Cultural Studies 1983 Quotes

“Thus, while Williams demonstrated that the existing literary canon can itself be reread in historical and cultural terms, he was unable to reflect on the degree of selectivity implicit within it, on the ways in which it is determined by the circumstances of its production, and on the ways it too easily ignores the languages and voices which have been excluded from the traditional culture. A dominant and traditional culture”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“of an interest in and a theory of subcultures rests upon a clear transposition from deviance theory, although its questions are often presented in a more social interactionist framework: What is the definition of the situation of a particular group? How does it differ from the dominant definitions? How are those whose definitions differ brought, invited, urged, or constrained back into the mainstream? What is the process by which the deviant is labeled? What is the importance of the excluded for the maintenance of the dominant collective representations? Thus, despite their perfectly straightforward lineage from mainstream sociological”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“Consequently, social order is dependent on constraint. Those who are not within the normative order are subject to control, preferably being induced back into the structure. It is within this conception of social order that Durkheim talks about crime as more than an infringement of the social or normative order, for it takes on a symbolic importance within every society by creating the opportunity for the ritual act of punishing those who are the exception to the rule. Only through punishment does a society reaffirm its normative integration and the power of its normative”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“incorporation points to the extremely important idea that the dominant ideology often responds to opposition, not by attempting to stamp it out, but rather by allowing it to exist within the places that it assigns, by slowly allowing it to be recognised, but only within the terms of a process which deprives it of any real or effective oppositional force.”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“Then it is clear that the dominant culture is working effectively, and in a hegemonic way. Hegemony here is evidenced by the fact that the dominant culture need not destroy the apparent resistance. It simply needs to include it within its own spaces, along with all the other alternatives and possibilities. In fact, the more of them that are allowed in, and the more diverse they are, the more they contribute to the sense of the rich open-ended variety of life, of mutual tolerance and respect, and of apparent freedom. The notion of incorporation”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“But of course it is not in their accents, not with the same measure and impact of experience as in the language of those who speak for themselves. That is why it is important in reconstituting”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“The contrast between these two cultural experiences and their inevitable impact on one another is not unlike the experience of migration—from one class to another, from one town to another, from the country to the city, or from the periphery to the center. It makes you instantly alive to the forms and patterns which have shaped you and which you have left behind, intellectually at the very least, for good. I say “intellectually at the very least” for it is almost as inevitable that you will try, symbolically at least, to return to it. Williams wrote a number of rather undisguised autobiographical”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“homologous with those of other practices in the same social formation. One may”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“and some of the ways in which they have been defined and understood are shared. How are they shared? Through the interactive communication between the members of that community. Consequently, all the means of communication—language and media in their broadest senses and not just the narrow sense of communication as the transmission of information (in which Williams is not interested)—provide the ways through which the individuals within a community, culture, or society exchange and refine their shared meanings and in which they collectively and socially define what it is they are going through. Culture, for”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“the basis for a (cultural) community lies in the sharedness of those definitions of historical experiences. People locate themselves as belonging to a community because within it, some experiences are common”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“of English culture. That personal experience”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“Cambridge didn’t know it existed and, if it had known, it wouldn’t have known how to talk about it because it had no language for it. How could it? Cambridge is addicted to notions of culture which depend upon that which is written down in books, and the Welsh valleys have no books. They have an oral culture; they have a traditional culture;”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“Indeed his methodology is exactly that of an ethnographer, listening first of all to the language, to the actual practical speech which people use, to the ways they sustain relationships through language, and to the ways they categorise things.”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“lead anything, but they were able to survive. And they survived with dignity. Their lives constituted a pattern of culture: not the authenticated, valorised, or dominant pattern of culture, not the literate and “cultured” pattern of culture, but something he wants to call “a culture” nevertheless. He evokes that early traditional working class—which the leader of the Labour Party has said is disappearing forever—and he tries to “read it” in the same way he would read a piece of prose. He describes the kind of working-class home in which he was raised; he looks at how they arrange their living rooms, at the fact that even if the house is going to rack and ruin, there is always one place in it for visitors. Nobody else in the house ever goes into it. They may”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“conditions, but in the social and cultural aspects of working-class life in that period, a certain pattern of culture, a certain set of values, a certain set of relationships between people. He sees how people who didn’t have access to a great deal of the material goods made a life for themselves, how they created and constructed a culture which sustained them. Of course, it sustained them in positions of subordination. They weren’t the masters and mistresses of the world. They weren’t people who were going to”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“The New Left recognised the importance of cultural change in this period, but found little help in the existing Marxist bag of tricks; for the most part, the concept simply didn’t appear. I will return shortly to the question of the early forms of Marxist thinking about the problem of culture. My point, however,”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“that if you can understand the changes that are taking place in the culture of the society, you will have a very important strategic clue to understanding broader changes in society’s nature and how it is working. I have begun”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“But while there were economic and political questions about the nature of this socioeconomic system, which looked so different from British societies in the past, it was also perfectly clear that the major transformations were not so much political and economic as cultural and social. But that raised yet another fundamental question: Namely, what are the tools with which one tries to understand the nature of subtle and often contradictory cultural change? And it also assumed, very importantly,”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“questions had to be seen in American terms for the first time. When the Labour Party lost for the second time in the 1959 election, people were predicting that the Conservatives would be in power for a hundred years (thankfully they weren’t, but it looked endless). The leader of the Labour Party, trying to explain what had gone wrong to the 1959 Labour conference, reached into his analytic tool bag and blamed the telly, and the fridge, and the secondhand motorcar, and the women’s magazines, and the disappearance of the working-class cloth cap, and the fact that people didn’t go to the whippets anymore. The breakdown of cultural life explained what had gone wrong! Consequently, the next question that had to be faced was”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“changes which can be identified with American culture’s taking the historical lead in a global context: the diminishing sharpness of class relations; the drifting and incorporation of sectors of the working and lower-middle classes into the professional and nonprofessional commercial classes; the beginnings of mass cultures; the massive penetration of the mass media and the beginnings of a television age; the rapid expansion of a consciousness led by consumer advertising, et cetera. Consequently, British intellectuals and politicians alike had to confront questions about the nature of mass culture and mass society, about the changes taking place in an affluent, capitalist, developed, industrial society, and those questions”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“then, people, especially Marxists, thought—knew—that Britain was the first paradigm industrial society, that everything, from expansion to the tendential decline in the rate of profit, happens first in Britain. But in the postwar period they have to confront the fact that the paradigm case, for all of Western Europe, suddenly”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“This is the “American phase” in British life. Until”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“from nothing, ab initio and ex nihilo, it does provide the circumstances in which trends already lying deep within the society can, as it were, move at an accelerated pace, enabling them to appear and break through the resistances of normal life more easily and rapidly than under normal conditions. It is clear that significant changes began”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History

“War quite frequently disrupts the chain of normal relations, including class, in a society. And while it doesn’t create new trends”
― Stuart Hall, Cultural Studies 1983: A Theoretical History