Hall "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms"

Hall, Stuart (1980). Cultural Studies: two paradigms

- there is no absolute beginnings

1. “Culturalism”

- Richard Hoggart

o “Uses of Literacy’

o ‘culture debate’ : high/low culture distinction

o Leavis “Scrutiny, Culture and Society”

o Practical criticism : to “read” working class culture as if it is a ‘text’

o Rejection of high/low cultural divide

o Culture and Society as one and the same (unity) movement

- Raymond Williams

o “Culture and Society”

o “The Long Revolution”

§ Against empirical, particularist thought

§ The experiential ‘thickness’

- E.P. Thompson

o “Making of the English Working Class”

o English Marxist historiography

o Economic and ‘Labour’ history

§ Took culture seriously: culture as the site of politics

§ Culture : Changes in industry, democracy, and class (Williams)

§ New Left

- ‘Culture’

o IDEAS

§ R. Williams: “the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences

§ Culture = Society (community of common meanings)

§ No longer the best, highest values but all conventions, common meanings,

§ “The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families” (59)

o PRACTICES

§ One must study ‘the relationship between these patterns’

§ Patterns are lived and experienced as a whole (structure of feeling)

o Against

§ “Idealist” tradition of culture, elitism

§ Vulgar materialism, economic determinism

· Base/superstructure

· => R.Will : radical interactionism (interactions between all practices in and with one other)

· => no distinctions between practices, because they are all variant forms of praxis, of general human activity and energy

- Revisions

o Lucien Goldmann (Lukacs)

§ ‘Genetic structuralism’

o E.P. Thompson’s ‘Base and Superstructure’ ( critique of “The Long Revolution” )

§ There are different ‘dimensions’ of struggle and confrontation between opposed ‘ways’ of life

2. “Structuralism”

- Ideology, as opposed to ‘culture’

- Levi-Strauss’s culture

o Culture as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence, especially human and natural worlds

o Ideology: unconscious categories through which conditions are represented and lived

- Experience:

o Culturalist: experience as the ground where consciousness and conditions intersected

o Strucuralist : experience as mere effect of categories, classifications, and frameworks of the culture (unconscious structures)

o Althusser: ideology is a system of representations, but it has nothing to do with consciousness. imaginary relations (For Marx)

- Structuralist advantages

o 1. Difference, rather than of unity

o 2.

o 3. decentering of experience (ideology): not a central idea for the culturalist

- Culturalist advantages

o 1. affirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle and organization as a necessary element in the analysis of history (agency)

§ Gramsci

3. the Alternatives

- Lacanian psychoanalysis

o Filling the empty spot of the “subject”

o (Weakness) Subject= transhistorical, universal character

- Return to the Political Economy of culture

o Restoring base/superstructure

- Foucault