those practices
  • because hegemony is omnipresent, anything can be an object of study
  • has adapted any methodology from other disciplines deemed useful
  • had often focused on popular culture
  • the absence of a particular methodology does not mean cultural studies lack a theory
    • Hall’s essays provide a comprehensive theoretical overview:
      • processes of identity formation are central
      • concepts of conjuncture (everything exists simultaneously amid specific historical forces and specific determinant structures) and articulation (these elements in any conjuncture and the relations among them are articulated differently at different times and places. Social groups work to make their articulation prevail)
      • social field as dynamic site of contending forecast
      • identity is always being constituted by norms, institutions and subject positions
      • No dominant order can provide a permanent, seamless vision
      • interactions between mainstream norms and marginalized groups
    • linking literary theory’s understanding of the production of meaning and interpretation of texts with social theory’s delineation of conflicting forces within the social field

Criticism

• In their openness, cultural studies lack boundaries and values?
• refusal to declare a predominant methodology and an object of study. These two features are required of traditional academic disciplines.
• Traditional leftists criticize his emphasis on culture over socioeconomic politics
• post-structuralist opponents consider that the concept of hegemony ignores the irreductible heterogeinity of the social field

Starting points

• Aligned with [[Antonio Gramsci]] and against pessimistic visions of the [[Frankfurt School]] ([[Mark Horkheimer]] and [[Theodor W. Adorno]]) and [[Louis Althusser]]
  • Adaptation of Gramsci’s conception of hegemony and uses it to provide a dynamic panorama of ongoing struggles of all members of society
    • also desire for intellectuals to connect to these political struggles
• Also engagement with Foucault:
  • power dispersion throughout society
  • processes of subject formation
  • power/knowledge produced by intellectual discourses

" Let me put it this way: you have to be sure about a position to teach a class, but you have to be open-minded enough to know that you are going to change your mind by the time you teach it next week.”

Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies

• Conference of 1990
• reflection fo cultural studies:
  • as a practice
  • re. its institutional positioning
  • marginality of centrality of its practitioners as intellectuals
  • now and future of cultural studies
    • desire to escape an authoritative approach
    • thus takes an autobiographic approach
• Cultural studies is a discursive formation (Foucault):
  • no simple origins.
  • Multiple discourses and histories.
  • Set of unstable formations
  • Different methodologies and theoretical positions in contention
• However, not a policed disciplinary area?
  • Tension btw a refusal to police the field and the need to outline some positions within it and argue for them.
    • these positions are not final
• Key theoretical moments in cultural studies to be deconstructed
  • British cultural studies as Marxist critical practice
    • Although central questions shared, Marxism and cultural studies were never a perfect theoretical fit
    • Cultural studies point out the problems of Marxism:
      • orthodoxy, doctrinal character, reductionism, eurocentrism…
    • Theoretical work as struggle: in the case of Marxism, struggle with its limitations and work with its questions
    • Gramsci was addressing unanswered questions of Marxism: the nature of culture, the conjunctural, the importance of historical specificity, hegemony, ensemble and blocs to think questions of class.
    • He also proposed "the production of organic intellectuals", and that is what cultural studies aim at
      • work for a type of relationship in a conjuncture
      • they must be at the forefront of intellectual work. they must know more than traditional intellectuals. no theoretical limits from which cultural studies can turn back
      • they must transmit their knowledge to those who do not belong to the intellectual class professionally
      • so, theory and practice combined
      • theoretical work that must go on and on, live with the tension btw theory and practice
      • 2 theoretical movements which interrupted it in its formation (metaphor of theoretical work as interruption):
        • around feminism: reorganized the field:
          • the personal as political: changed the object of study
          • expansion of the notion of power
          • gender and sexuality in relationship to power
          • subjectivity and subject
          • social theory and psychoanalysis
        • around race:
    • movements provoke theoretical movements
    • The linguistic turn shook the path of cultural studies
      • discovery of discursivity and textuality
      • structuralist, semiotic and poststructuralist work
        • culture through the metaphor of language and textuality
          • delay, displacement always implied in the concept of culture
      • culture will always work through textuality… and at the same time textuality is not enough. That tension is essential to cultural studies,
      • what is the point of cultural studies in front of terrible tragedies such as AIDS?
        • this tension is something the cultural studies theorist must feel
        • however AIDS is not just a matter of people dying, but also about representation, effects of language, textuality as site of life and death
      • Institutionalization of British cultural studies and American cultural studies:
        • rapid in the US when compared to the British
        • institutionalization in Britain seen as a danger
      • how should the cultural studies field be defined according to the metaphors he has laid out

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