Introduction to Cultural Studies

Introduction:
Cultural studies do not speak with one voice, it cannot be spoken with one voice,
and there is no one voice with which it could be represented.

‘Culture’ is a strange category. It’s one of those concepts that we simply cannot
do without- it is used everywhere- but which is also unsatisfactory and cries out
for betterment. No one can define it exactly or say what it ‘really’ means. That’s
partly why it is so useful, because we can always say later we meant something
slightly different, whilst getting on for now saying something nearly right of
great importance. So many things are contained in the word.

At an everyday human level, cultural interests, pursuits and identities have never
been more important than today. This has to be broadly considered, of course, as
individuals and groups bearing a felt responsibility for and wanting a hand in the
making of the self as something more than a passive or unconscious acceptance
of a historically/socially prescribed identity- simply being working class, black
or white, young or old, etc. Everyone wants to have, or make, or be considered
as possessing cultural significance. No one knows what the social maps are any
more, so it is more important not be left out, overlooked or misrepresented.
Everyone wants to stake in the action, though no one is quite sure where the
party is.

At the same time and in a connected way, ‘culture’ has become an important and
much used theoretical and substantive category of connection and relation. Both
in academic and popular writing and commentary we see countless references to
‘culture of …schools, organizations, pubs, regions, social orientations,
ethnicities, etc.’ You name it and you can add, ‘culture of…’ All those evoked
domains of ‘culture’ are seen as containing a multiplicity of human forms and
relations: from micro-interpersonal interactions group norms processes and
values to communicative forms, provided texts and images, wider out to
institutional forms and constraints, to social representations and social imagery;
wider out still to economic , political, ideological determinations. All can be
traced back for their cultural effects and meanings, all traced for their mutual
interactions from the point of view of how the meanings of a particular ‘culture’
are formed and held to operate.

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Small wonder, then, that the mode of academic enquiry that seeks to
comprehend some of this, ‘cultural studies’, should be a field of at times
intractable complexity and perhaps the first great academic experiment in the
attempted formation of a ‘non-disciplinary’ discipline. No single approach can
hope to comprehend the above in one sweep; no one sweep producing some
partial understanding can fail to notice what other sweeps might produce. We
are condemned to a kind of eclecticism because of the very eclecticism and
indissoluble combinations of the dissimilar in the increasingly complex ‘real’
world around us.

It is, therefore, necessary to reflect briefly on the much-contested academic field

of cultural studies. At a first glance, it may seem that a workable definition of
culture itself would lead seamlessly to a reasonably straightforward definition of
cultural studies. Yet, that is not the case, since ‘studies of culture’ are not
entirely – or always – synonymous with ‘cultural studies’. For the two to be
synonymous, not only a particular interpretation of culture, but also a specific
approach to scholarly inquiry, needs to be in attendance.

It seems necessary in the beginning to start by querying the etymology and

subsequent usage of the term ‘culture’. The word derives from the Latin verb
colere, which means ‘to cultivate’, in the sense of both farming (cultura agri)
and tending to one’s soul (cultura animae). The Oxford English Dictionary
definition of culture – as both the cultivation of the soil and certain animals and
the cultivation or development of the mind, faculties and manners –
appropriately reflects the original semantic mismatch. One might say that,
throughout much of human history, the former brand of culture has been the
everyday necessity for the poor, while the latter has been the prerogative of the
selected and privileged few, who had their primary needs catered for and could
thus engage in tending their spiritual wellbeing. Indeed, until recently, ‘culture’
was understood as ‘high culture’ and reserved exclusively for the social elites.

A different term ‘civilization’ was used to convey the set of principles, practices
and their attendant material manifestations, which enable human beings to
engage with society and its institutions. Within the academic arena, this meant
that studies of ‘culture’ (that is, high culture) were mostly reserved for the
departments of literature, fine arts and philosophy, while studies of ‘civilization’
were pursued by historians, sociologists and anthropologists.

As early as the eighteenth century, anthropology was the first discipline to adopt
a broader meaning of ‘culture’, by conflating its then privileged meaning with
that of what was commonly referred to as ‘civilization’. An anthropological
approach to culture – as opposed to the traditional aesthetic reading – includes
all values, practices, artifacts and modes of behaviour that characterize a
particular community and guarantee its continuing reproduction.

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Even though initially this more egalitarian and less judgemental approach was
by and large applied by Western/European practitioners to the cultures of less
developed and other ‘exotic’ societies and groups, it effectively presaged the
blurring of the distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture we are witnessing
today within the developed ‘Western’ world.

Due to the inertia of institutionalized knowledge, it took two hundred years and,
in particular, the momentous social change worldwide following the Second
World War, for this more inclusive understanding of culture to spill over from
anthropology and affect other academic disciplines. The decisive turn occurred
in post-second-world-war Great Britain, with scholarly interventions by the for-
fathers of cultural studies, Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart and Stuart Hall.
In their pioneering work, these scholars promoted what was to become the
implied sine qua non of cultural studies practice; an auspicious mix of
investigative passion, academic rigour, literary sensibility and socio-political
engagement.

Partly because of its origin within the British academia and its subsequent rapid
dissemination along the Anglo-American axis, cultural studies remains open to
charges of Anglocentrism and parochialism. Yet, cultural studies has been
practiced in many locations outside the Anglo-American spectrum. This border
crossing has broadened the horizons of cultural studies research, as each strand
contributed to its own culturally distinctive flavor and white Anglo-American
practitioners began acknowledging and deconstructing their own privileged
position within the structures of domination under their scrutiny.

With its understanding of culture as a ‘whole way of life’, cultural studies spans
a variety of traditional academic disciplines. In fact, it has been defined as not
simply interdisciplinary but ‘actively and aggressively anti-disciplinary - a
characteristic that more or less ensures a permanently uncomfortable relation to
academic disciplines’.

In addition to this critical self-positioning of cultural studies outside the

‘established’ academic disciplines, its openly avowed political undercurrent –
stemming from a fundamental disbelief in politics-free knowledge – renders it
all the more incompatible with and sometimes even antagonistic towards
disciplines based precisely on an objectivist worldview. Politics lie at the very
foundation of the sense of self of cultural studies practitioners. They see
themselves not merely as detached observers of cultural practices, but also, and
more importantly, as politically engaged participants in cultural change.

