1. Given that "The Need for Cultural Studies"by Giroux, et al. was written in 1984 (what a symbolic year!), my reading of it had to be necessarily anachronistic. What, I wonder, would the authors have to say about the advent of social media as a discursive space, which, in the intervening years (especially on writing-heavy platforms such as Twitter, Tumblr, and others), has established itself as a sort of oppositional public sphere and simultaneously shown the limits of that establishment? When constructed discursive spaces are lent autonomy of critical reference they become mired in their own circularity. I'm not sure such a "self-regulating discourse" can exist. This begs the question: should counter-disciplinarity be the concern/goal and should such a construction be "housed" at all (in counter-institutions where "There would be various sorts of collectives, variously membered--study groups, counter-disciplinary research groups, even societies and institutes.")? Is institutionalization a requisite for social transformation? Are we missing something in between the cracks of academia/"public"?
2. Going off of that, I was pleasantly surprised to see Hall's own abdication of "absolute beginnings," and the careful way he navigates several (not just two) theoretical paradigms without coming to any hierarchy, but suggests an uneasy cooperation. Although, I'm still unsure what a counter-ideology would look like and how it would be made operative. It seems to me that it would have to, in some sense, construct an apparatus of representation of dominant social contradictions for the realization of 'men' as for-themselves agents. Would the emphasis be put upon the counter-ideology as a critical apparatus or as something which (re)produces counter-commodities? What, that is, is the exact (direct or indirect) correspondence between critique (and the re-arranging of hegemony) and future production?
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