Itinerary of a Thought: Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies, and the Unresolved Problem of the Relation of Culture to "Not Culture"

Abstract

In a 1992 memorial for Allon White, Stuart Hall eulogized the passing of his friend and of the "metaphors of transformation" that had been "so significant, historically, for the radical imaginary." Modeled on the "revolutionary moment" and associated with Marxism, such metaphors, Hall said, "no longer command assent." Rather than mourning their demise, he suggested that cultural studies, having "moved decisively beyond such dramatic simplifications and binary reversals," required a new metaphor "for imagining a cultural politics" and thinking "the relations between 'the social' and 'the symbolic' " ("For Allon White," 287-88). Hall might have been recounting his own intellectual travels, having embarked on his career committed to the metaphors he now came to inter. This reversal in Hall's thought parallels the theoretical itinerary of the field with which his name has become synonymous. Insofar as Hall is "largely responsible for developing and articulating [its] theoretical positions" (Dworkin, 196), his writings provide a map of the trajectory of cultural studies, from culturalism to structuralism to structuralist Marxism to poststructuralism and post-Marxism. This essay critically assesses that journey by tracing Hall's engagement with these bodies of thought as he sought to resolve the problem of a reflection theory of culture. His solution, I will argue, necessarily resulted in abandoning a materialist theory of culture while conserving the economism and idealism that cultural studies set out to surpass. [End Page 200]

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