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To be properly understood, these two attributes of cultural studies – its
problematic positioning within the academic canon and its conscious political
engagement – need to be further qualified. To begin with, the attributes need to
be seen as the least common denominator among a widely divergent range of
theoretical, methodological and political positions adopted in inquiring cultural
practices ‘from the point of view of their intrication with, and within, relations
of power’. The theoretical and methodological choices of cultural studies are not
preset, but vary pragmatically and strategically according to the questions under
scrutiny and the specific power relations at work in a particular context. This
methodological ‘bricolage’ may thus include semiotics, deconstruction, textual
or content analysis, observation, surveys, focus groups or interviews, to name
only a few of the research strategies employed by cultural studies practitioners.

Similarly, no homogeneous political programme underlies cultural studies

research, other than a consistent interest in and commitment to disenfranchised
or marginal populations, such as racial or ethnic minorities, underprivileged
social classes, or those disempowered on the basis of gender, age, sexuality,
geographical locations or colonial legacies. Within these groups, the focus has
been on oppositional subcultures, seen as capable of resisting the hegemonic
modes of caoitalist domination. This preoccupation positions cultural studies to
the left of the political spectrum, to use the increasingly problematic political
categorization, which many see as superseded. Cultural studies aims to represent
a voice of conscience ‘from within’, probing and aspiring to dismantle
mechanisms of domination.

In a conscious effort to overturn the hierarchy between ‘high’ or ‘elite’ and

‘low’ or ‘popular’ culture, cultural studies practitioners have tended to resort to
the ‘affirmative’ strategy of privileging the latter, risking, perhaps, to reinforce
the dichotomy by simply inverting it and thus unwittingly accepting its basic
premises. Yet, cultural studies is not exclusively concerned with popular culture,
‘though it is perhaps always, in part, about ‘the rules of inclusion and exclusion
that guide intellectual evaluation’.

Cultural studies involves how and why such work is done not just its content. In
other words, when examining texts and practices deemed to represent either
‘low’ or ‘high’ culture, cultural studies practitioners consistently shift their
attention from the text itself to the broader socio-cultural context of its
production, distribution and consumption, thus hoping to expose and contest the
very power relationships at work in the formation of dominant canons.

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The Parameters of Cultural Studies:
There is a difference between the study of culture and institutionally located
cultural studies. The study of culture has taken place in a variety of academic
disciplines- sociology, anthropology, literature, etc.- and in a range of
geographical spaces. However, this is not to be understood as cultural studies.
The study of culture has no origins, and to locate one is to exclude other possible
starting points. Nevertheless, this does not mean that cultural studies cannot be
named and its key concepts identified.

Cultural studies is a discursive formation, that is, ‘a cluster or formation of

ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about forms of
knowledge and conduct associated with a particular topic, a social activity or
institutional site in society’ (Hall, 1997a). Cultural studies is constituted by a
regulated way of speaking about objects (which it brings into view) and coheres
around key concepts, ideas and concerns. Further, cultural studies had a moment
at which it named itself, even though that naming marks only a cut or snapshot
of an ever –evoking intellectual project.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies:

Cultural studies has been reluctant to accept institutional legitimation.
Nevertheless, the formation of the centre f or contemporary cultural studies at
Birmingham University (UK) in the 1960s was a decisive organizational
instance. Since that time, cultural studies has extended its intellectual base and
geographic scope. There are self-defined cultural studies practitioners in the
USA, Australia, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, with each ‘formation’
of cultural studies working in different ways. While British cultural studies need
not be privileged per se, the formation of cultural studies at Birmingham
remains an institutionally significant moment.

Since its emergence, cultural studies has acquired a multitude of institutional

bases, courses, textbooks and students as it has become something to be taught.
This necessarily involves ‘disciplining’ cultural studies.

Disciplining Cultural Studies:

Many cultural studies practitioners oppose forging disciplinary boundaries for
the field. However, it is hard to see how this can be resisted if cultural studies
wants to survive by attracting degree students and funding. In that context
Bennett (1998) offers his ‘element of a definition’ of cultural studies.
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 - Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from
different disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations
of culture and power.
- Cultural studies is concerned with all those practices, institutions and
systems of classification through which there are inculcated in a
population particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and
habitual forms of conduct.
- The forms of power that cultural studies explores are diverse and include
race, gender, class, colonialism, etc. Cultural studies seeks to explore the
connections between these forms of power and to develop ways of
thinking about culture and power that can be utilized by agents in the
pursuit of change.
- The prime institutional sites for cultural studies are those of higher
education, and as such, cultural studies is like other academic disciplines.
Nevertheless, it tries to forge connections outside of the academy with
social and political movements, workers in cultural institutions and
cultural management.

With this in mind, we may consider the kinds of concepts that regulate cultural
studies as a discursive formation.

Culture and Signifying Practices:

Cultural studies would not warrant its name without a focus on culture. ‘By
culture, here I mean the actual grounded terrain of practices, representations,
languages and customs of any specific society. I also mean the contradictory
forms of common sense which have taken root in and helped to shape popular
life’ (Hall,1996c). Culture is concerned with questions of shared social
meanings, that is, the various ways we make sense of the world. However,
meanings are not simply floating ‘out there’; rather, they are generated through
signs, most notably those of language.

Cultural studies has argued that language is not a neutral medium for the
formation of meaning and knowledge about an independent object world
‘existing’ outside of language. Rather, it is constitutive of those very meanings
and knowledge. That is, language gives meaning to material objects and social
practices that are brought into view by language and made intelligible to us in
terms that language delimits. These processes of meaning production are
signifying practices. In order to understand culture, we need to explore how
meaning is produced symbolically in language as a ‘signifying system’.

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Representation:
A good deal of cultural studies is centred on questions of representation. That is,
on how the world is socially constructed and represented to and by us in
meaningful ways. Indeed, the central strand of cultural studies can be
understood in the study of culture as the signifying practices of representation.
This requires us to explore the textual generation of meaning. It also demands
investigation of the modes by which meaning is produced in a variety of
contexts. Further, cultural representation and meanings have a certain
materiality. That is, they are embedded in sounds, inscriptions, objects, images,
books, magazines, and television programmes. They are produced, enacted, used
and understood in specific contexts.

