“Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies”
by Stuart Hall 

Provider: Christine Hsieh / 謝怡秀

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I.           Retrospection and extension of the cultural studies into the future

A.         Origins of CS (abbreviation for cultural studies)

1.          Multiple discourse

2.          Multiple histories

3.          Formations

4.          Multiple methodologies

5.          Theoretical positions

B.         Open ended (extension to future)

It is a project that is always open to that which it doesn’t yet know, to that which it can’t yet name.

C.         Present

Here one registers the tension between a refusal to close the field (CS), to police it and, at the same time, a determination to stake out some positions within it and argue for them.

II.        Strategy (p. 1900)

A.         Deconstruct Marxism in British CS

1.          New left isolation from Marxism

2.          No perfect match moment between Marxism and British CS

a. Orthodoxy, doctrinal character, determination
b. Marxism in the Eurocentrism

3.          Wrestling with the angels (p. 1901)  The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off.

a. Involvement in theory in order not to be in.
b. Example—Gramsci  He belongs to the problematic of Marxism, yet he displaces some of the inheritances of Marxism in CS.

B.         Project of CS: in Gramsci’s close notion of cultural studies (p. 1903)

1.          Trying to find an institutional practice in CS that might produce an organic intellectual.

2.          Organic intellectual should be at the forefront of intellectual theoretical work.

3.          They cannot absolve himself or herself from the responsibility of transmitting those ideas.

C.         Theoretical work as interruption (extrinsic sources of the formation of CS)

CS as theoretical work must go on and on living with that tension deconstruct and construct CS at the same time.

1.          Ruptural intervention of feminism (p.1904)

        a. The opening of the question of the personal as political so as to change the object of CS studies
b. Expansion of the notion of power—hegemony
c. The centrality of question of gender and sexuality to the understanding of power itself
d. Reopening of the dangerous area of subjective as theoretical practice 
e. Reopening the field of psychoanalysis in CS

2.          Race question in CS

3.          Other theoretical advances:

 a. Structuralism
b. The notion of heterogeneity--he multiplicity of meanings…

D.         The nature of CS—contradictory, displacement, contestation.

1.          AIDS as example (p. 1907)

III.     Conclusion (p. 1908)

A.         The problem of the institutionalization of these two constructions: British cultural studies and American cultural studies

1.          The danger of the enormous explosion of CS in the U.S., its rapid professionalization and insititutionalization: Theoretical fluency is not to theorized everything in cultural studies, which may constitutes power and politics as exclusively matters of language and textuality itself.

B.         How the field of cultural studies has to be defined.

CS as theory of a set of contested, localized conjunctural knowledges, which has to be debated in a dialogical way.

Source

Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 278.　

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