Stuart Hall Cultural Studies 1983
Hall, Stuart, Jennifer D. Slack, and Lawrence Grossberg. Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History. Durham, N.C: Duke University Press, 2016. Print.
Contents
| Lecture 1: The formation of cultural studies Lecture 2: Culturalism Lecture 3: Structuralism Lecture 4: Rethinking the base and superstructure Lecture 5: Marxist structuralism Lecture 6: Ideology and ideological struggle Lecture 7: Domination and hegemony Lecture 8: Culture, resistance, and struggle. |
Author
Stuart McPhail Hall, FBA (3 February 1932 – 10 February 2014) was a Jamaican-born cultural theorist, political activist and sociologist who lived and worked in the United Kingdom from 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was one of the founding figures of the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.[1]
In the 1950s Hall was a founder of the influential New Left Review. At the invitation of Hoggart, Hall joined the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University in 1964. Hall took over from Hoggart as acting director of the Centre in 1968, became its director in 1972, and remained there until 1979.[2] While at the Centre, Hall is credited with playing a role in expanding the scope of cultural studies to deal with race and gender, and with helping to incorporate new ideas derived from the work of French theorists like Michel Foucault.
Context
The publication of Cultural Studies 1983 is a touchstone event in the history of Cultural Studies and a testament to Stuart Hall's unparalleled contributions. The eight foundational lectures Hall delivered at the University of Illinois in 1983 introduced North American audiences to a thinker and discipline that would shift the course of critical scholarship. Unavailable until now, these lectures present Hall's original engagements with the theoretical positions that contributed to the formation of Cultural Studies.
Thesis
Throughout this personally guided tour of Cultural Studies' intellectual genealogy, Hall discusses the work of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson; the influence of structuralism; the limitations and possibilities of Marxist theory; and the importance of Althusser and Gramsci. Throughout these theoretical reflections, Hall insists that Cultural Studies aims to provide the means for political change.
Methodology
A very interesting de-sacralization of figures like Althusser, Williams, and even Marx himself in order to point out their methodology, historical/intellectual limitations, key insights, and contribution to major questions plaguing the Marxist tradition.
Key Terms
social determinations - less in the abstract, more as you approach historical conjuncture.
Criticisms and Questions
Notes
| Lecture 1: The formation of cultural studies talks about the history of the new left review, the challenge of post-war consumer culture on challenging Marxist writ, and the base-superstructure question. Major inspiration and and methodologies are literary critical ones. Lecture 2: Culturalism this is an intellectual biography of Raymond Williams which, although highly critical, still celebrated his importance to cultural studies. - changing focus of cultural studies from elite canons to popular traditions. - social practices also include attempt to live socially in ways which reflect how we understand and experience our circumstances. - distinctive culture emerges out of interactions between different social groups or social classes: that is the object of William's analysis: structures of feeling that are reflected or expressed in different social practices. -first chapter of "Marxism and Literature" on language. -how to possibly deal with structure of feeling using base-superstructure -"this is how history presents itself— as an undifferentiated set of interwoven practices." -dominant, residual, and emergent culture very important way to think about cultural change. -dominant culture allows opposition to exist in the place it assigns -makes a particular kind of break with the mechanistic definition of base and superstructure. "to begin to generate notions of culture which are democratic, notions of culture which are popular, notions of culture which are materialist, is a real labour, and one wants to acknowledge the work and learn from it without swallowing the whole pill." Lecture 3: Structuralism A beautiful summary of the history and approach of structuralism. -starts with Durkheim looking at facts of social life rather than our ideas about them. -Language, as primary symbolic system, gives clues to wider symbolic universe of cultures. - Whereas language uses limited set of rules to come up with near endless combinations, the same is true to any social domain (mythology for example) -over time structuralism becomes more interested in symbolic forms themselves rather than their relationship to social structures. -structuralist methology is more intuitive than it pretends. -Marxism and Levi Strauss connection: marxist project as a way to discover distinct social logics of difference social formations with underlying structure creating them. -the use of linguistics as a rich generative metaphor enables semioticians to analyze the inventory of particular culture, -all social practices are made meaningful not by language which expresses the world, but by languages which are able to produce meaning, enabling human societies to signify. social practices do not exist outside of the meanings which different societies give to them. Lecture 4: Rethinking the base and superstructure This lecture focuses on the concept of base/superstructure through Marx's own thought, specifically by contrasting the much more theoretical german ideology and grundrisse intro (and communist manifesto) vs. the much more nuanced and historically specific 18th Brumaire. Three main premises which distinguish Marx's method: 1) all historical forms are historically specific 2) principle objects of analysis are laws, tendencies, and structures of a particular mode of production 3) human societies can only be understood as result of social organization and its dependency on modes of extracting means for survival from nature. -Marx often elaborates complex ideas and then collapses them into single sentence or image. -two objections to base-superstructure model: economic reductionism and class reductionism. -false consciousness is a dumb idea, ideologies have something true about them, truths people recognize. -need to remember Marx and Engels real struggle was against idealism, still a real pull into idealism built into academic life and the structure of western thought. If you let a materialist idea alone for just a moment, you find that it has slid over to idealism. Idealism is still the most powerful language available for talking about complexity. -Engels tried to recognize polemical context of much of Marx's writing - avoid epigones repeating as scientific truth what had been a vulgar joke in a political pamphlet. - In Communist Manifesto classes are being continually split up until there are only two. - 18th Brumaire explains how 1848 revolutions led to a man on a horse with a three-cornered hat. - as you lower the level of abstraction, you come closer to the details of a particular concrete historical formation, and you have to bring in other determinations into discourse in order to make sense of what you're talking about. -Some of the so-called silences in Marx's discourse [race, gender] are the result of the relevant level of abstraction rather than From the fact he thinks these other determinations are insignificant" -Stuart Hall in rethinking the base and superstructure -It is against the proletariat that the bourgeois form a party built around a language of family ,law, order, and property using rural voters as base. Proletariat is anarchist other. - 18th Brumaire built on analysis of social movements, social groupings, alliances, and blocs without clear class character, although intrinsic language remains decidedly materialist. 