Materialism and Non-Reductionism:

Cultural studies has, for the most part, been concerned with modern
industrialized economies and media cultures organized along capitalist lines.
Here representations are produced by corporations who are driven by the profit
motive. In this context, cultural studies has developed a form of cultural
materialism that is concerned to explore how and why meanings are inscribed at
the moment of production. That is, as well as being centered on signifying
practices, cultural studies tries to connect them with political economy. This is a
discipline concerned with power and the distribution of economic and social
resources. Consequently, cultural studies has been concerned with:

- Who owns and controls cultural production;

- The distribution mechanisms for cultural studies;
- The consequences of patterns of ownership and control for contours of the
cultural landscape.

Having said that, one of the central tenets of cultural studies is its non-
reductionism. Culture is seen as having its own specific meanings, rules and
practices which are not reducible to, or explainable solely in terms of, another
category or level of a social formation. In particular, cultural studies has waged
a battle against economic reductionism. That is, the attempt to explain what a
cultural text means by reference to its place in the production process. For
cultural studies, the processes of political economy do not determine the
meanings of texts on their appropriation by audiences. Rather, political
economy, social relationships and culture must be understood in terms of their

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own specific logics and modes of development. Each of these domains is
‘articulated’ or related together in context-specific way. The non-reductionism
of cultural studies insists that questions of class, gender, sexuality, race,
ethnicity, nation and age have their own particularities which cannot be reduced
either to political economy or to each other.

Articulation:
Cultural studies has deployed the concept of articulation in order to theorize the
relationships between components of a social formation. This idea refers to the
formation of a temporary unity between elements that do not have to go
together. Articulation suggests both expressing/representing and a ‘putting-
together’. Thus, representations of gender may be ‘put-together’ with
representations of race or nation so that, for example, nations are spoken of as
female. This occurs in context-specific and contingent ways that cannot be
predicted before the fact. The concept of articulation is also deployed to discuss
the relationship between culture and political economy. Thus, culture is said to
be ‘articulated’ with moments of production but not determined in any
‘necessary’ way by that moment. Consequently we might explore how the
moment of production is inscribed in texts but also how the ‘economic’ is
cultural, that is, a meaningful set of practices.

Power:
Cultural studies writers generally agree on the centrality of the concept of power
to the discipline. For most cultural studies writers, power is regarded as
pervading every level of social relationships. Power is not simply the glue that
holds the social together, or the coercive force which subordinates one set of
people to another, though it certainly is this. It is also understood in terms of the
processes that generate and enable any form of social action, relationship or
order. In this sense, power, while certainly constraining, is also enabling. Having
said that, cultural studies has shown a specific concern with subordinated
groups, at first with class, and later with races, genders, nations, age groups, etc.

Popular Culture:
Subordination is a matter not just of coercion but also of consent. Cultural
studies has commonly understood popular culture to be the ground on which this
consent is won or lost. As a way of grasping the interplay of power and consent,
two related concepts were repeatedly deployed in cultural studies’ earlier texts,
though they are less prevalent these days, namely ideology and hegemony.

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By ideology is commonly meant maps of meaning that, while they purport to be
universal truth, are historically specific understandings that obscure and
maintain power. For example, television news produces understandings of the
world that continually explain it in terms of nations, perceived as ‘naturally’
occurring objects. This may have the consequence of obscuring both the class
divisions of social formation and the constructed character of nationality.
Representations of gender in advertising, which depict women as housewives or
sexy bodies alone, reduce them to those categories. As such, they deny women
their place as full human beings and citizens. The process of making,
maintaining and reproducing ascendant meanings and practices has been called
hegemony. Hegemony implies a situation where a ‘historical bloc’ of powerful
groups exercises social authority and leadership over subordinate groups
through the winning of consent.

Texts and Readers:

The production of consent implies popular identification with the cultural
meaning generated by the signifying practices of hegemonic texts. The concept
of text suggests not simply the written word, though this is one of its senses, but
all practices that signify. This includes the generation of meaning through
images, sounds, objects (such as clothes) and activities (like dance and sport).
Since images, sounds, objects and practices are sign systems, which signify with
the same mechanism as a language, we may refer to them as cultural texts.

However, the meanings that critics read into cultural texts are not necessarily the
same as those produced by active audiences or readers. Indeed, readers will not
necessarily share all the same meanings with each other. Critics, in other words,
are simply a particular breed of reader. Further, texts, as forms of representation,
are polysemic. That is, they contain the possibility of a number of different
meanings that have to be realized by actual readers who give life to words and
images. We can examine the ways in which texts work, but we cannot simply
‘read off’ audiences’ meaning production from textual analysis. At the very
least, meaning is produced in the interplay between text and reader.
Consequently, the moment of consumption is also a moment of meaningful
production.

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Subjectivity and Identity:
The moment of consumption marks one of the processes by which we are
formed as persons. What is to be a person, viz. subjectivity, and how we
describe ourselves to each other, viz. identity became central areas of concern in
cultural studies during the 1990s. In other words, cultural studies explores:

- How we come to be the kinds of people we are;

- How we are produced as subjects;
- How we identify (or emotionally invest in) descriptions of ourselves as
male or female, black or white, young or old.

The argument, known as anti-essentialism, is that identities are not things that
exist; they have no essential or universal qualities. They are rather discursive
constructions, the product of discourses or regulated ways of speaking about the
world. In other words, identities are constituted, made rather than found, by
representations, notably language.

The Intellectual strands of Cultural Studies:

The concepts we have explored are drawn from a range of theoretical and
methodological paradigms. The most influential theories within cultural studies
have been; Marxism, culturalism, structuralism, poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis and the politics of difference (under which heading, for the sake
of convenience, I include feminism, theories of race, ethnicity and
postcolonialism). The purpose of sketching the basic tenets of these theoretical
domains is to provide a signpost to thinking in the field. However, each needs to
be developed in more detail throughout the text and there is no one place to look
for theory. Theory permeates all levels of cultural studies and needs to be
connected to specific debates rather than be explored solely in the abstract.

Marxism and the Centrality of Class:

Marxism is, above all, a form of historical materialism. It stresses the historical
specificity of human affairs and the changeable character of social formations
whose core features are located in the material conditions of existence. Marx
argued that the first priority of human beings is the production of their means of
subsistence through labour. As the humans produce food, clothes and all kinds
of tools with which to shape their environment, so they also create themselves.
Thus labour, and the forms of social organization that material production takes
as a mode of production, are central categories of Marxism.

