Cultural Studies And Its Theoretual Legacies, States

Stuart Hall, in Cultural Studies and its Theoretical Legacies, states “But there is something at stake in cultural studies, in a way that I think, and hope, is not exactly true of many other very important intellectual and critical practices.” (Hall 1996, 99) This statement suggests that cultural studies, has something to offer which is of greater importance, if not different from, the offerings and insights of other academic disciplines. In this paper, I will look at whether or not this suggestion has merit, or is cultural studies just another academic discipline with no more or no less importance than any other discipline. I will draw my analysis and conclusions based on Hall’s paper, some personal insight and the work of Zygmunt Bauman.

Cultural studies as Hall puts it, “Had many trajectories, many people had and have different trajectories through it, it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention.” (Hall 1996, 99) This could be interpreted by some to mean that the idea of cultural studies has no rules, no real focus, and therefore no real credibility.

I think that what this allows cultural studies to be, which help to differentiate itself from other academic disciplines such as the humanities and social sciences, is the ability to think even more outside the box and to look at the world through a less constricted lens. Cultural studies, at least in theory, and how I think Hall was referring, allows more freedom to think outside the specific rules of looking at the world through the eyes of sociology, psychology, politics or economics, to view the world without the rules and constraints of a specific field of study, more open. Cultural studies takes an inter-disciplinary approach to the study of the world, allowing for more abstract thought. That being said, it does not follow that no rules apply or that one can just take a random approach to cultural studies, I believe, that on the contrary, it places more responsibility on those in the field of cultural studies to look for a focal point in individual projects and to identify and validate that which they study. What it means, is that one can have a broader or more open viewpoint that

is not as constrained as it might be in other fields of study.
While we might be now able to argue, at least to a certain extent, that cultural studies may have fewer restrictive and constraining boundaries than some other disciplines, does that necessarily imply that the stakes are higher for cultural studies? Like other academic disciplines, cultural studies looks at how individuals interact with society both in positive and negative ways, and how individuals act upon society and how society acts upon individuals. Zygmunt Bauman in Liquid Modernity, suggests that people have become complacent and accepting of the society within which we live, failing to recognize our lack of freedom, as he states,
That to emancipate, to ‘liberate from society’, we ought and must was not for Marcuse a problem. What was a problem – the problem specific to the society which ‘delivers the goods’ – was that for liberation there was no ‘mass basis’,, to put it simply: few people wished to be liberated, even fewer were willing to act on that wish, and virtually no one was quite sure in what way the ‘liberation from society’ might differ from the state they were already in. (Bauman 2012, 16)

I think that from the perspective of cultural studies, this sums things up in the proverbial nutshell. Cultural studies, I believe, attempts to crack the shell of society, the iron cage of Weber, to go beyond the mere shell, and seek out what is inside the shell. Cultural studies looks to awaken individuals and examine culture through whatever lens is required from that specific point in time or space.
Hall discusses how cultural studies rose in response to some of the dissatisfaction associated with Marxism and a shift to more open thought, as he states
There never was a prior moment when cultural studies and Marxism represented a perfect theoretical fit. From the beginning (to use this way of speaking for a moment) there was always-already the question of the great inadequacies, theoretically and politically, the resounding silences, the great evasions of Marxism – the things that Marx did not talk about or seem to understand which were our privileged object of study, culture, ideology, language, the symbolic. (Hall 1996, 100)

Whereas Marxism, looks at individuals as products of their society and are thus interpellated by society and lack the agency and ability to control their own destiny, cultural studies looks at how individuals can affect society.

Through cultural studies the boundaries imposed by society, tradition and structures can be made more elastic to extend beyond traditional borders and to explore greater human potential and possibilities, which may not be as easily accomplished in other academic disciplines. In other words, cultural studies might be seen as thinking more outside the box than other disciplines. Cultural studies looks to both examine and challenge the hegemony and injustice created by and within society. Bauman

states:
‘Society’ always stood in an ambiguous relation to individual autonomy: it was, simultaneously, its enemy and its sine qua non condition. But the proportions of threats and chances in what is bound to remain an ambivalent relationship have radically changed in the course of modern history. Though the reasons to watch it closely may not have disappeared, society is now primarily the condition which individuals strongly need, yet badly miss – in their vain and frustrating struggle to reforge their de jure status into the genuine autonomy and capacity for self-assertion. (Bauman 2012, 40)

It is this relationship, between sine qua non, that which is needed, and de jure, that which is applied in practice, that cultural studies focuses upon. Cultural studies attempts to examine how individuals manage the duality of their condition, between their own personal goals and autonomy and the greater goals and rules imposed by society as a whole. This relationship is largely conflictual and what might be good for the individual may not be good for society and vice versa.
In conclusion, I would suggest that cultural studies does not actually have more at stake than other academic disciplines, but it does however, tend to embody or combine some of the stakes of other disciplines in a common package under the guise of one umbrella known as cultural studies. So although the stakes for cultural studies are high, it is because of their link and connection to other academic disciplines, to which I believe cultural studies owes its existence in the first place. I believe that what this allows cultural studies to have which may not be present in other academic disciplines in a broader view of the world as a whole, however, I do not necessarily think that translates to cultural studies having any more or less at stake than any other academic discipline.