Cultural elements that appear to persist can secretly shift their social meaning and function

Evidence

We understand struggle and resistance, nowadays, rather better than we do reform and transformation. Yet “transformations” are at the heart of the study of popular culture. I mean the active work on existing traditions and activities, their active reworking, so that they come out a different way: they appear to “persist”—yet, from one period to another, they come to stand in a different relation to the ways working people live and the ways they define their relations to each other, to “the others” and to their conditions of life. Transformation is the key to the long and protracted process of the “moralization” of the laboring classes, and the “demoralization” of the poor, and the “re-education” of the people. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 993

Categorization

• QUESTION: How does one empirically detect that an apparently unchanged tradition has changed its social relation? What evidence distinguishes reworking from persistence?
• XREF: connects to: Geocultural aggregates shift so fast they cannot ground fixed ontology. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 710; Cultural outcomes within Relation are unpredictable and resist fixed hierarchy — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 827; Self-styled cultural rebels often become the establishment without realizing it — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1210