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The organization of a mode of production is not simply a matter of coordinating
objects; rather, it is inherently tied up with relations between people. These
relationships, while social, that is, co-operative and coordinated, are also matters
of power and conflict. Indeed, Marxists regard social antagonisms as being the
motor of historical change. Further, given the priority accorded to production,
other aspects of human relations – consciousness, culture and politics- are said
to be structured by economic relations.

For Marxism, history is not a smooth evolutionary process. Rather, it is marked

by significant breaks and discontinuities of modes of production. Thus, Marx
discusses the transformations from an ancient mode of production to a feudal
mode of production and thence to the capitalist mode of production. Different
forms of material organization and different social relations characterize each
mode of production. Further, each mode of production is superseded by another
as internal contradictions, particularly those of class conflict, lead to its
transformation and replacement.

Capitalism:
The enterprise of Marx’s work was an analysis of the dynamics of capitalism.
This is a mode of production premised on the private ownership of the means of
production ( in his days, factories, mills, workshops; and in a more
contemporary vein, multinational corporations). The fundamental class division
of capitalism is between those who own the means of production, the
bourgeoisie and those who, being a propertyless proletariat, must sell their
labour to survive.

The legal framework and common-sense thinking of capitalist societies declare

that the worker is a free agent and the sale of labour is a free and fair contract.
However, Marx argues that this appearance covers over a fundamental
exploitation at work. Capitalism aims to make a profit and does so by extracting
a surplus value from workers. That is, the value of the labour taken to produce a
product, which becomes the property of the bourgeoisie, is less than the worker
receives for it.

The realization of surplus value in monetary form is achieved by the selling of

goods (which have both ‘use value’ and ‘exchange value’) as commodities. A
commodity is something available to be sold in the marketplace. Thus,
commodification is the process associated with capitalism by which objects,
qualities and signs are turned into commodities. The surface appearance of
goods sold in the marketplace obscures the origin of these commodities in an
exploitive relationship; a process Marx calls commodity fetishism. Further, the

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fact that workers are faced with the product of their own labour now separated
from them constitutes alienation. Since the proletariat are alienated from the
core of human activity, namely the labour process, so they are alienated from
themselves.

Capitalism is a dynamic system whose profit-driven mechanisms lead to the

continual revolutionizing of the means of production and the forging of new
markets. For Marx, this was its great merit in relation to feudalism. This is
because it heralded a massive expansion in the productive capacities of
European societies. It dragged them into the modern world of railways, mass
production, cities and a formally equitable and free set of human relations in
which people were not, in a legal sense, the property of others (as were serfs in
feudal societies).

However, the mechanisms of capitalism also give rise to perennial crises and
will ultimately lead, or so Marx argued, to its being superseded by socialism.
Problems for capitalism include:

- A falling rate of profit;

- Cycles of boom and bust;
- Increasing monopoly;
- The creation of a proletariat which is set to become the system’s grave-
digger.

Marx hoped that capitalism would be rent asunder by class conflict. He

envisaged the proletariat’s organizations of defense, trade unions and political
parties, overthrowing and replacing it with a mode of production based on
communal ownership, equitable distribution and ultimately the end of class
division.

Marxism and Cultural Studies:

Cultural studies writers have had a long, ambiguous, but productive relationship
with Marxism. Cultural studies is not a Marxist domain, but has drawn succour
from it while subjecting it to vigorous critique. There is little doubt that we live
in social formations organized along capitalist lines that manifest deep class
divisions in work, wages, housing, education and health. Further, cultural
practices are commodified by large corporate culture industries. In that context,
cultural studies has been partisan in taking up the cause of change.

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However, Marxism has been critiqued for its apparent ideology. That is, the
positing of an inevitable point to which history is moving, namely the demise of
capitalism and the arrival of a classless society. This is a problem on both
theoretical and empirical grounds. Theoretically, a determinist reading of
Marxism robs human beings of agency or the capacity to act. This is so because
the outcomes of human action appear to be predetermined by metaphysical laws
(ironically posing as objective science) that drive history from outside of human
action. It is a problem on empirical grounds because of the failure of significant
numbers of proletarian revolutions to materialize, and the oppressive totalitarian
outcomes of those that made claims to be such revolutions.

In its engagement with Marxism, cultural studies has been particularly

concerned with issues of structure and action. On the one hand, Marxism
suggests that there are regularities or structures to human existence that lie
outside of any given individual. On the other hand, it has a commitment to
change through human agency.

Cultural studies has resisted the economic determinism inherent in some

readings of Marxism and has asserted the specificity of culture. Cultural studies
has also been concerned with the apparent success of capitalism. That is, not
merely its survival but its transformation and expansion. This has been attributed
in part to the winning of consent for capitalism on the level of culture. Hence the
interest in questions of culture, ideology and hegemony which were commonly
pursued through perspectives dubbed culturalism and structuralism.

Culturalism and Structuralism:

In the collective mythology of cultural studies, Richard Hoggart, Raymond
Williams and Edward Thompson are held to be early figureheads representing
the moment of ‘culturalism’. This perspective is later contrasted with
‘structuralism’. Indeed, culturalism is a post-hoc term that owes its sense
precisely to contrast with structuralism.

Culture is Ordinary:
Culturalism stresses the ‘ordinariness’ of culture and the active, creative
capacity of people to construct shared meaningful practices. Empirical work,
which is emphasized within the culturalist tradition, explores the way that active
human beings create cultural meanings. There is a focus on lived experience and
the adoption of a broadly anthropological definition of culture which describes it
as an everyday lived process not confined to ‘high’ art.
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Culturalism, particularly for Williams and Thompson, is a form of historical
cultural materialism that traces the unfolding of meaning over time. Here culture
is to be explored within the context of its material conditions of production and
reception. There is an explicit partisanship in exploring the class basis of culture
that aims to give ‘voice’ to the subordinated and to examine the place of culture
in class power. However, this form of ‘left-culturalism’ is also somewhat
nationalistic, or at least nation-centred, in its approach. There is little sense of
either the globalizing character of contemporary culture or the place of race
within national and class cultures.

