Cultural Studies made once-contested premises into today’s unstated scholarly common sense

Evidence

To shift my argument to a different level of analysis, it may well be that some key aspects of Stuart’s influence on the study of media and communications are today almost invisible, insofar as they concern the transformation of the unspoken premises on which the field rests. Nowadays, it goes without saying that there is more to the media than questions of economics and that issues of culture and representation are equally important; that we must pay attention to questions not only of class but also of race, gender, and sexuality; that low-status, fictional media can play just as important a cultural role as serious news and current affairs; that the field of the political must be extended to include its vernacular forms; and that audiences are evidently not passive dupes or zombies. However, if all that now seems no more than common sense, this is because the kind of Cultural Studies that Stuart initiated has made it so, over the last thirty years, forcing these issues onto the research agenda against a background of the wailing and gnashing of teeth in some quarters. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 34

Categorization

• XREF: Offers a beautiful worked example of Hall’s own theory applied to his legacy: a school of thought succeeds precisely when its premises become invisible common sense. Echoes Kuhn on paradigm normalization.