Stuart Hall Theories

Stuart Hall Theories

Introduction

Stuart Hall was born on February 3, 1932, in Kingston Jamaica, professor of sociology at the Open University between 1979 and 1997, living in England since 1951 (diaspora).

His work includes the titles: The Hard Road to Renewal (1988), Resistance Through Rituals (1989), The Formation of Modernity (1992), Questions of Cultural Identity (1996) and Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices (1997), which proposes a rich dialogue with other scientists. His best known work The Uses of Literacy was published in 1957, in which he defends the value of popular culture in front of the new mass culture, whose main expression appears in the so-called popular media and other cultural industries solutions. Hogarth makes a comparison between popular culture and culture 'colonization' of the working class.

His work seeks to define the concept of late modernity or postmodernity, and the crisis of identity that gradually through social transformations, shifts the subject of the Enlightenment, which was based on the centrality of human rationality, transiting the sociological subject and their interaction with the world, and the postmodern subject, one that came into being from 1989 composed of multiple identities. Influenced by authors such as Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, Ernest Laclau, Marx and Engels, Hall does not see modern societies central organization endowed with a “shift” in the view of Laclau. From this concept, the identity takes on a different character with respect to identity and sociological enlightenment, since dismantles stability and enables the emergence of new identities which, in the author's view, are open, contradictory, fragmented and plural, hence the postmodern subject.

Discussion

From his exhaustive analysis of Marxism, Hall argues that the biggest problems that remain unanswered are the culture, ideology, language and symbolism, and its interpretation Eurocentric. Still from Marxism, Hall suggests the constant struggle (struggle) as a way of building a solid theory, which tried to make the CCCS (Hall, 1989).

Cultural studies also suffered a strong influence of Gramsci, which addresses issues such as the nature of culture, discipline situation, historical specificity, hegemony and class relations as groups or blocks. Gramsci is also influential in the development of the concept of organic intellectuals who emerge from a historical specificity and try to produce knowledge that can be applied in practice. Cultural studies, are dynamic and related to a specific time and place, are sometimes interrupted by external factors. Two of the most important were the issues of feminism and ethnicity (Hall, 1993).

Feminism, according to Hall is a “thief who enters the house at night,” raises new issues as individual as a politician, the expansion of the notion of power, the influence of gender and sexuality, and their relationship with psychoanalysis. Already racism is addressed superficially, with the themes of the issues of ethnicity, politics, resistance to racism, critical issues of cultural policies (Hall, 1990).

Hall also discusses the importance of discourse and textuality, the expansion of the meanings, the relationship of textuality with the power and symbolism and identity. For Hall, there is always a shift of thinking to the realities and ...