Cultural Studies’ core problem is non-reductive determinacy between the cultural and the economic.

Evidence

Though neither structuralism nor culturalism will do, as self-sufficient paradigms of study, they have a centrality to the field which all the other contenders lack because, between them (in their divergences as well as their convergences), they address what must be the core problem of Cultural Studies. They constantly return us to the terrain marked out by those strongly coupled but not mutually exclusive concepts culture/ideology. They pose, together, the problems consequent on trying to think of both the specificity of different practices and the forms of the articulated unity they constitute. They make a constant, if flawed, return to the base/superstructure metaphor. They are correct in insisting that this question—which resumes all the problems of a non-reductive determinacy—is the heart of the matter: and that on the solution of this problem will turn the capacity of Cultural Studies to supersede the endless oscillations between idealism and reductionist. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 208

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Lays out Hall’s central theoretical bet: the culture/ideology coupling and ‘non-reductive determinacy’ as the question on which Cultural Studies’ entire future turns.
• DEFINE: Defines what Hall takes to be the field’s governing problem: thinking specificity of practices together with their articulated unity, against both idealism and reductionism.
• XREF: This is the hinge of Hall’s whole career — the anti-reductionist move that later grounds his work on articulation, race, and Thatcherism. Connects to his essay ‘The Problem of Ideology.’