Structuralism:
Culturalism takes meaning to be its central category and casts it as the product
of active human agents. By contrast, structuralism speaks of signifying practices
that generate meaning as an outcome of structures or predictable regularities that
lie outside of any given person. Structuralism searches for the constraining
patterns of culture and social life which lie outside of any given person.
Individual acts are explained as the product of social structures. As such,
structuralism is anti- humanist in its decentring of human agents from the heart
of enquiry. Instead it favours a form of analysis in which phenomena have
meaning only in relation to other phenomena within a systematic structure of
which no particular person is the source. A structuralist understanding of culture
is concerned with the ‘systems of relation’ of an underlying structure (usually
language) and the grammar that makes it possible. In sum:

- Culturalism focuses on meaning production by human actors in a

historical context.
- Structuralism points to culture as an expression of deep structures of
language that lie outside of the intentions of actors and constrain them.
- Culturalism stresses history.
- Structuralism is synchronic in approach, analyzing the structures of
relations in a snapshot of a particular moment. As such, it asserts the
specificity of culture and its irreducibility to any other phenomena.
- Culturalism focuses on interpretation as a way of understanding meaning.
- Structuralism has asserted the possibility of a science of signs and thus of
objective knowledge.

Structuralism is best approached as a method of analysis rather than an all-

embracing philosophy. However, the notion of stability of meaning, upon which
the binaries of structuralism and its pretensions to surety of knowledge are
based, is the subject of attack by poststructuralism. That is, poststructuralism
deconstructs the very notion of the stable structures of language.

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Poststructuralism:
The term poststructuralism implies ‘after structuralism’, embodying notions of
both critique and absorption. That is, postsructuralism absorbs aspects of
structural linguistics while subjecting it to a critique that, it is claimed, surpasses
structuralism. In short, poststructuralism rejects the idea of an underlying stable
structure that founds meaning through fixed binary pairs (black-white; good-
bad). Rather, meaning is unstable, being always deferred and in process.
Meaning cannot be confined to single words, sentences or particular texts but is
the outcome of relationships between texts, that is, intertexuality. Like its
predecessor, poststructuralism is anti-humanist in its decentring of the unified,
coherent human subject as the origin of stable meanings.

Anti-essentialism:
Perhaps the most significant influence of poststructuralism within cultural
studies is its anti-essentialism. Essentialism assumes that words have stable
referents and that social categories reflect an essential underlying identity. By
this token there would be stable thruths to be found and an essence for, for
example, femininity or black identity. However, for poststructuralism there can
be no truths, subjects or identities outside the language. Further, this is a
language that does not have stable referents and is therefore unable to represent
fixed truths or identities. In this sense, femininity or black identity are not fixed
universal things but descriptions in language which through social convention
come to be ‘what counts as truths’ (that is the contemporary stabilization of
meaning).

Anti-essentialism does not mean that we cannot speak of truth or identity.

Rather, it points to them as not being universals of nature but productions of
culture in specific times and places. The speaking subject is dependent on the
prior existence of discursive positions. Truth is not so much found as made and
identities are discursive constructions. That is, truth and identity are not fixed
objects but are regulated ways that we speak about the world or about ourselves.
Instead of the scientific certainty of structuralism, poststructuralism offers us
irony: that is, an awareness of the contingent, constructed character of our
beliefs and understandings that lack firm universal foundations.

15
Postmodernism:
There is no straightforward equation of poststructuralism with postmodernism,
and the sharing of the prefix ‘post’ can lead to unwarranted conflation of the
two. However, they do share a common approach to epistemology, namely the
rejection of truth as a fixed eternal object. There is a vigourous rejection of the
idea of great narrative or stories that can give us certain knowledge of the
direction, meaning and moral path of human ‘development’. This is an
objection to the teleology of Marxism, the certainty of science and the morality
of the church.

Postmodern writers share the idea that knowledge is not metaphysical,

transcendental or universal but specific to particular times and spaces. For
postmodernism, knowledge is perspectival in character. That is, there can be no
one totalizing knowledge that is able to grasp the ‘objective’ character of the
world. Rather, we have and require multiple viewpoints or truths by which to
interpret a complex, heterogeneous human existence. Tus, postmodernism
argues that knowledge is:

- Specific to language games;

- Local, plural and diverse.

An equally significant body of work is centred on important cultural changes in

contemporary life. Postmodern culture is said to be marked by a sense of the
fragmentary, ambiguous and uncertain quality of the world along with high
levels of personal and social reflexivity. This goes hand in hand with irony and
the blurring of cultural boundaries. For some thinkers, postmodern culture
heralds the collapse of the modern distinctions between the real and the
simulated.

Poststructuralism and postmodernism are anti-essentialist approaches that stress

the constitutive rule of an unstable language in the formation of cultural
meaning.

The Politics of Difference:

A theme of structuralism and poststructuralism is the idea that meaning is

generated through the play of difference down a chain of signifiers. Subjects are
formed through difference, so that we are constituted in part by what we are not.
There has been a growing emphasis on difference in the cultural field, and in
particular on questions of gender, race and nationality.
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Feminism:
Feminism is a field of theory and politics that contains competing perspectives
and prescriptions for action. However, in general terms, we may locate feminism
as asserting that sex is a fundamental and irreducible axis of social organization
which, to date, has subordinated women to men. Thus, feminism is centrally
concerned with sex as an organizing principle of social life where gender
relations are thoroughly saturated with power. The subordination of women is
argued to be evident across a range of social institutions and practices, that is,
male power and female subordination are structural. This has led some feminists
to adopt the concept of patriarchy, with its derivative meanings of the male-
headed family, ‘mastery’ and superiority.

Liberal feminism stresses equality of opportunity for women. This is held to be

achievable within the broad structures of the existing legal and economic
frameworks. In contrast, socialist feminists point to the interconnections
between class and gender, including the fundamental place of gender
inequalities in the reproduction of capitalism. Instead of liberal and socialist
feminism’s stress on equality and sameness, difference or radical feminism
asserts essential differences between men and women. These are celebrated as
representing the creative difference of women and the superiority of ‘feminine’
values.

Problems with Patriarchy:

A criticism of the concept of patriarchy is its treatment of the category of
‘woman’ as undifferentiated. That is, all women are taken to share something
fundamental in common in contrast to all men. This is an assumption
continually challenged by black feminists, among others, who have argued that
the movement has defined women as white and overlooked the differences

between black and white women’s experiences. This stress on difference is

shared by poststructuralist and postmodern feminists who argue that sex and
gender are social and cultural constructions, which cannot be adequately
explained in terms of biology or reduced to functions of capitalism. This is an
anti-essentialist stance that argues that femininity and masculinity are not

17
essential universal categories but discursive constructions. That is, gender is
constituted by the way we talk about and perform it. As such, post structuralist
feminism is concerned with the cultural construction of subjectivity per se and
with a range of possible masculinities and femininities.