18th Brumaire offers alternative to base-superstructure metaphor without giving up the ground that the metaphor has won. Lecture 5: Marxist structuralism Lecture on the Althusserian break, talks a lot about how Althusser hardens distinctions and makes overly rigid distinctions/definitions, but has some invaluable contributions to Marxism including 1)the problem of the subject 2) nature of social formations 3) theory of determinations Levels of Abstraction abstract levels of how surplus value is created historical account of things like the factory laws, where far more specific determinations (political organizations, popular morals, etc.) come into play. Human agency depends on which level of abstraction that analysis is dealing with Althusser points out Marx's synchronic approach in mature works like Capital - we have sense of totality which is a complexly structured whole, irreducible to either humanism of historicism. Articulates levels in the social formation: economic, politics, ideological, theoretical. Develops non-reductionist ways of thinking about determinancy using: "overdetermination" and "relative autonomy" displacement: the economic might be manifested in the political structural autonomy as a concept is more coherent than relative autonomy, but less effective. big takeaway from Althusser is that although society is a complex totality, it still has a definite structure with a "structure in dominance", not just a random assortment of sociological empirical facts. Althusser allows us to think about "difference" in a particular way. Post-structuralism only allows for difference (Foucault), plurality of discourses, going beyond the "unity in difference". Althusser gives us "articulation": the form of a connection which allows us to make a unity of two different elements under certain conditions. Difference in complex unity. So make sure to look at not the proto-Lacanian, neo-Foucauldian, pre-Derridian, Althusserian text "ideological state apparatuses" but more generative original essays in For Marx like "On Contradiction and Overdetermination". For revolution you need contradictions to build up and fuse into "a ruptural unity". Structures exhibit tendencies — lines of force, openings —which constrain, channel, and in a sense "determine". But they cannot guarantee. Lecture 6: Ideology and ideological struggle Knowledge, whether ideological or scientific, has to be produced through a practice. It is not the reflection of the real in discourse, in language. Social relations have to be "represented in speech and language" to acquire meaning. Meaning is produced as a result of ideological or theoretical work. It is not simply a result of an empiricist epistemology. "ideological state apparatuses" has two points 1) purpose of ideology is social reproduction 2) made through interpellation. Most work has focused on only second part (Foucult on discourse, Lacan on unconsious processes) Language and behavior are the media, so to speak, of the material registration of ideology, the modality of its functioning. We have to deconstruct language to understand the ideological thinking which are inscribed in them. Does not explain why there is complacency even when the state is not dictating everything. Why do journalists choose their stories and viewpoints in a democratic capitalist society. question of reproduction assigned to Marxist (male) pole and subjectivity to the psychoanalytic (feminine) pole. It does not follow that because all practices are in ideology, that they are nothing but ideology. Ideologies do not operate through single ideas, they are plural acting in discursive chains, in semantic fields, in discursive formations. Social relations exist, independent of mind, independent of thought. And they can only be conceptualized in thought. We need a much simpler and more productive way to think about ideolgy: the theory of articulation how ideology discovers its subjects rather than how the subject thinks the necessary and inevitable thoughts which belong to it. ideology empowers people, enables them to begin to make some sense of their historical situation, without reducing those forms of intelligibility to their socioeconomic or class location or social position. "If you want to move religion, to rearticulate it in another way, you are going to come across all the grooves that have articulated it already." "The relationship between social forces and ideology is absolutely ideological" The moment of historical formation is critical for any semantic field. Commonsense thinking contains what Gramsci calls the traces of ideology "without an inventory" Field of the ideological is "relatively autonomous" field of constitution, regulation, and social struggle". But it is not reducible to the simple determinancy of any of the other levels of social formations.
ideology does not only have the function of social reproduction, but sets limits to the degrees to which a society can reproduce itself. Ideology is shifting in a constant, undending process — what Volosinov called "the multiaccentuality of the ideological sign" of the "class struggle in language."
Lecture 7: Domination and hegemony
wonderful intellectual history of Gramsci.
Ideology consists of two floors: coherent theoretical explanation of an ideology / its common sense practical consciousness. New ideologies must compete in a realm already filled with other popular conceptions and viewpoints. common sense ideas are "themselves material forces"
consciousness is not an individual matter but a relationship between self and ideological discourses which compose the cultural terrain of a society. Hegemony entails the formation of a bloc, not the appearance of a class.
Victory is seizing the balance of power on each of the fronts of struggle. The balance of political, social, and ideological forces at each point in the social formation. Few in the left have understood, but the bourgeoisie had done beautifully.
Lecture 8: Culture, resistance, and struggle.
the field of ideological discourse are neither organized nor are directly reducible to economic class positions. |