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Contemporary Cultural Theory

emergence of this new discipline, or maybe proto-discipine,
cultural studies. Where culture is a part only, albeit an important
part, of sociology, it has become the subject matter for cultural
studies. Where literary criticism focuses on one particular kind
of culture—‘high’ literature—cultural studies is concerned in
principle with all kinds. Whatever the origins of cultural theory
in these other disciplines, we do now have to add cultural studies
into the equation. What kind of discipline is this? Indeed, is it
really a discipline at all?
In chapter 1 we canvassed four different versions of what
cultural studies might be: an inter- or post-discipline; a political
intervention into the existing academic disciplines; a new disci-
pline, defined in terms of a new subject matter; and a new
discipline, defined in terms of a new theoretical paradigm. We
concluded by arguing for an understanding of cultural studies
as a loosely ‘social-scientific’ approach to the study of all text-
ualised meanings, both elite and popular, literary and
non-literary. This will have important extra-textual aspects—the
study of cultural production and reception, for example—but it
also retains a distinctly textual moment as central to the entire
enterprise. It is all well and good to discover who writes what,
how it is distributed and how read, but there is a certain point-
lessness to the exercise if no attempt is made to analyse what it
is that has actually been written, distributed and read. Which
poses the question of what methods cultural studies should
deploy in its study of ‘texts’, using this latter term very loosely
to refer to any semantic unit of meaning, whether written, spoken,
cinematic, televisual, or whatever. In chapter 1, we also noted
Mulhern’s distinction between, in his phrase, ‘Kulturkritik’ and
‘Cultural Studies’—the criticism of elite and of popular texts,
respectively, in each case for the purposes of demonstrating their
supposed value. These are both models for textual analysis.
Indeed, as Mulhern astutely observes, despite their reversed
valorisations of the elite and the popular, they are in essence the
same model, insofar as they each reproduce the same ‘metacul-
tural’ discursive form and fulfil the same ‘metapolitical’ function:
the symbolic resolution of real social contradictions. In short, they
are each instances of ‘criticism’.

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