Event overview
One of a series of workshops, organised by the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, that celebrates and considers Stuart Hall's work by close engagements with some of his key publications.
Each workshop consists of a series of responses to Stuart Hall's texts and a discussion of their significance in their historical context and their continued agency and effect in the debates of contemporary cultural studies and beyond. Attendance is open, with the request that attendees read the particular text beforehand.
Workshop 3: "Marx's Notes on Method: A 'Reading' of the '1857 Introduction"
Julia Ng chair, Gregor McLennan, David Nowell Smith, Alberto Toscano
In a piece examining "Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies (1996),” Stuart Hall writes of a period at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies during which, for five or six years, "we decided, in a very un-British way, we had to take the plunge into theory, we walked right around the entire circumference of European thought, in order not to be, in any simple capitulation to the zeitgeist, marxists." Hall describes how "we read German idealism, we read Weber upside down, we read Hegelian idealism, we read idealistic art criticism." And situated "at the tip of the iceberg of this long engagement," writes Hall, was "a long rambling piece" on Marx's 1857 'Introduction' to The Grundrisse.
This workshop takes as its point of departure the essay “Marx’s Notes on Method: A ‘Reading’ of the 1857 Introduction,” which not only originated as a Working Paper distributed for seminar discussion at the Centre in 1974, but was also, decades later, republished with Hall’s enthusiastic consent in 2003 in the journal Cultural Studies. Laying the groundwork in its 1974 iteration for the method he would put into practice shortly afterwards in his seminal study Policing the Crisis, the essay served in its 2003 reappearance as Hall’s urgent appeal to re-enliven a “detour through theory” in order to interrogate the relation between abstraction and concretion at the centre of cultural studies’ methodological framework. Taking seriously Hall’s open invitation to “plunge into theory” as part of cultural studies’ ongoing intellectual work, the workshop explores the philosophical heritage of the field, starting with the distinction drawn between structuralism in Marx’s epistemology and Althusser’s, and extending beyond the mere “tip of the iceberg” into the genealogy of “concrete analysis” in German idealism. In doing so, the workshop will stake out cultural studies’ genuine European and international scope, and therefore come to terms with its theoretical fluency today.
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Biographies of Speakers
Gregor McLennan is Professor of Sociology and Head of the School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies at the University of Bristol. He received his postgraduate training at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham, and is the author of numerous books including Marxism and the Methodologies of History (1981), Marxism, Pluralism and Beyond (1989), and Sociological Cultural Studies: Reflexivity and Positivity in the Human Sciences (2006).
Julia Ng is Lecturer in Critical and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths, University of London. She received her postgraduate and postdoctoral training in comparative literature and philosophy at Northwestern and Harvard, and is the co-editor of a special issue on Walter Benjamin, Gershom Scholem, and the Marburg School (Modern Language Notes, 2012). She is currently completing a book entitled Conditions of Impossibility.
David Nowell Smith is Lecturer in Literature at the University of East Anglia, and author of Sounding/Silence: Martin Heidegger at the Limits of Poetics (Fordham UP, 2013) and On Voice in Poetry: The Work of Animation (Palgrave, 2015 forthcoming).
Alberto Toscano is Reader in Critical Theory in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is the author of Fanaticism: The Uses of an Idea (2010) and Theatre of Production: Philosophy and Individuation between Kant and Deleuze (2006). He has translated a number of works by Alain Badiou and is on the editorial board of the journal Historical Materialism.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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27 Nov 2014 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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