‘Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies’- Reading Notes by Roxana Popa

 title suggests a look back to past& a way of thinking about the Now& the Future of CS(
Cultural studies ) by retrospective
 Hall defines culture as a process that creates particular meaning for objects and controls
ideas ‘that events, relations,structure do have conditions of existence and real
effects,outside the sphere of the discurssive, but only within the discurssive,and subject to
its specific conditions,limits and modalities, do they have or can they be constructed within
meaning.’
 to Hall cultural studies has a discursive formation in Foucault’s sense.
 It means: it has no single origin.
it is a multiple discourse and has many histories.
it is always a set of unstable formation. It has ‘centre’ only in quotation. it has
many trajectories.
it is a project that is open to that which it does not know
 in English departments, CS has challenged the predominance of the governing categories of
literary studies (the "canon," the homogeneous "period," the formal properties of genre,
the literary object as autonomous and self-contained) in the interest of producing
"readings" of all texts of culture and inquiring into the reproduction of subjectivities.
 Hall borrows a term ‘worldliness’of CS used by Edward Said
 He speaks of one of the important theoretical legacies part of the origin of cultural studies
namely the emergence of New Left in Britain with the disintegration of classical Marxism.
 Classical Marxist thesis was that economic base has a determining effect on the cultural
superstructure.
 Classical Marxism was mainly engaged with power, capital, exploitation etc. and did not talk
about the objective cultural studies such as culture, ideology, language, the symbolic etc.
 Hall says that Gramsci ‘ belonged and belongs to the problematic of marxism’
 There were two movements that were considered interruptions that the cultural studies
faced : Feminism & Racism
 The interruption of Feminism was ‘ specific and decisive’
 Hall uses the example of AIDS to ask why there are critical intellectuals out there when
people are dying
 Citical theory must be expanding to find out what can be done
 Language is an important element in CS because it is a source of meaning; meaning creates
knowledge & ideas that became part of our culture