Planned reaction

Statements of Stuart Hall's that grab my attention and that I'll probably react to once I've formed reactions to his paper, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies", probably after re-reading it several times.



"Although Cultural Studies as a project is open-minded it can't be simply pluralist in that way. Yes, it refuses to be a master discourse or a meta-discourse of any kind. Yes, it is a project that is always open to that which it doesn't yet know, to that which it can't yet name. But it does have some will to connect; it does have some stake in the choices it makes."

"The only theory worth having is that which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency." (OK, I've been fighting them tooth and nail and not sure I understand this, much less agree with it)

"For cultural studies (in addition to many other theoretical projects), the intervention of feminism was specific and decisive. It was ruptural."

"We know it was, but it's not known generally how and where feminism first broke in. I use the metaphor deliberately: as the thief in the night, it broke in; interrupted, made an unseemly noise, seized the time, crapped on the table of cultural studies."