Psychoanalysis invalidated the sociological concept of socialization for cultural theory.

Evidence

HALL: I’ll say just three brief things about the tensions. One of the most important examples for me of a tension which has been enormously theoretically productive for my own work and which I’m damned if I know how to resolve, and which I therefore have to live with, is exactly that triangle that I referred to earlier, which has been put on the agenda by the interruption of feminism. The interrelations between feminism, psychoanalysis, and Cultural Studies defines a completely and permanently unsettled terrain for me. The gains of understanding cultural questions in and through the insights of psychoanalytic work, especially as those have been reread through the political practices of feminism, opened up enormous insights for me—that’s what I mean by gain. I just feel I know something after that moment that I didn’t know before that I now have to work with. But every attempt to trans late the one smoothly into the other doesn’t work; no attempt to do so can work. Culture is neither just the processes of the unconscious writ large nor is the unconscious simply the internalization of cultural processes through the subjective domain. The latter just doesn’t work. Psychoanalysis completely breaks that sociological notion of socialization; I’ll never use it again. That’s what I mean by interruption: the term tails out the bottom. I cannot explain how social individuals are constituted and reconstituted through the concept of socialization. It just had to go. But I cannot translate the one onto the other. I have to live with the tension of the two vocabularies, of the two unsettled objects of analysis, and try to read the one through the other without falling into psychoanalytic readings of everything. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 274

Categorization

• XREF: Hall’s insistence on reading feminism and psychoanalysis ‘through’ each other without smooth translation connects to Edward Said’s contrapuntal reading and to the broader poststructuralist refusal of master disciplinary codes.