Race, Ethnicity and Hybridity:

Another ‘politics of difference’ which has received increasing attention within
cultural studies is that of race and ethnicity in postcolonial times. Ethnicity is a
cultural concept centred on norms, values, beliefs, cultural symbols and
practices that mark a process of cultural boundary formation. The idea of
‘racialization’ has been deployed to illustrate the argument that race is a social
construction and not a universal or essential category of either biology or
culture. Races do not exist outside of the representation but are formed in and by
it in a process of social and political power struggle.

There are two key concerns that have emerged in and through postcolonial
theory, namely those of domination-subordination and hybridit - creolization.
Questions of domination and subordination surface most directly through
colonial military control and the structured subordination of racialized groups.
In more cultural terms, questions arise about the denigration and subordination
of ‘native’ culture by colonial and imperial powers along with the relationship
between place and diaspora identities.

The question of hybridity or creolization points to the fact that neither the
colonial nor colonized cultures and languages can be presented in ‘pure’ form.
Inseparable from each other, they give rise to forms of hybridity. In metropolitan
cultures, like America and Britain, this concept is reworked to include the hybrid
cultures produced by, for example, Latino-Americans and British Asians.

Central Issues in Cultural Studies:

The last three decades of the 20th Century have witnessed a development in the
field of cultural studies to a stage where similar problems, issues and debates
have emerged from within the literature. A ‘problem’ in cultural studies is
constituted by a field of recurrent doubts and puzzles in the literature. It is worth
crystallizing some of the key points here.

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Language and the Material:
A long-running debate within cultural studies concerns the relationship between
culture as signification and culture as material. This debate is located in the
triangular confrontation between:

1- The legacy of Marxism within cultural studies.

2- The development of an anti-reductionist strain within cultural studies.
3- The recent ascendancy of poststructuralism.

For Marxism, culture is a corporal force locked into the socially organized
production of the material conditions of existence. Marxism has argued that the
material mode of production is ‘the real foundation of cultural superstructures.
That is, the material - understood here as the economic - determines the cultural.
However, this orthodox reading of Marx proved to be too mechanical and
deterministic in exploring the specific features of culture. Consequently, the
narrative of cultural studies involves a distancing of itself from Marxist
reductionism. Instead, the analysis of the autonomous logic of language,
culture, representation and consumption was placed in the foreground.
Structuralism provided the means by which to explore language and popular
culture as autonomous practices by emphasizing the irreducible character of the
cultural (as a set of distinct practices with their own internal organization).

Some critics have felt that cultural studies has gone too far in its assertion of the
autonomy of culture and has abandoned political economy. Although this
argument has some merit, it is not the case in the multiperspectival approach
offered by Hall’s ‘circuit of culture’. Here a full analysis of any cultural practice
requires discussion of both ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ and articulation of the
relations between them. Accordingly, the material as political economy vs;
cultural autonomy debate represents an unnecessary binary division between the
two concepts.

The Textual Character of Culture:

The machinery and operations of language are central concerns for cultural
studies. Indeed, the investigation of culture has often been regarded as virtually
interchangeable with the exploration of meaning produced symbolically through
signifying systems that work ‘like a language’. This turn to studying language
within cultural studies represents a major intellectual gain and research
achievement. It has also involved some partial rightedness.

19
Most students of cultural studies should be aware that culture can be read as a
text, using concepts like signification, code or discourse. However, an emphasis
on structuralist and poststructuralist accounts of signification has sometimes led
cultural studies to reify language as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’ rather than grasp it as a
social practice. The danger here is a kind of textual determinism. That is, textual
subject positions are held to be indistinguishable from, and constitutive of
speaking subjects. The living, embodied speaking and acting subject may be lost
from view.

The metaphor of culture as ‘like a language’ has a great deal to recommend it.
However, there is also much to be gained by describing culture in terms of
practices, routines and spiritual arrangements. Not only is language always
embedded in practice, but also all practices signify. Further, the identification of
textual codes and object positions does not guarantee that the prescribed
meanings are ‘taken up’ by concrete persons in daily life. In sum, the study of
language is absolutely critical to cultural studies as an ongoing project. At the
same time, there remain some significant blind-spots in the field, including:

- The positing of language as a free-floating system rather than a human

social activity;
- The elevation of semiotic theory over the linguistic competencies of
living persons.

The Location of Culture:

For Raymond Williams, culture is located, for all interests and purposes, within
flexible and identifiable boundaries. That is, culture is understood to be a facet
of place. Indeed it is constitutive of place. In so far as culture is a common
whole way of life, its boundaries are largely locked into those of nationality and
ethnicity, that is, the culture of, for example, the English or the British.
However, globalization has made the idea of culture as a whole way of life
located within definite boundaries increasingly problematic.

In particular, that which is considered to be local is produced within and by

globalizing discourses. These include global corporate marketing strategies that
orient themselves to differentiated ‘local’ markets. Much that is considered to be
local, and counterpoised to the global, is the outcome of translocal processes.
Place is now forged globally by virtue of the movement of cultural elements
from one location to another. For example, population movement and electronic
communications have enabled increased cultural juxtapositioning, meeting and
mixing. These developments suggest the need to escape from a model of culture
as a locally bounded, ‘whole of life’.

20
The processes of globalization suggest that we need to rethink our conception of
culture. Culture is not best understood in terms of locations and roots but more
as hybrid and creolized cultural routes in global space. Indeed, the prominence
given to difference in cultural theory has led many writers to think of culture,
identities and identifications as always a place of borders and hybridity rather
than fixed stable entities. Culturs are not pure, authentic and locally bounded.
They are the syncretic and hybridized products of interactions across space.

Yet there remains a value in locating culture in place in order to be able to say
things like ‘this is a valued and meaningful practice in Australian culture’ or that
the cultural flows of the ‘Black Atlantic’ involve musical forms of ‘West
African origin’. The duality of culture lies in its being both ‘in place’ and of ‘no
place’. Global culture can be understood as a series of fluid and overlapping
fields (or language games) marked out with the temporary knots or nodal points
of place. Phrases like ‘a whole way of life’ or a ‘local culture’ no longer signify
cultural entities but are expressions that mark out analytic boundaries drawn for
particular purposes.

How Is Cultural Change Possible?

