Cultural Studies has no single origin but many unstable formations.

Evidence

Cultural Studies is a discursive formation, in Foucault’s sense. It has no simple origins, though some of us were present at some point when it first named itself in that way. Much of the work out of which it grew, in my own experience, was already present in the work of other people. Raymond Williams has made the same point, charting the roots of Cultural Studies in the early adult education movement in his essay on “The Future of Cultural Studies” (1989). “The relation between a project and a formation is always decisive,” he says, because they are “different ways of materializing … then of describing a common disposition of energy and direction.” Cultural Studies has multiple discourses; it has a number of different histories. It is a whole set of formations; it has its own different conjunctures and moments in the past. It included many different kinds of work. I want to insist on that! It always was a set of unstable formations. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 236

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Cultural Studies as a ‘discursive formation’ in Foucault’s sense, with multiple discourses, histories, and conjunctures rather than a single origin.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s concept of discursive formation from The Archaeology of Knowledge and to the reader’s interest in how intellectual movements are constituted.