Cultural studies: two paradigms

STUART HALL

From Media Culture and Society Volume 2, Number 1, January 1980.

Submitted by:

- Mohsine WAHIB- Soufiane ADRANE

Master ProgramIntroduction to Culture

Dr. BOUZEKRI

Outline Introduction

• Stuart Hall• Cultural Studies Two paradigms:

• Culturalism• Structuralism

Summary

Stuart Hall (born 3 February 1932 in Kingston, Jamaica) is a cultural theorist and sociologist who has lived and worked in the United Kingdom since 1951. Hall, along with Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, was an early and influential contributor to the school of thought that is now known as British Cultural Studies or The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies.

Stuart Hall

Cultural Studies

Cultural studies is an academic field grounded in critical theory, which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film/video studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural phenomena in various societies. Cultural studies researchers often concentrate on how a particular phenomenon relates to matters of ideology, nationality, ethnicity, social class, sexuality, and/or gender.

What is Cultural Studies? Study of relations between social relations and meanings (how social divisions are made meaningful)

Culture is terrain on which ideological representations of class, gender, race are enforced, and contested by social groups validating their experience.

Hegemony

• operates in the realm of representations and consciousness• implies power inequality in different segments of society• naturalizes a class ideology and renders it in the form of

common sense• exercised through ‘authority,’ not physical force• operates through institutions (educational system, media and

the family)

Cultural studies focus on analysis of cultural forms and their meaning in the context of power relations in society

Two Paradigms

Culturalism Structuralism

Richard Hoggart

Raymond Williams

E.P. Thompsom

Levi-Strauss

De Saussure

Althusser

R. Hoggart was a key figure in the emergence of cultural studies in the late 1950s and 1960s. He founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies ( 1964 ) at the University of Birmingham (the Birmingham school) and wrote a seminal early analysis of working-class culture, The Uses of Literacy ( 1957 ).

Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh academic, novelist and critic. He was an influential figure within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the mass media and literature are a significant contribution to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books have sold in UK editions alone and there are many translations available. His work laid the foundations for the field of cultural studies and the cultural materialist approach.

Edward Palmer Thompson was an English historian, writer, socialist and peace campaigner. He is probably best known today for his historical work on the British radical movements in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, in particular his sociological work The Making of the English Working Class (1963). He also published influential biographies of William Morris (1955) and (posthumously) William Blake (1993) and was a prolific journalist and essayist. He also published the novel The Sykaos Papers and a collection of poetry.

Ferdinand de Saussure was a Swiss linguist whose ideas laid a foundation for many significant developments in linguistics in the 20th century. Saussure is widely considered to be one of the fathers of 20th-century linguistics, and his ideas have had a monumental impact throughout the humanities and social sciences.

Claude Levi-Strauss, the French philosopher widely considered the father of modern anthropology because of his then-revolutionary conclusion that so-called primitive societies did not differ greatly intellectually from modern ones, died Friday at his home in Paris from natural causes. He was 100.

Louis Pierre Althusser was a Marxist philosopher. He was born in Algeria and studied at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where he eventually became Professor of Philosophy.Althusser is commonly referred to as a Structural Marxist, although his relationship to other schools of French structuralism is not a simple affiliation and he is critical of many aspects of structuralism.

«  What is important are the significant breaks – where old line of thought are

disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are

regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. »

«  Cultural Studies, as a distinctive problematic, emerges from one such moment, in the mid-1950s.»«  These three books constituted the caesura out of which- among other things- «  Cultural Studies » emerged.»«  And this is perhaps the point to note that this line of thinking was roughly coterminous with what has been called the « agenda» of the early New Left…»«  Politics of intellectual work ‘ Squarely at the centre of cultural studies from the beginning»

«  Two rather different ways of conceptualizing ‘culture’ can be drawn out of the many suggestive formulations in Raymond Williams’ Long Revolution »

Definition 1 : « the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experiences »

Definition 2 : « refers the social practices » and «  the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life » «  the sum of their inter-relationships »

«  The experiential pull in this paradigm, and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes the two key elements in the humanism on the position outlined ». (p:63)

Both writers reject ‘Literal reading’ of the ‘classical Marxist’ ‘base and superstructure’ metaphor. Both reject ‘vulgar materialism’ and ‘economic determinism’

For Williams ‘ culture is threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their inter-relationship’

Thompsom operate with a more classical distinction than Williams, between social being and social consciousness (the term he infinitely prefers, from Marx, to the more fashionable “base and superstructure”)

Stuart Hall, in his "Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms," distinguishes between a "culturalist" paradigm, which he associates with the work of Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson, and a "structuralist" paradigm, which he associates with the work of structuralists like Claude Levi-Strauss and the Marxism of Louis Althusser. What is at stake in the distinction between "culturalism" and "structuralism" is the significance of theory.

Hall's discussion of these contesting paradigms is part of a historical narrative of the emergence and development of cultural studies.

However, Hall's use of the categories of hegemony and "articulation" does not in and of itself solve the problem of determination, or even provide the elements of such a solution. Gramsci always insisted that hegemony is not exclusively an ideological phenomenon.

Both the "economic" and the "cultural-ideological" aspects of social domination are recognized here, but in a way that separates them in an absolute way and makes it impossible to theorize the relations between them.

The ‘cultural’ strand in cultural studies was interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the ‘Structuralisms.

Aside from the wholly distinct intellectual and conceptual universes within which these alternative paradigms developed, there were certain points where, despite their apparent overlaps, Culturalism and structuralism were starkly counterposed. We can identify this couterposition at one of its sharpest points precisely around the concept of ‘experience’

’

Conclusion

Whereas, in ‘Culturalism’, experience was the ground – the terrain of ‘the lived’ – where consciousness and conditions intersected, structuralism insisted that ‘experience ’ could not, by definition, be the ground of anything, since one could only ‘live’ and experience one’s conditions in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture. These categories, however, did not arise from or in experience: rather, experience was their ‘effect’.