CULTURAL STUDIES: TWO PARADIGMS

Stuart Hall

Stuart Hall: In General

 Born on 3 Feb 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica (then a colony of UK) into a middle class family
of Indian, African & British descent- Caribbean
 A Cultural Theorist/ Sociologist
 Lived and worked in UK since 1951
 Studied at Merton College, University of Oxford
 One of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies/ The Birmingham School of
Cultural Studies
 Served as the Director of CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) at
Birmingham University from 1968 to 1979
 Professor of Sociology at the Open University (1979- 1997)
 Now, a Professor Emeritus
 Married to Catherine Hall, a Feminist Professor at University College, London
 Founding editor of NEW LEFT REVIEW
 Major Works
 Situating Marx: Evaluations & Departures (1972) – article
 Encoding & Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973)- article
 The Hard Road to Renewal (1988)
 Formations of Modernity (1992)
 Questions of Cultural Identity (1996)
 Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997)
 His works center on the interconnections between ideology, identity, culture and
politics- Increased concern with postmodernism and issues of race during 1990’s-
throughout his academic years, he has argued for ‘the relevance of sophisticated
Marxism to the understanding of contemporary social formations as well as a force for
social change’.
 Founding Editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture
 A proponent of Reception Theory- This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope
for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience

CULTURAL STUDIES: TWO PARADIGMS

(Paradigm- approaches to the study of culture/ model)

 In “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms”, Stuart Hall articulates two paradigms or two types
of approaches to the study of culture. They comprise a ‘culturalist’ strand deriving from
the works of Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E P Thompson & a ‘structuralist’ strand
which owed first to Levi- Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure and then to the work of
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Althusser.
 The culturalist strand in CS is interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of
the ‘Structuralisms’…
Stuart Hall presents the differences between the two paradigms on the basis of the
concept of the process/ purpose of culture, the importance of ‘experience’, the
positioning of abstractions like the existence of dialectical relations between conditions
& consciousness, and the function of ideology.

CULTURALISM → HOGGART, RAYMOND WILLIAMS & E P THOMPSON

 The founding fathers of CCCS- Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams & E P

Thompson- represent the moment of culturalism
Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society, E P
Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class are the seminal works in
culturalism.
The Uses of Literacy represents a tradition of English working class culture.
Culture and Society presents the culture- and- society tradition of a particular
group of English intellectuals. The Making of the English Working Class presents
a tradition of working- class political culture

Hall has characterized these authors as ‘culturalists’. He analyzed the projects of

these 3 authors as acts of ‘recovery’ and of constituting traditions.

 According to Hall, the significance of the “culturalist paradigm” is that it insists

on an understanding of culture not as a set of privileged texts, but rather as the
systems of meanings embodied in all social practices.
 In Culturalism, experience is the ground/ terrain of ‘the lived’. Its focus is on how
people experience their conditions of life.
 The ‘culturalists’ (Williams & Thompson) view popular culture as an expression
of the working class / expressions of class relations.
 Hall describes Culturalists’ definition of culture as “the sum of the available
descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common
experiences”. This definition has ‘democratized’ culture from an elite status. i.e,
from the ‘best’ or ‘privileged’ to a framework that involves the common or
ordinary.
 As per the culturalist definition, ‘culture is everything’; All things such as art,
commodity, ideas, process etc created by community (everyone regardless of
status) possess the ability to define and redefine meaning. This approach opens
up all cultural phenomena to criticism. This dissolves the traditional modernist
definition of high/ low culture.

 STRUCTURALISM → LEVI STRAUSS, SAUSSURE & ALTHUSSER

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 The strength of Structuralist paradigm is that it critiques the humanism and

experimentalism of the culturalist paradigm.
  Structuralism insists that ‘experience’ can’t be the ground of analysis. It is not an
authenticating source. One can only ‘live’ and experience one’s conditions in &
through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture. These
categories do not arise from or in experience. Experience is the effect or
product of classifications, frameworks, language or discourses (social structures).
 The Marxist Structuralists see popular culture as imposed set of meaning.
 To the structuralists, the study of culture is not in the sum of cultural
phenomena, but in the underlying relationships/ contradictions.
 The term ‘structural’ gives the idea of culture as rigid and determinative.
 In this arena, questions of ideology, structures of domination & the work of
intellectuals take over from questions about culture or experience.
 Structuralists stress on ‘determinate conditions’.

CULTURALISM & STRUCTURALISM (FROM CHRIS BARKER)

Culturalism stresses the ordinariness of culture and the active, creative capacity of
people to construct shared meaningful practices. Empirical work, which is emphasized within the
culturalist tradition, explores the way that active human beings create cultural meanings. There
is a focus on lived experience and the adoption of a broadly anthropological definition of culture
which describes it as an everyday lived process not confined to ‘high’ art.

Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a form of historical cultural

materialism which traces the unfolding of meaning over time, exploring culture in the context of
its material conditions of production and reception.

If culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product of
active human agents, structuralism speaks instead of signifying practices which generate
meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities which lie outside of any given
person. Structuralism is anti- humanist in its decentering of human agents from the heart of
inquiry, favoring a form of analysis in which phenomena have meaning only in relation to other
phenomena within a systematic structure of which no particular person is the source. A
structuralist understanding of culture is concerned with the systems of relations of an underlying
structure.

 According to Hall, CS emerged as a distinct problematic through the interventions in

literary studies of Hoggart & Williams. The Structuralist intervention constituted a
powerful challenge to this paradigm, making work along similar lines possible.

 Hall is of the view that they are contesting paradigms & they are a part of a historical
narrative of the emergence and development of Cultural Studies. i.e, CS is constituted by
opposing theoretical discourses, which are both necessary but limited. To him, some
kind of conceptual transformation or epistemological break is necessary.
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  Hall concludes that there are two major and as yet unreconciled paradigms for the
analysis of popular culture (culturalism & structuralism). He argues that culturalism’s
strength corresponds to the weakness of structuralism. Structuralism is unable to
explain those phenomena which culturalism privileges.

 Hall attempts to chart a course for the future of CS. To him, one can ‘appropriate’ the
strength and avoid the weakness of each approach, which will go beyond both
paradigms.
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