“‘Theory’ is a term that often connotes an objective, formal tool, or even a ‘value-free’ heuristic device. In place of that conception of theory, cultural studies works with the notion of theory as a ‘detour’ to help ground our engagement with what newly confronts us and to let that engagement provide the ground for retheorizing. Theory is thus a practice in a double sense: it is a formal conceptual tool as well as a practising or ‘trying out’ of a way of theorizing” (114). I guess I’m just returning, yet again, to this question of why cultural studies is so hung up on theory. Is there any room for investigating whether theory, just as any other cultural product (as writing), doesn’t also have multiple articulations? Can we, that is, ever get outside theory, really?
I love when Hall suggests Baudrillard be silent for two-thirds of a century in order to actually feel what it is to be ‘of the masses.’ Hall is spot on in his insistence that postmodernism as it stated in a theory of critique (or as it was articulated in the 1970s-80s) can’t account for mass use of cultural objects. What did it mean in 2019, when protesters in Beirut, Chile, and Hong Kong adopted the Todd Phillips Joker makeup as an radical-identificatory and, in the context of surveillance, anti-identificatory tactic? This seems ripe for some articulation-theory in the sense Hall and cultural studies gives it. Does this comedic (but very serious) appropriation constitute the very site of postmodern history?
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