Cultural struggle peaks where opposed traditions intersect and compete over shared forms

Evidence

It is also often the case that cultural struggle arises in its sharpest form just at the point where different, opposed traditions meet, intersect. They seek to detach a cultural form from its implantation in one tradition, and to give it a new cultural resonance or accent. Traditions are not fixed forever: certainly not in any universal position in relation to a single class. Cultures, conceived not as separate “ways of life” but as “ways of struggle,” constantly intersect: the pertinent cultural struggles arise at the points of intersection. Think of the ways in the eighteenth century, in which a certain language of legality, of constitutionalism, and of “rights” becomes a battleground, at the point of intersection between two divergent traditions: between the “tradition” of gentry “majesty and terror” and the traditions of popular justice. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 1017

Categorization

• XREF: The 18th-century rights language example connects directly to E.P. Thompson’s ‘Whigs and Hunters’ and the rule of law debate, and to Hall’s own work on law in later essays. — connects to: Old folk-art injustice retains a lament; mass-culture alienation masks itself as togetherness — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 227; Culture spans everyday social reproduction and aesthetic practice as one contested process — Max Haiven, Cultures of Financialization, 114; Forms of popular struggle vary dramatically across place and time. — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 252