Cultural study is permanently displaced because signifying practice eludes direct linkage to social structures

Evidence

If you work on culture, or if you’ve tried to work on some other really important things and you find yourself driven back to culture, if culture happens to be what seizes hold of your soul, you have to recognize that you will always be working in an area of displacement. There’s always something decentered about the medium of culture, about language, textuality, and signification, which always escapes and evades the attempt to link it, directly and immediately, with other structures. And yet, at the same time, the shadow, the imprint, the trace, of those other formations, of the intertextuality of texts in their institutional positions, of texts as sources of power, of textuality as a site of representation and resistance, all of those questions can never be erased from Cultural Studies. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 252

Categorization

• SEED: A usable characterization of culture as an inherently decentered medium — candidates as an epigraph or frame for writing on culture’s refusal of direct causal reduction.