Cultural studies writers have consistently identified the examination of culture,
power and politics as central to the domain. Indeed, cultural studies can be
understood as a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production
of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Many cultural studies writers
have wanted to link their work with political movements. This followed the
model of the ‘organic’ intellectuals, who were said to be the thinking and
organizing elements of the counter-hegemonic class and its allies.

However, there is little evidence to suggest that cultural studies writers have
ever been ‘organically’ connected with political movements in any significant
way. Rather, cultural studies intellectuals acted ‘as if’ they were organic
intellectuals, or in the hope that one day they could be. Originally cultural
studies writers imagined themselves organically linked to revolutionary class

factions. Later, as class declined as a political vehicle and socialism receded as

an immediate goal, New Social Movements took on the mantle of political
agents. However, cultural studies has not been especially successful in forging
links with such movements either.

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Indeed, there is little evidence of popular support for radical political change in
the west at all, let down ‘cultural revolution’. Reform seems to be the only
possible way to move forward within western liberal democracies. This does not
mean that we have to accept liberal democracy as it stands. On the contrary, one
of our aims must be to push for the extension of democratic practices within the
liberal democratic framework. This has led some in the field to argue for cultural
policy that is specifically and carefully targeted with a clear sense of the
intended outcomes and mechanisms of transformation. Overall cultural studies
has not developed a general political strategy but engages where it can on a
contingent basis.

Rationality and its Limits:

Western cultures mostly assume that human life is explicable in terms of the
rational choices of individual actors. Rational action is that which can be
justified within a specific cultural context. Cultural studies would not want to
adopt the notion of the rational actor who calculates the means to maximize his
or her interests. Nevertheless there has been an implicit assumption that
rationality could provide logical explanations for cultural phenomena. For
example, a common assumption has been that racism and sexism would dwindle
in the face of rational argument.

Often absent from cultural studies are the non-linear, non-rational and
emotionally driven aspects of human behaviour. The exception to this
observation is the import of psychoanalysis into the field. For example, Hall
(1990) and Butler (1993) have profitably explored Lacanian psychoanalysis and
the processes by which our psychic identifications or emotional investments are
attached to disciplinary discourses. Yet psychoanalysis has its own problems,
not least its phallocentrism and spurious claims to objective science. But still,
there are very good reasons why cultural studies as a discipline needs to further
develop issues of affect and emotion. Many of the horrors of our world are
driven by emotional responses, and social change is never going to be a simple
matter of argument and analysis.

The exploration of emotion is one route by which to dethrone the ascendancy

and authority of the rational mind. Another is pursued by a postmodern
philosophy that has turned reason against itself. For over 200 years reason and
rationality have been championed as the source of progress in knowledge and
society. However, a range of postmodern thinkers have criticized the impulses
of modern rationality. They argue that it brings us not so much progress as

22
domination and oppression. The very impulse to control nature through science
and rationality is, it is argued, an impulse to control and dominate human beings.
This is an instrumental rationality whose logic leads not only to industrialization
but also to concentration camps.

Foucault, for example, argues that:

- Knowledge is not metaphysical, transcendental or universal.
- Knowledge is a matter of perspective.
- Knowledge is not pure or neutral but is always from a point of view.
- Knowledge is itself implicated in regimes of power.

However, Foucault also questions the idea of a clear and final break between
enlightenment and post-enlightenment thought, or between the modern and
postmodern. It is not a question of accepting or rejecting enlightenment
rationality but of asking: ‘What is this reason that we use? What are its historical
effects? What are its limits, and what are its dangers?’ (Foucault,(1984).

Key methodologies in cultural studies:

Cultural studies has favoured qualitative methods with their focus on cultural
meaning. Work in cultural studies has centred on three kinds of approach:
1 ethnography, which has often been linked with culturalist approaches and
a stress on lived experience;
2 a range of textual approaches, which have tended to draw from semiotics,
poststructuralism and Derridean deconstruction;
3 a series of reception studies, which are eclectic in their theoretical roots.

Ethnography:

Ethnography is an empirical and theoretical approach inherited from

anthropology which seeks detailed holistic description and analysis of cultures
based on intensive field work. In classical conceptions, the Ethnographer
participates in people's lives for an extended period of time watching what
happens; listening to what is said, asking questions (Hammersley and Atkinson,
1983: 2). The objective is to produce what Geert: (1973) famously described as
thick descriptions of the multiplicity of complex conceptual structures. This
would include the unspoken and taken-for-granted assumptions that operate
within cultural life. Ethnography concentrates on the details of local life while
connecting them to wider social processes.
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Ethnographic cultural studies has been centred on the qualitative exploration of
values and meanings in the context of a whole way of life. That is ethnography
has been deployed in order to explore questions about cultures, life-worlds and
identities. As More remarks qualitative research strategies such as ethnography
are principally designed to gain access to ‘naturalized domains and their
characteristic activities’ (Morley, 1992: 186). However, in the context of media-
oriented cultural studies, ethnography has become a code-word for a range of
qualitative methods, including observation, in-depth interviews and focus
groups. Here, it is the spirit of ethnography (i.e. qualitative understanding of
cultural activity in context) which is invoked polemically against the tradition of
quantitative communications research.

Textual approaches:
Although textual work comes in many guises, including literary criticism, the
three outstanding modes of analysis in cultural studies draw from:

- semiotics;
- narrative theory;
- deconstructionism.

Texts as signs:

Semiotics explores how the meanings generated by texts have been achieved
through a particular arrangement of signs and cultural codes. Such analysis
draws attention to the ideologies or myths of texts. For example, semiotic
analysis illustrates the case that television news is a constructed representation
and not a mirror of reality. The media's selective and value-laden representations
are no accurate pictures of the world. Rather, they are best understood as the site
of struggles over what counts as meaning and truth. Television may appear to be
realistic because its use of seamless editing and the invisible cut. However, such
realism is constituted by a set of aesthetic conventions rather than being a
reflection of the ‘real world’.

Texts as narratives:

Texts tell stories, whether that is Einstein's theory of relativity, Hall's theory of
identity, or the latest episode of The Simpsons. Consequently, narrative theory
plays a part in cultural studies. A narrative is an ordered sequential account that
24
makes claims to be a record of events. Narratives are the structured form in
which stories advance explanations for the ways of the world. Narratives offer
us frameworks of understanding and rules of reference about the way the social
order is constructed. In doing so they supply answers to the question: How shall
we live?

Stories take different forms and utilize a variety of characters, subject matters
and narrative structures (or ways of telling a story). However, structuralist
theory has concerned itself with the common features of story formation.

