Culture is a constitutive dimension of all social practices, not a cause of them

Evidence

This, Mulhern argues, makes ” ‘culture’ everything—too excessive, without fixed composition or tendency … a heterogeneous mass of possibilities.” Not everything: but a dimension of all signifying practices (which of course also have material conditions of existence); and not without “tendencies,” but never finally determined, and thus always open to more than one possibility—and so always with a degree of contingency. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 160

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s interest in Stuart Hall’s essays as economic thought; the ‘culture not everything but a dimension of all signifying practices’ formulation parallels Gramsci’s and Althusser’s debates the reader is engaging.
• DEFINE: Sharpens Hall’s own precise definition of culture’s role in social practice against Mulhern’s reading of Cultural Studies as making culture everything.