Cultural Studies replaced Marxist base-superstructure with complex notions of determination

Evidence

Thus “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms” begins by making an inventory of the qualities of the Cultural Studies’ perspective initially developed by Hoggart and Williams. Stuart offers a careful detailing of the innovations offered in their work (and in parallel, that of the historian E. P. Thompson) in opening up a more serious appreciation of the importance of cultural processes. As he observes, from a methodological point of view this also involves an important innovation in the use of a documentary, descriptive, and anthropological (or ethnographic) perspective on popular cultures and the “structures of feeling” (in Williams’s phrase) by which they can be characterized. In an important move, to which we shall return in later sections, he also details the specific contribution made by these early Cultural Studies authors in dislodging the fundamentalist Marxist model of base and superstructure and in developing more complex notions of determination, which allow for ideological superstructures to play more than a residual or reflective role. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 124

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces the foundational concept of ‘structures of feeling’ and the move beyond deterministic base-superstructure Marxism toward overdetermined ideology.
• XREF: Echoes Arnold Hauser and Frankfurt School debates over whether superstructure plays a merely reflective role.