November 1, 2004

Stuart Hall: "Cultural Studies: two paradigms"

Hall, Stuart. "Cultural Studies: two paradigms" in Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57-72.

Synopsis:

Hall opens with a reminder that Cultural Studies emerged as a response to a particular state of affairs in Britain in the 50s, referencing early New Left agenda that positioned "'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies from the beginning" (58).

He then draws out two different notions of 'culture' that underscore Raymond Williams' Long Revolution:

  • Def 1: Culture is "the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences" (59). This definition allows us to talk about democratization of culture.
  • Def 2: Coming from an anthropological perspective, culture "refers to social practices" and "the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life" (60). In other words, threaded through all social practices is culture which is the "sum of their inter-relationships" (60).

Hall then moves to discuss culture in Williams' text before broadly speaking of the historical situation around Cultural Studies that permitted this, referencing a structuralist and culturalist schism and moving to the likes of Marx, Althusser, Gramsci, Durkheim, and Levi-Strauss to complicate the concept of culture from the schism. Hall suggests that culturalism "would correct for the hyper-structrualism ... by restoring the unified subject" while "discourse theory" (?poststructuralism?) "restores the decentered subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated" (70).

For Hall, Cultural Studies "thinks forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises" (72). Individually, neither will do but between them, they address the core issues of Cultural Studies.

Reflection:

Hall's arguments are clearly situated in a political debate of which i know little. From what i know, Cultural Studies was developed in the mid-50s in Britain in response to the need for academics to be "applicable." Given this, Hall seems to be implying that cultural studies has relevance by bridging the work of structuralists and culturalists (which includes sociologists, anthropologists, and critical theorists) and applying it to contemporary social issues. That said, i have a feeling there's more to this story.

Application:

Hall is one of the key theorists conceptualizing subcultures. Reading this article is intended to give me more of a background on Hall.

Cultural Studies is the site of much thought on media, consumption and production and its relationship to culture and society. It seems prudent to understand the political framework in which those theories emerged.

Category: cultural studies

Posted by zephoria at November 1, 2004 4:54 PM