On Stuart Hall's Thought Of Cultural Identity

The thought of Cultural identity is the core idea of Hall's late cultural research theory,and it is also an outstanding contribution to the study of contemporary culture.The core element of cultural identity is the subject of cultural identity.Through the interaction between the subject and the other subjects,the same view of world is formed between the subjects,and people reach an agreed cultural identity.Cultural identity necessarily involves the discussion of subject.Different from the concept of subject in the perspective of western rationalism,Hall's view of subject is the background of past-modernism colonial criticism and the aim of subjectivity of deconstructing metaphysics.He advocates the establishment of a multi-subject,difference,and dynamic subjective view.This article clarifies the theoretical background and core issues of cultural identity by clearing up and interpreting the important texts of Hall's cultural identity,and on this basis rethinks Hall's theoretical gains and losses.Once the theory of cultural identity has been proposed,it will inevitably brings out thinking about related issues such as culture and subject.Raymond Williams sees culture as a manifestation of the overall lifestyle,believes that culture itself is material and productive.It creates new meanings,changes old cultural concepts,and forms new cultural identity.Raymond Williams' interpretation of radical cultural materialism about culture influences Hall's understanding of the nature of culture.Althusser's ideological subjective view deeply explores how the subject is produced.He sees the subject as being shaped by the ideological state machine,and ideology summons an individual to a subject.However,Althusser's structuralist approach erased the real relationship of human beings in real life,making Hall turn to Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony.Gramsci regards cultural identity as a field of struggle between different social groups.Cultural hegemony is an iterative process of loss,recovery,loss,and recovery.Organic intellectuals are the organizers of cultural identity.They guide cultural identity to take the lead in reaching agreement at the civil society level.These theoretical resources suggest that Hall considers cultural identity as an open production process.In discussions with other theorists on topics such as subject,subculture studies,post-colonialism,and new ethnicity,Hall made a comprehensive and profound exposition of the idea of "cultural identity".The first is the deconstruction of themain body of cultural identity.Hall criticized the subjective view of western rationalism,criticized the identity of the same and natural traditional subject,and pointed out that the subject highlights self in the comparison with the other.He subverted people's narrow views of the subject in previous cultural studies.Second,Hall believes that cultural identity is constantly constructed and we do not have a fixed essential identity.On the one hand,on the surface,we live in the same cultural community.In reality,everyone is a different individual.We are all different individuals.This is the same difference;on the other hand,although everyone both are heterogeneous and diverse,but we are also pursuing a continuum of the same and want to obtain the recognition of the community,which is the same in the differences.The subject achieves a degree of reconciliation in the contradiction between breakage and continuation.The result is an "imagined community." Finally,starting from the perspective of constructivism,Hall uses representation theory to analyze the internal operating mechanism of cultural identity and highlights the important role of language and discourse in reconstructing cultural identity.In the cross-cultural context,Hall analyzed how local British cultural identity was achieved.Under the multiple backgrounds of language,discourse,and symbolism,cultural identity was revealed,bringing to light the activities of representation of cultural identity and realizing the Copernicus's deflection in the field of cultural studies.Hall thinks that people's identity is constructed in the dialectical movement of the same and difference.Identity does not have a permanent fixed point,and the identity of the subject has multiple and complex features.This is a preliminary answer to the mystery of human identity.