Abstract
In this chapter, Donald Hedrick teases out what he terms a “micro-legacy” of Stuart Hall’s famous talk on the “legacies of Cultural Studies,” in Hall’s stated allegiance to the “necessary modesty of theory.” Exemplifying his position, he sustains discussion of the unacknowledged importance of metaphors, such as “struggle” or “hegemony” or “interruption.” Applying this claim to the matter of teaching, which Hall doesn’t address, Hedrick flips over the privileged status of theory by treating writing and metaphorization, connected to practices of pedagogy, as primary. Trying out this proposal in an imaginative assignment to compare Donald Trump to capital itself, Hedrick attempts a number of parallels: branding, precarity, volatility, communicative capital, value creation, commodification of pleasures, Marx’s “universal prostitution, inequality production and the ultimate absence of any social goal. While such an assignment might seem more playful than rigorous, one notes Hall’s claim that metaphors can be life or death matters. Hedrick’s sample might open up a thread of possible cultural studies pedagogy through serious, radical, exploratory and creative imagination.
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Notes
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An earlier version of this essay, “Adorno Does Donald,” Was Presented at a Plenary Session of the Cultural Studies Association at Georgetown University, Washington, DC, May 25, 2017.
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Hedrick, D. (2019). Cultural Studies as Writing Project, with Trump Assignment. In: Aksikas, J., Andrews, S., Hedrick, D. (eds) Cultural Studies in the Classroom and Beyond. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-25393-6_7
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