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Description of Article
The two paradigms within Cultural Studies that form the basis of Hall's title are
culturalism and structuralism. Culturalism claims that experience is the base of culture;
structuralism claims that experience is an effect of culture, that culture is an unconscious
manifestation, and that consciousness (self-determination) is merely another effect of
unconsciousness.
Hall begins this article with a description of the foundational texts of Cultural Studies:
Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy, and Williams' Culture and Society and The Long
Revolution (31, 31-32). His purpose, here, is to demonstrate that though these scholars'
ideas changed over time, the enduring and perhaps defining feature of their work is their
insistence on experience as the basis of culture. Hall calls this a culturalist position.
He posits the culturalist position, with its reliance on experience, against a structuralist
position, which claims that experience is itself merely an effect of culture; the concept of
"genuine experience" is in fact the result of culture itself. Hall claims that Cultural
Studies takes place in between these two broad and opposing concepts. The main strength
of culturalism is that it insist on human agency and the relevance of individuality. The
main strength of structuralism is that it insists that human agency must always be
considered within the context of pre-existing conditions.
By happy coincidence, Hall maps two of the main directions we'll take in this course --
the study of Barthes and semiotics, and the study of Foucault and agency within pre-
existing conditions.
These texts were made possible by and were in response to British culture in the 1960's
and 70's, was "roughly coterminous with what has been called the 'agenda' of the New
Left. . . . [and] placed the 'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural
Studies from the beginning" (32, 33).
Like Johnson, Hall doesn't define "culture" or "cultural studies," but he does briefly
"resume the characteristic stresses and emphases through which the concept has arrived
at its present state of (in)-determinacy" (33).
The second concept of culture is made up of social practices. This concept seems rather
more abstract than ideas, and once I compare it with the concept of culture, it makes both
seem abstract almost to the point of incomprehension. The "theory of culture," he writes,
"is defined as 'the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life'. Culture
is not a practice. . . . It is threaded through all social practices and is the sum of their
inter-relationships" (34). One was to study, then, all aspects of culture, and not separate
our specific aspects.
My question here, then, is how do we separate a culture's ideas from its social practices?
Isn't meaning making itself a social practice? Is that my view simply because of my
profession?
For the next several pages, Hall describes the changes in the ways Williams and
Thompson defined culture, but concludes that while these changes (and the differences in
their ways of thinking) are significant, the key feature of their definitions of culture is that
"in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous
'forms' underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is
'essentializing'. They have a particular way of understanding totailty. . . . They understand
it 'expressively'" (39). This, then, is what Hall describes as the Culturalist tradition in
cultural studies.
Hall then claims that the "'culturalist' strand in Cultural Studies was interrupted by the
arrival on the intellectual scene of the 'structuralisms'" (39). Hall describes the difference
between the culturalist and structuralist strands in cultural studies:
These are the "two paradigms" to which Hall refers in his title. According the Hall, "it
was Lévi-Strauss, and the early semiotics, which made the first break" (39).
Hall's take, though, is that neither concept is "adequate to the task of constructing the
study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed domain of study"
(42).
The first strength of structuralism that Hall describes is that it stresses determinate
conditions. Any cultural analysis must take economic and political conditions into
account. Structuralism also offers us the opportunity for abstract thinking, for "movement
between different levels of abstraction," as a way of making sense of culture (43). Would
culturalism insist on the description of experience only? Would description of experience
constitute cultural study? Hall claims that Cultural Studies has driven itself, or been
driven into, a "Poverty of Theory" position (43).
Hall describes two more strengths of structuralism (44-45) then moves to a discussion of
the strengths of culturalism (45). The first contribution of culturalism that Hall describes
is that it insists that consciousness -- deliberate movement within particular constraints --
"properly restores the dialectic between the unconsciousness of cultural categories and
the moment of of conscious organization: even if, in its characteristic movement, it has
tended to match structuralism's over-emphasis on 'conditions' with an altogether too-
inclusive emphasis on 'consciousness'" (45). This seems once again to echo Johnson; a
cultural study moves between given conditions and human desire (consciousness).
Hall concludes by describing three other paradigms in cultural studies which he felt were
not central but significant to the project of cultural studies--the reconstitution of the
subject in structuralist models of cultural studies, a return to classical Marxism's
economic model, and Foucault's suspension of "the nearly-insoluble problems of
determination" which "has made possible a welcome return to the concrete analysis of
particular ideological and discursive formation, and the sites of their elaboration" (47). I
disagree, however, with the critique of Foucault in which he claims that the problem with
Foucault is that he "so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a
scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than largely
contingent, that we are entitled to see him . . . as deeply committed to the necessary non-
correspondence of all practices to one another" (47). Following David Halperin in St.
Foucault, I'll argue that Foucault does offer a very specific analysis of the relationship
between practices.