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the founding editor of the New Left Review, Hall did much to open a debate about immigration and expanded the scope of Cultural Studies to deal with the issues of identity, race and gender, and incorporated new ideas derived from the work of French poststructuralist theorists.

Hall argues that Hoggart and Williams’ culturalism was flawed in its emphasis on the determining role of human experience, classical Marxism was flawed in its emphasis on the determining role of the economy, and Althusserean Marxism was flawed in its emphasis on the determining role of language and ideology. Hall regards language as operating within a framework of power, institutions, politics and economics, but he extends structuralist logic and recaptures culturalism’s privileging of agency to move beyond Althusser (Cultural Studies and the Center 38).

He remains convinced that meaning and experience are constructed through signifying practices, while refusing to accept that experience is nothing but the sum total of the governing structure of language (Signification 102). This view presents people as producers and consumers of the culture at the same time. For him culture is not something to simply appreciate, or study; it is also a critical site of social action, where power relations are both established and potentially unsettled. He regards culture as an incomplete, contingent process over which we must struggle, rather than a static object we can simply describe. Hall rejected Marx’s reductive notion of culture as a passive, secondary, reflection in order to stress its active, primary, constitutive role in society (A Sense 29).

Since the 1980s Hall has turned toward Gramsci and the emphasis he places on hegemony as a site of struggle. Gramscian hegemony came to provide a warrant for moving away from the Althusserean-inspired view that ideology is an implacable force for asserting meanings to subordinate groups by the inevitable ideological positioning of the individual by the apparatus of the State and its agencies like the school or family. Hall’s reading of Gramscian hegemony helped the Center to make notions of agency away from the impasse of stucturalist Marxism. According to Gramsci’s notion, cultural practices and communication texts can be viewed as a battleground in a struggle between different groups to define, maintain and contain meaning. The highly important consequence of this notion for Hall and British Cultural Studies is the possibility it provides for viewing the outcomes of power struggle between groups as fluid, ongoing, and never predetermined and also for examining the effects of ideology concretely as they are manifested in living texts (On Ideology 33).

Hall is one of the main proponents of reception theory. This approach to textual analysis focuses on the scope for ‘negotiation’ and ‘opposition’ on part of the audience. This means that a text is not simply passively accepted by the audience, but the meaning depends on the cultural background of the audience. In ‘Encoding/Decoding’, he uses Marxist structuralism in order to argue that media discourse is an overdetermined site at which meaning is not present but is socially pr本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。