The subject is produced by culture, not given before it.

Evidence

What we think of as our individuality—something given before culture, which we possess as a subject just by being born, after which we learn to use the tools of culture—is quite the reverse. This is part of what I meant by saying that identity is not settled in the past but always also oriented toward the future. We enter culture, and by doing so appropriate a language, a culture, which someone else—many other people—created for us, and only in that way gradually become subjects. — Stuart Hall, Essential Essays, Volume 2, 1193

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines the decentered subject: identity as posterior to culture rather than a pre-cultural possession.
• XREF: Connects to Foucault’s subjection-through-discourse and the ‘society sui generis’ of Marx, Weber, Durkheim; foundational bridge to how Islamophobia scholarship reads the construction of Muslim subjects. — connects to: Culture operates as tools and values at once, not one before the other. — Nina Eliasoph, “Close to home”: The work of avoiding…, 182; Subjectivity forms through practice, not prior to it. — Yael Arbell, The Circle of Commoning:…, 85