Cultural Studies engaged Marxism through its omissions, not its established doctrines.

Evidence

What I mean by that is certainly not that I wasn’t profoundly, and that Cultural Studies then wasn’t from the beginning profoundly, influenced by the questions that Marxism as a theoretical project put on the agenda: the power, the global reach and history-making capacities of capital; the question of class; the complex relationships between power, which is an easier term to establish in the discourses of culture than exploitation, and exploitation; the question of a general theory which could, in a critical way, connect together in a critical reflection different domains of life, politics and theory, theory and practice, economic, political, ideological questions, and so on; the notion of critical knowledge itself and the production of critical knowledge as a practice. These important, central questions are what one meant by working within shouting distance of Marxism, working on Marxism, working against Marxism, working with it, working to try to develop Marxism. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 240 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

I want to look at two other theoretical moments in Cultural Studies which interrupted the already interrupted history of its formation. Some of these developments came as it were from outer space: they were not at all generated from the inside, they were not part of an inner-unfolding general theory of culture. Again and again, the so-called unfolding of Cultural Studies was interrupted by a break, by real ruptures, by exterior forces; the interruption, as it were, of new ideas, which decentered what looked like the accumulating practice of the work. There’s another metaphor for theoretical work: theoretical work as interruption. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 247 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

Related

• Marxism shaped Cultural Studies by posing central questions even as practitioners worked against it (similarity 0.91)
• Marxism’s core questions shaped Cultural Studies even after its political collapse. (similarity 0.88)
• Cultural Studies and Marxism never had a perfect theoretical fit (similarity 0.86)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.86)
• Cultural Studies theory advances through rupture and exterior interruption, not internal unfolding. (similarity 0.86)
• Cultural studies arose from Marxist disappointment rather than from academic progress (similarity 0.86)
• Cultural Studies history is interrupted by exterior forces, not unfolded internally (similarity 0.85)
• Ongoing theorizing, not finished Theory, is what Cultural Studies requires (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural Studies must balance holding a position with open-ended ongoing theorizing. (similarity 0.84)
• Cultural Studies’ founding texts were acts of recovery of prior traditions (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies evolved through critical engagements with Marxism, feminism, and race. (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies engaged Marxism as a problem, not a solution (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies was politically committed intellectual work from its start (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies emerged by displacing culturalism with Gramsci, structuralism, semiology, and discourse theory. (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies’ interdisciplinary subversiveness risks becoming slack pluralism when institutionalized (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Marxism shaped Cultural Studies by posing central questions even as practitioners worked against it #corroborates (0.75) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 240
• Cultural Studies is founded on agonistic debate inimical to orthodoxy #expands (0.70)
• Cultural Studies advanced through external ruptures rather than internal evolution #corroborates (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 247
• Cultural Studies evolved through critical engagements with Marxism, feminism, and race. #corroborates (0.55) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 128