Cultural Studies was never a unified or stable formation

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. It was “centered” only in quotation marks, in a particular kind of way which I want to define in a moment. It had many trajectories; many people had and have different trajectories through it; it was constructed by a number of different methodologies and theoretical positions, all of them in contention. Theoretical work in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was more appropriately called theoretical noise. It was accompanied by a great deal of bad feeling, argument, unstable anxieties, and angry silences. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 236

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Cultural Studies as a ‘discursive formation’ in Foucault’s sense rather than a field with linear origins.
• SEED: The idea that a movement’s ‘theoretical noise’ and conflict are constitutive rather than incidental could anchor an essay on why productive intellectual fields are contentious.