Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms by Stuart Hall (UGC NET English Unit VII)

     Stuart Hall: Brief Overview

ü  Born on 3 Feb 1932 in Kingston,  Jamaica (then a colony of UK) into a middle class family of Indian, African & British descent- Caribbean

ü  A Cultural Theorist/ Sociologist

ü  Lived and worked in UK since 1951

ü  Studied at Merton College, University of Oxford

ü  One of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies/ The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies

ü  Served as the Director of CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) at Birmingham University  from 1968 to 1979

ü  Professor  of Sociology at the Open University (1979- 1997)

ü  Now, a Professor Emeritus

ü  Married to Catherine Hall, a Feminist Professor at University College, London

ü  Founding  editor of NEW LEFT REVIEW

ü  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)

ü  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’.

ü  Founding Editor of Soundings: A Journal of Politics and Culture

ü  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 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.

 

1. CULTURALISM (HOGGART, WILLIAMS & THOMPSON)

 

ü  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.

 

ü  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.

ü  In Culturalism, experience is the ground/ terrain of ‘the lived’. Its focus is on how people experience their conditions of life.

ü  The ‘culturalists’ (Williams & Thompson) view popular culture as an expression of the working class / expressions of class relations.

ü  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.

ü  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.

 

2. STRUCTURALISM (LEVI STRAUSS, SAUSSURE  & ALTHUSSER)

ü   The strength of Structuralist paradigm is that it critiques the humanism and experimentalism of the culturalist paradigm.

ü  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).

ü  The Marxist Structuralists see popular culture as imposed set of meaning.

ü  To the structuralists, the study of culture is not in the sum of cultural phenomena, but in the underlying relationships/ contradictions.

ü  The term ‘structural’ gives the idea of culture as rigid and determinative.

ü  In this arena, questions of ideology, structures of domination & the work of intellectuals take over from questions about culture or experience.

ü  Structuralists stress on ‘determinate conditions’.

 

CULTURALISM & STRUCTURALISM

 

                     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.

 

§  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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