Page 18 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

deliberately connecting the study of the popular with that of the
‘literary’. In this definition, it represents a shift not so much in
empirical subject matter as in theoretical paradigm. This concep-
tion was important for Williams, whose ‘empirical’ work quite
systematically transgressed the boundaries between elite and
popular cultures. But it is also present, for example, in Easthope’s
understanding of ‘literary study’ as ‘increasingly indistinguish-
able from cultural studies’ (Easthope, 1991, p. 65); in Tony
Bennett’s sense of cultural studies as fundamentally concerned
with ‘the relations of culture and power’ (Bennett, 1998, p. 53);
or in Stephen Greenblatt’s description of his own work on Renais-
sance literature as ‘the new historicism in cultural studies’
(Greenblatt, 1990, p. 158).
No doubt, there is something to be said for all four senses of
the term: they each register important aspects of different phases
in the development of cultural studies. But there is a cumulative
logic, nonetheless, which suggests to us that the greater promise
lies with this fourth conception: not in the discovery of a new
subject matter, nor even in the ‘deconstruction’ of the disciplinary
boundaries that demarcated literature from fiction, art from culture,
elite from popular; but rather in the development of new methods
of analysis for both. Andrew Milner half-seriously ‘defines’ cultural
studies as the ‘social science of the study of the production, distri-
bution, exchange and reception of textualised meaning’ (Milner,
2002, p. 5) and this will serve as our definition here. We use the
term ‘social science’, as he does, to denote a discipline the primary
purposes of which are description and explanation rather than
judgement or ‘canonisation’. We use the term ‘textualised meaning’
to denote a concern with signifying practices in general rather than
literature and art or the mass media in particular. And we use the
phrase ‘production, distribution, exchange and reception’ to denote
an interest in how texts are produced, circulated and received in
determinate social contexts, as well as in texts considered ‘in their
own right’. If this is indeed what we mean by cultural studies, then
it follows that its intellectual novelty is primarily theoretical, rather
than substantive. Which leads us to the central subject matter of
this book: not so much cultural studies in general as cultural theory
in particular.

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