Cultural Studies grew from agonistic debate, not progress toward settled orthodoxy

Evidence

One key part of his argument, in trying to dislodge the emerging, triumphalist Grand (Theoretical) Narrative of this fast-developing field, was to recognize that, rather than developing along any smooth pathway toward a set of revealed truths, the forms of Cultural Studies developed in Birmingham had always themselves been driven by the “theoretical noise” of intense (and often fractious) debate between multiple contestatory discourses. This, he argued, was essential to the intellectual project, which he understood as being founded in a necessarily “agonistic” process of debate, which is fundamentally inimical to the final establishment of any form of intellectual orthodoxy. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 128

Categorization

Category: Definitional Content

• DEFINE: Introduces Hall’s definition of the intellectual project as ‘agonistic’ — a permanent contested process fundamentally opposed to orthodoxy.

Related

• Hall held agonistic debate as essential and hostility to orthodoxy as constitutive. (similarity 0.94)
• Cultural Studies was never a unified or stable formation (similarity 0.83)
• Cultural Studies’ identity lies in an unresolved tension between theory and politics (similarity 0.82)
• Intellectual projects must balance committed positions with open-ended theorizing (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural Studies’ founding texts were acts of recovery of prior traditions (similarity 0.82)
• Cultural Studies engaged Marxism through its omissions, not its established doctrines. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies emerged from a literary rather than economic tradition (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies must balance holding a position with open-ended ongoing theorizing. (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies is founded on agonistic debate inimical to orthodoxy (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies must remain permanently open-ended and responsive to external influences (similarity 0.81)
• Ongoing theorizing, not finished Theory, is what Cultural Studies requires (similarity 0.81)
• Cultural Studies emerged by displacing culturalism with Gramsci, structuralism, semiology, and discourse theory. (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural study needs to decanonize categories while retaining critical judgment (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies was politically committed intellectual work from its start (similarity 0.80)
• Cultural Studies has no single origin but many unstable formations. (similarity 0.80)