Page 16 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

4 DAVID MORLEY AND KUAN-HSING CHEN

4 through the interviews with Hall, to reinterrogate the accepted story
of the ‘genealogy’ of cultural studies, and to raise questions concerning
its future as a field of study.

Although Hall’s position and concerns have always been conjunctural in
nature, developing in response to emerging social and political questions,
and hence have changed considerably over the past forty years (and will, no
doubt, continue to change), we do want to argue that his intellectual
formation in a significant way arose from, and has, in key respects, to be
situated in relation to, the marxist tradition. In fact, it could be argued that
Hall’s more recent work has taken on board neglected questions and
confronted different schools of thought in a way that potentially enriches
and opens up the discursive space of marxism, in response to new
historical currents and movements.
To highlight this marxist influence, Part I, ‘(Un)Settling accounts:
marxism and cultural studies’, begins with Hall’s ‘The problem of
ideology: marxism without guarantees’, which situates his own theory of
ideology in relation to the key trajectories of contemporary marxism. Jorge
Larrain’s ‘Stuart Hall and the marxist concept of ideology’ takes issue with
Hall’s theoretical account of Thatcherism, arguing for a balance between
the classical marxist concept of ideology and Hall’s Gramscian one. Colin
Sparks, in ‘Stuart Hall, cultural studies and marxism’, speaking from a
more traditional British marxist position, traces historically how, in his
view, the cultural studies tradition, under the influence of Hall’s work,
initially encountered and then moved away from the classic marxist
priority given to the economic and thus came closer to a convergence with
the approaches of discourse theorists such as Foucault. Interestingly,
Sparks also identifies certain key continuities between the arguments made
by Hall in his early work, in relation to the thesis of the ‘embourgeoisment’
of the British working class (see Hall 1958 and 1960) and some of Hall’s
later arguments concerning the break-up of traditional class structures, in his
work on the ‘New Times’ project. Sparks’ arguments (even if one disagrees
with his conclusions) do point to a recent tendency to de-emphasize class in
the work of cultural studies: a tendency which, in our view, now needs to
be reconsidered. How to balance and re-theorize the question of
articulating social classes, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, nation
and global capital together, into a forceful explanatory framework, able to
confront the ‘New Times’ we face politically, does seem to be an urgent
issue on the agenda of cultural studies. Hanno Hardt’s ‘British cultural
studies and the return of the “critical” in American mass communications
research’, originally published in the 1986 JCI Special Issue, considers the
dangers of the American academic appropriation and professionalization
of ‘British’ cultural studies, which has tended to result in the loss of its
original political commitments. Regrettably, the subsequent development