Accessible scholarship must still produce genuinely new knowledge, not confirmatory slogans.

Evidence

But this cannot be done at the expense of serious thinking, because the last thing that we want is a rousing populist work that doesn’t tell us anything. My main problem with a great deal of work in Cultural Studies is that it didn’t tell us anything new. It was a circular exercise and the wonderful thing was that you could arrive back at the beginning by a very long and intellectually rewarding route: The bourgeoisie produces bourgeois culture which exercises bourgeois hegemony. Hooray! That is the last thing that anybody out there needs: to be told what they already know. They need the production of new knowledges. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 266

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the critique of tautological theorizing already flagged against Cultural Studies earlier in the chapter series; connects to Hall’s privileging of ‘new knowledges’.
• QUESTION: Which specific Cultural Studies works does Hall have in mind? He calls the circular exercise widespread yet names no texts.
• SHARE: For a colleague who teaches cultural theory: the withering ‘bourgeoisie produces bourgeois culture… Hooray!’ jab is a gift.