Page 93 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

STUART HALL, CULTURAL STUDIES AND MARXISM 81

five important features which can be shown materially to have affected the
kinds of work done under the rubric of cultural studies during the 1970s.
The first of these is that the shift to marxism was more or less the same
as what Stuart Hall termed the shift from the ‘culturalist’ to the
‘structuralist’ paradigms of cultural studies. As we have shown, the early
texts of cultural studies saw the category of ‘experience’ as central to their
theoretical framework. It was just at this point that the two paradigms
diverged most sharply:

We can identify this counterposition at one of its sharpest points
precisely around the concept of ‘experience’, and the rôle the term
played in each perspective. Whereas, in ‘culturalism’, experience was
the ground—the terrain of the ‘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.
(Hall, 1980b:66)
The new, marxist, intellectual framework was one which saw experience,
and the human subject who had such experience, as the resultant of the
operations of the economy, of ideology and so on, rather than the starting-
point of social investigation.
The second feature of note is that it was a prior encounter with
structuralism which governed the appropriation of marxism. The record
shows that ‘structuralism’ made an impact upon the Birmingham Centre
independently of, and earlier than, any serious engagement with marxism.
Thus, the Centre published, as part of its series of Occasional Papers, work
by Tim Moore and Edgar Morin, introducing structuralism and semiotics,
which were based on lectures given in 1967 and 1968 (Moore, 1968;
Morin, 1969). There had been no equivalent rediscovery of Marx. It is not
until the 1966–7 session that even passing reference is made to Marx
(Anon, 1968). When it was eventually taken up, between 1968 and 1971,
marxism was only one element of a general theoretical reappraisal:
‘phenomenology, symbolic interaction, structuralism and marxism were
precisely the areas which cultural studies inhabited in its search for an
alternative problematic and method’ (Anon, 1971:5). It was not until 1970–
1 that the engagement with Marx became central: ‘We chose as a coherent
theory one the Centre had not previously analysed, that of Karl Marx’
(Anon, 1971:10).
At this point, marxism was conceived of as a relatively broad current of
thought, in which different formulations appeared to be addressing the same
or similar topics: