What are the main ideas in Stuart Hall's "Cultural Studies and its Theoritical Legacies"?

The paper, originally published in 1992, examines how
cultural studies can continue to be a counter-hegemonic critical and political cultural
practice in spite of its increasing institutionalization in official institutions. How
can cultural studies continue to maintain its critical vein, its challenge to
institutionalized power, its strong connections with marginality from within the
Academy. One of the crucial point that Hall makes is his final distinction between
academic and intellectual work. While they may overlap at times, they are crucially
different as intellectual work "does not try to inscribe itself in the overarching
metanarrative of achieved knowledges, within the institutions"
(286).

Hall also debates the relationship of cultural
studies to Marxism. He challenges simple notions that considered cultural studies
progressively slipping into Marxism. Yet, he recognizes that his definition of
intellectual work is indebted to the Italian Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci.
Practitioners of cultural studies can be defined using Gramsci's idea of the "organic
intellectual". Organic intellectuals, like cultural studies, work on two fronts. On the
one hand, they cultivate their knowledge, which has to be effective and deep. On the
other hand, knowledge cannot be an end in itself as organic intellectuals must make it
accessible to those people who are not part of the intellectual class. The same is true
about cultural studies whose theoretical legacy is to use theory to stimulate debates
that can have political and social impacts.

Page reference
to Hall's essay in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary
Nelson, Paula Treichler. New York and London: Routledge, 1992, pp.
277-294