Subjects are constituted by unconscious cultural categories rather than their authors

Evidence

The premises and preconditions which sustain their rationalities have been rendered invisible by the process of ideological masking and taking-for-granted we earlier described. They seem to be, even to those who employ and manipulate them for the purposes of encoding, simply the “sum of what we already know.” That they contain premises, that these premises embody the dominant definitions of the situation, and represent or refract the existing structures of power, wealth, and domination, hence that they structure every event they signify, and accent them in a manner which reproduces the given ideological structures—this process has become unconscious, even for the encoders. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 921 (#expands, via linked claim)

The difference is that, whereas culturalism would correct the hyper-structuralism of earlier models by restoring the unified subject (collective or individual) of consciousness at the center of “the Structure,” discourse theory, by way of the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the Lacanian concepts of how subjects are constituted in language (through the entry into the Symbolic and the Law of Culture), restores the decentered subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enunciated. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The collective unconscious is culturally imposed, not biologically inherited — Frantz Fanon, Constance Farrington, Black skin, white masks, 668; Structuralism inverts culturalism’s claim by making experience an effect of categories; Ideologies connect to subjects through contingent, breakable articulations rather than necessity (+18 more)

Related

• Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness (similarity 0.87)
• Linguistics decentered identity by showing subjects are positioned in pre-existing discourse (similarity 0.86)
• Culturalism’s totality reduces to the simple unity of praxis with homologous contradictions. (similarity 0.83)
• Becoming a subject requires prior subjection to discourse (similarity 0.82)
• Structuralism holds that culture speaks the subject rather than the reverse. (similarity 0.82)
• Structuralism decentered individual agency that culturalism treated as authentic (similarity 0.81)
• In structuralist thought the speaking subject is spoken by unconscious cultural structures (similarity 0.80)
• Culture is inherently decentered and resists direct linkage to other structures (similarity 0.80)
• The subject is produced by culture, not given before it. (similarity 0.80)
• Ideological premises in media encoding operate unconsciously even for the encoders (similarity 0.79)
• The discursive perspective reintroduces non-unitary subjectivity that structuralism had abolished (similarity 0.79)
• Discourse theory merely relocates contradiction from structure to the unconscious. (similarity 0.79)
• The discursive turn requires reintroducing the subject as non-unitary and internally contradictory (similarity 0.78)
• The media construct imaginary coherence from fragmented plural representations (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Ideological premises in media encoding operate unconsciously even for the encoders #expands (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 921
• Discourse theory restores a decentered subject while culturalism restores a unified consciousness #expands (0.60) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 204
• Ideologies connect to subjects through contingent, breakable articulations rather than necessity #expands (0.55)