Stuart Hall's landmark essay “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” charts the theoretical development of British Cultural Studies by contrasting two dominant frameworks that have shaped its trajectory: culturalism and structuralism. Hall does not present these as mutually exclusive or chronologically sequential, but as overlapping paradigms in creative tension, each responding to broader intellectual and political conditions.
The Culturalist Paradigm: Experience and Humanism
Emerging in the 1950s and 1960s through the works of Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams, and E. P. Thompson, the culturalist approach emphasized lived experience, consciousness, and historical agency. This tradition rejected deterministic forms of Marxism and instead sought to give voice to working-class cultures on their own terms. Culture was seen not as a superstructural reflection of economic base but as a vital, expressive field through which people made sense of their lives.
Williams's notion of “structures of feeling” and Thompson’s focus on “the making of the working class” exemplify this orientation. Both resisted static or mechanistic models, proposing instead a historically situated, human-centered theory of cultural practice. Culture here was defined anthropologically as “a whole way of life” and analytically as a “common process of meaning-making.”
The Structuralist Turn: Language and Ideology
By the late 1970s and 1980s, this humanist tradition came under pressure from structuralist and post-structuralist critiques, particularly those informed by Saussurean linguistics, Althusserian Marxism, and Lacanian psychoanalysis. Structuralism challenged the primacy of “experience,” arguing that subjects are not authors of meaning but are constituted by language and ideology. From this view, experience is not an origin but an effect—an imaginary relation shaped by deeper structural forces.
Althusser’s concept of ideology as unconscious structure, and Lévi-Strauss’s work on cultural systems as akin to language, played pivotal roles in this shift. In this paradigm, the subject is “spoken by” structures rather than speaking them, and meaning arises not from intentional acts but from systems of signification. Theory, rather than description, becomes the privileged mode of analysis.
Hall’s Mediating Position: Toward a Synthesis
Hall resists choosing between the paradigms. Instead, he argues for a dialectical engagement with their tensions. While both paradigms are partial, their antagonism has been productive. The culturalist emphasis on agency and experience retains analytic value, especially when refined by Gramscian concepts such as hegemony and articulation. Meanwhile, structuralism’s rigor and emphasis on ideology help uncover the invisible constraints that shape consciousness.
Ultimately, Hall calls for a Cultural Studies that holds together the insights of both paradigms without collapsing into reductionism or abstraction. He advocates for a materialist theory of culture that accounts for both historical agency and structural determination.
See als: "The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities" by Stuart Hall
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