Politics operates through the cultural meanings people use to make sense of their lives

Evidence

It was part of the effort—then no doubt still at a primitive stage—to expand the definition of culture and politics, which came to be distinctive of both the New Left and Cultural Studies: to see culture as one of the constitutive grounds of all social practices—including politics—in so far as they are “signifying” (i.e., as they have “relevance for meaning,” as Max Weber once put it). Unless social groups and classes are always already inscribed in political place by “the economic in the last instance” and “wear their political number plates on their backs,” as Nicos Poulantzas once graphically put it, how could the recruitment of social forces to political positions and programs and their mobilization in the contest over power not be a political issue? And how could that process occur without “working,” in part, on the constitutive ground of the meanings by which people make sense of their lives? — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 160

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This defines the core intellectual project of Cultural Studies: rejecting economic determinism while keeping material conditions, arguing politics recruits subjects through meaning. Dense, paradigm-shifting for the reader.
• DEFINE: Hall’s rebuttal of Mulhern — culture is a dimension of all signifying practices, not everything.
• XREF: connects to: Complex political matters can be translated into everyday language citizens understand. — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 103; Recognizing geopolitics changes the meaning of our actions can shatter one’s sense of existence — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 493; Ordinary daily experience is shaped by the political powers that rule it. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 667 (+2 more)