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Contemporary Cultural Theory

CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL THEORY

Cultural theory, or ‘Theory’ with a capital ‘T’, as it is sometimes
written in the United States, is different from either philosophy
or discipline-specific theories such as sociological theory. Some
see it as a new and distinctly ‘postmodern’ type of transdiscipli-
nary theorising. Fredric Jameson cites Michel Foucault as
providing the exemplary instance of this kind of ‘undecidable’
genre, which takes as its object not so much a particular class of
phenomena as the textualisation of the phenomenal in general
(Jameson, 1998, p. 3). For Jameson, Theory is very specifically
post-structuralist: he uses the terms more or less interchangeably
to denote ‘very precisely a postmodernist phenomenon’ in which
‘depth is replaced by surface’. Thus understood, Theory is char-
acterised by an in principle opposition to depth models, be they
hermeneutic (inside/outside), dialectical (appearance/essence),
psychoanalytic (latent/manifest), existential (authenticity/
inauthenticity) or semiotic (signifier/signified) (Jameson, 1991,
p. 12). But if contemporary Theory is indeed both transdisci-
plinary and textual, in our view it need not necessarily be
post-structuralist. Jameson himself writes Theory of a distinctly
transdisciplinary and textual character, while nonetheless main-
taining a clear distance from what remains of post-structuralism
(however we define that term).
Ironically, this use of ‘Theory’ as more or less identical to post-
structuralism replicates an earlier trope from British cultural
studies, where theory was understood as essentially structural-
ist. During the 1970s, the Birmingham Centre witnessed a
sustained encounter between an earlier English tradition of
‘literary’ cultural criticism and a variety of French structuralist
and more generally continental ‘western Marxist’ (and sociolog-
ical) traditions. The encounter was theorised as that between
‘structuralism’ and ‘culturalism’ by two successive directors, Hall
himself and Richard Johnson (Hall, 1980; Johnson, R., 1979).
In each case, an empiricist culturalism was contrasted with a
theoreticist structuralism. We shall return to this matter in the
chapter that follows. For the moment, note only that for Hall,
structuralism’s superiority over culturalism derived precisely

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