Page 28 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

modernism. We use the term ‘culturalism’ to denote an intel-
lectual tradition that deliberately counterposed the value of
culture to the claims of utility. This is a tradition that typically
conceived culture in radically anti-individualist fashion, as an
organic whole, and in radically anti-utilitarian fashion, as a repos-
itory of values superior to those of material civilisation. It has
been an essentially literary tradition, but one that provided impor-
tant inspiration to two contemporary movements—cultural
studies and cultural materialism—each of which has sought to
problematise the boundaries between literature and non-
literature. By ‘critical theory’ we refer above all to the Kulturkritik
of the ‘Frankfurt School’, but also to the key thinkers from whom
the School derived inspiration, notably Marx, Weber and Freud,
and to other contemporary critics who have derived their own
inspiration from these or related sources. This is a tradition that
combined a culturalist sense of the antithesis between culture and
civilisation with a utilitarian sense of the importance of material
interests. It has been a largely sociological tradition, the key
concepts of which include notions such as ideology, legitimation
and hegemony.
We use the term ‘semiology’ to refer to the intellectual tradi-
tion prompted either directly or indirectly by Ferdinand de
Saussure’s anticipation of a science of the study of signs. In
its opening ‘structuralist’ phase, this tradition was characterised
by a search for underlying and constraining patterns and
structures, especially patterns analogous to those that occur in
language. In its later ‘post-structuralist’ phase, the emphasis
shifted towards the plurality and indeterminacy of meaning, but
remained fundamentally ‘linguistic’ nonetheless. In this tradition,
cultural artefacts are best understood as elements within systems
of signification. By ‘difference theory’, we mean the whole range
of late twentieth-century cultural theories inspired in whole or
in part by the politics of difference associated with the ‘new social
movements’. Here we explore how socio-historical differences,
such as those between genders and sexualities, nationalities and
ethnicities, have been theorised in relation to the non-immediacy,
the différance, as Derrida has it, of language and culture. The key
concepts here will include identity and, of course, difference itself.

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