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
