Really, really loved Giroux's "Public Pedagogy" essay--it helped me historicize cultural studies and its reactive counterparts in academia. Being so persuasive in speaking of cultural studies as a pedagogical (and of culture as public pedagogy), I wonder: is the proper place of Cultural Studies in academia properly pedagogical? That is, if we're barring academia itself as a specific public culture, is one of the tasks in the struggle to open up pedagogical methods to include and become creative thereof so-called mass culture? I think the essay answers this, but I'm still wondering what it would look like in a classroom context--how do we adapt pedagogical methods to the open, practical, and pragmatic work of connecting texts (always changing) to their contexts (always changing)? What constitutes the resistance--and here I'm thinking of our own class--to bringing our own cultural contexts into greater relief in discussing Hall's legacy? Exciting stuff!
Near the end of Morley's essay, he quotes Hall's refrained position against Theory--however, with the modification that, as Hall says, is only anti-Theory in order to "go on theorizing," which doesn't have the same ring as when other authors quote it as a dismissal of 'professional' critique. It recalls the often refrained, and often misinterpreted line from Derrida: "There is nothing outside the text" (or in its more exact translation and context, "There is no outside-text (in the sense of a total explanatory position from which to view an object of critique)." This is a more general question about the legacy not only of Hall but of theory as practice: How do we get into these Theory-holes, these moments of stagnation in which Theory comes to stand for the work and not a relay between political practices that are intentionally actionable to create change and reflection upon their efficacy and methods? How can we better anticipate these moments so as to not have to continually retread the same tropic terrain?
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