Page 14 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 5

Cultural studies and cultural theory

The available definitions of the term ‘culture’ are many and
various then, and we shall have cause to consider them in more
detail in later chapters. But let us now offer our own working
‘non-definition’ of ‘culture’ as referring to that entire range of
institutions, artefacts and practices that make up our symbolic
universe. In one or another of its meanings, the term will thus
embrace: art and religion, science and sport, education and
leisure. By convention, however, it does not embrace the range
of activities normally deemed either ‘economic’ or ‘political’. This
threefold distinction, between the economics of the market, the
politics of the state and the culture of what is sometimes referred
to as civil society, has been a recurrent motif in modern social
theory: it occurred, for example, in Karl Marx as the distinction
between mode of production, political superstructure and
social consciousness (Marx, 1975, p. 425) and in Max Weber
as that between class, party and status (Weber, 1948). But it is
clear that in each case, as in a whole range of parallel instances,
consciousness/status/culture (ideology/discourse etc.) are
largely residual categories, defined as much as anything by
their negative property of not being economics or politics.
As that which is neither work/class/exploitation nor war/
power/oppression, culture becomes ‘the heart of a heartless
world’, to borrow Marx’s description of religion (Marx, 1975,
p. 244). But just as religion in the abstract translates in practice
into religions in the bitterly contested plural, so too culture readily
translates into cultures. Hence its almost talismanic status
during the so-called ‘culture wars’ of late twentieth-century
United States, where it could denote simultaneously both the
canonical high ‘culture’ of established academic tradition and
the ethnic, sexual, generational and gendered ‘counter-cultures’
of the ‘new social movements’.

DEFINING CULTURAL STUDIES

The culture wars provide a suitable occasion to proceed from
culture to cultural studies, since part of what was at stake in
their still unresolved outcome is precisely the status of the new

5