The linguistic turn permanently decenters cultural analysis yet cannot escape questions of power.

Evidence

Again, there is no space here to do more than begin to list the theoretical advances which were made by the encounters with structuralist, semiotic, and poststructuralist work: the crucial importance of language and of the linguistic metaphor to any study of culture; the expansion of the notion of text and textuality, both as a source of meaning and as that which escapes and postpones meaning; the recognition of the heterogeneity, or the multiplicity, of meanings, of the struggle to close arbitrarily the infinite semiosis beyond meaning; the acknowledgment of textuality and cultural power, of representation itself, as a site of power and regulation; of the symbolic as a source of identity. These are enormous theoretical advances, though of course, it had always attended to questions of language. (Raymond Williams’s work, long before the semiotic revolution, is central there.) Nevertheless, the refiguring of theory, made as a result of having to think questions of culture through the metaphors of language and textuality, represents a point beyond which Cultural Studies must now always necessarily locate itself. The metaphor of the discursive, of textuality, instantiates a necessary delay, a displacement, which I think is always implied in the concept of culture. 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

• DEFINE: Catalogues the specific structuralist/semiotic/poststructuralist advances: language, textuality, heterogeneity of meaning, representation as power.
• XREF: The ‘necessary delay or detour’ through language echoes the wider debate in economics/thought about whether culture can be read directly off economic structures—relevant to reader’s aim of bringing Hall into economic thought.