It also meant a dilemma in selecting which of their writings most represented the voice I was interested in, leading to some inconsistencies in following the twists and turns—and limitations—of their technique. This is something I have to clear up.

I think some of the most useful discussion will be on the limitations – where are the points at which the strategies break – that’s where you can define the edges of the strategies, give them shape. That may not be as nice as you would choosing the stuff you really like, but perhaps on the whole more useful, assuming that the people who’ll read your book already have a clue about these names and what they’re known for?

maybe more difficult is the issue of THEORY. dread theory. The four people that you talk about in the PhD version obviously have very different relations to theory: two of them basically disseminate and extend ‘import theories’ of various kinds (Hall, Morris), one of them is pretty much theory free (Hoggart) and Williams changes his relation to theory more than once during his career…does this matter at all for the project? And do different theories come with their own form of ‘address’ (Gramsci, de Certeau, Foucault, Althusser, Cixous… whoever) which are impersonated by their cultural studies disciples/popularisers?

, and…(this could go on for ever I’ll stop soon) what about institutional position: the four orginal figures have very different positions (from one another and across their careers) and their positionality has an immense effect on the kind of work they do and the kind of effects it has and the kind of recognition it gets….Take Williams for instance: for much of his career he was a Professor at Cambridge, pretty much the apex of the Brit/colonial university system and that helps account for why 1) his corpus is much more significant than the others in terms of depth, reach and care; and 2) he has had much more transnational recognition. (In the US outside of the relatively tiny dedicated ‘proper/real’ cultural studies community almost noone has heard of Hoggart or Morris, and Hall is not a major figure across the humanities in general either as Williams is). As most of us know: Hall was a full time academic for his career, which isnt true of Hoggart (who becomes for periods a big-time cultural bureaucrat) or Morris (who survives as a journalist for some years and scarmbles academically until she finally acquires a PhD)
Does a book concerning “address” need to take all this into account??

Holy shit, mel! academic ‘voice’ machines populating the assemblages of various writing machines… or does the writing machine become part of the territorialising voice assemblage… it seems as if you are becoming-Deleuzian… yes, the dark side, such POWER! bwuhahahaHAHA…

Anyway, it looks wicked.

But, tell me, are you doing one on the reactionary voice of popularist ‘intellectuals’ who participate in the culture wars? Carrrn, stick the boot in.

Q: is part of your argument that these voices are particularly resonant in cultural studies as against other areas of the humanities/social sciences? Be interested to hear more about that too.