According to Todorov (1977), narrative minimally concerns the disruption of an

equilibrium and the tracing of the consequences of said disruption until a new
equilibrium is achieved. .For example, an established soap opera couples are
shown in loving embrace as a prelude to the later revelation that one of them is
having an affair. The question is posed: will this spell the end of the relationship
A good of talk, emotion and explanation takes place before the characters are
either reconciled or go their separate ways. Soap opera is the name of a genre.
Genres structure the process and contain it; they regulate it in particular ways
using specific elements and combinations of elements to produce coherence and
credibility. Genre thus represents systemizations and repetitions of problems and
solutions in narratives (Neale, 1980).

Deconstruction:

Deconstructionism is associated with Derrida's ‘undoing’ of the binaries of

western philosophy and the extension of this procedure into the fields of
literature and postcolonial theory. To deconstruct is to take apart, to undo, in
order to seek out and display the assumptions of a text. In particular,
deconstruction involves the dismantling of hierarchical conceptual oppositions
such as man/Woman black/white, reality/appearance, nature/culture,
reason/madness, etc. Such binaries are said to ‘guarantee’ truth by excluding and
devaluing the ‘inferior’ part of the binary. Thus, speech is privileged over
writing, reality over appearance, men over women.

The purpose of deconstruction is not simply to reverse the order of binaries but
to show that they are implicated in each other. Deconstruction seeks to expose
the blindspots of texts, the unacknowledged assumptions upon which they
operate. This includes the places where a text's rhetorical strategies work against
the logic of a text's arguments. That is, the deconstruction seeks to expose the
tension between what a text means to say and what it is constrained to mean.

25
 One of the central problems faced by the process of deconstruction is that it
must use the very conceptual language it seeks to undo. For example, to
deconstruct western philosophy is to use the very language of western
philosophy. To mark this tension, Derrida Places his concepts under erasure. To
place a word under erasure is first to write the word and then to cross it out,
leaving both the word and its crossed-out version. As Spivak explains; ‘Since
the word is inaccurate, it is crossed out. Since it is necessary, it remains legible’
(Spivak, 1976). The use ‘under erasure’ of accustomed and known concepts is
intended to destabilize the familiar. As such it marks it as useful, necessary,
inaccurate and mistaken. Thus does Derrida seek to illuminate the undecidability
of meaning?

Reception Studies:

Exponents of reception consumption studies argue that whatever analysis of

textual a critic may undertake, it is far from certain which of the identified
meaning, if any, will be activated by actual readers/audiences/consumers. By
this is meant that audiences are active creators of meaning in relation to texts.
They bring previously acquired cultural competencies to bear on texts so that
differently constituted audiences will work with different meanings.

On the theoretical front, two fields of study have proved to be particularly

influential: first, Hall's (1981) ‘Encoding-Decoding model; and, second,
hermeneutic and literary reception studies. Hall argues that the production of
meaning does not ensure consumption of that meaning as the encoders might
have intended. This is so because (television) messages, constructed as a sign
system with multi-accentuated components, are polysemic. That is, they have
more than one potential set of meanings. To the degree that audiences
participate in cultural frameworks with producers, then audience decodings and
textual encodings will be similar. However, where audience members are
situated in different social positions (e.g. of class and gender) from encoders,
and thus have divergent cultural resources available to them, they will be able to
decode programmes in alternative ways.

Work within the tradition of hermeneutics and literary reception studies

(Gadamer, 1976, ser, 1978) argues that understanding is always from the
position and point of view of the person who understands. This involves not
merely reproduction of textual meaning but the production of meaning by the
readers. The text may structure aspects of meaning by guiding the reader, but it
cannot fix the meaning. Rather, significance is the outcome of the oscillations
between the text and the imagination of the reader.

26
The place of theory:

A significant strand of work in cultural studies is not empirical but theoretical.

- Theory can be understood as narratives that seek to distinguish and account

for general features which describe, define and explain persistently perceived
occurrences

Theory does not picture the world more or less accurately; rather, it is a tool,
instrument or logic for intervening in the world. This is achieved through the
mechanisms of description, definition, prediction and control. Theory
construction is a self-reflexive discursive endeavour that seeks to interpret and
intercede in the world.

Theory construction involves the thinking through of concepts and arguments,

often redefining and critiquing prior work, with the objective of offering new
ways to think about our world. Thus, theoretical concepts are tools for thinking.
This process has maintained a high-profile position within cultural studies.
Theoretical work can be thought of as a crafting of the cultural signposts and
maps by which we are guided. Cultural studies has rejected the empiricist claim
that knowledge is simply a matter of collecting facts on which theory can be
deduced or tested against. Rather, theory is always already implicit in empirical
research through the very choice of topic, the focus the research takes and the
concepts through which it is discussed and interpreted. That is, ‘facts’ are not
neutral and no amount of stacking up of facts produces a story about our lives
without theory. Indeed, theory is precisely a story about humanity with
implications for action and judgements about consequences.

Cultural studies seeks to play a de-mystifying role, that is, to point to the
constructed character of cultural texts and to the myths and ideologies that are
embedded in them. It has done this in the hope of producing subject positions,
and real subjects, who are enabled to oppose subordination. As a political theory
cultural Studies has hoped to organize disparate opposition groups into an
alliance of cultural politics. However Bennett (1998) has argued that the textual
politics which much cultural Studies produces is (a) not connected to any living
persons and (b) ignores the institutional dimensions of cultural power.
Consequently, he urges cultural studies to adopt a more pragmatic approach and
to work with cultural producers in the construction and implementation of
cultural policy.

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General Conclusion:

Cultural studies:
- is a plural field of contesting perspectives which through the production
of theory has sought to intervene in cultural politics;
- explores culture as the signifying practices of representation within the
context of social power;
- draws on a variety of theories including Marxism, structuralism,
poststructuralism and feminism;
- is eclectic in its methods;
- asserts the positionality of all knowledge, including its own;
- coheres conceptually around the key ideas of culture, signifying practices,
representation, discourse, power articulation, texts, readers and
consumption;
- is an interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary field of enquiry which explores
the production and inculcation of maps of meaning;
- can be described as a language-game or discursive formation concerned
with issues of power in the signifying practices of human life.

Above all, cultural studies is an exciting and fluid project that tells us stories
about our changing world in the hope that we can improve it.

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