Page 13 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Preface xi

that no one in the nineteenth century would recognize as “ legitimate ”

music. The bohemians were first perceived to be rulebreakers by the keepers
of normative culture, but with time, the changes they introduced into
cultural life altered for the better the cultural house they and we live in.
To use a contemporary analogy, culture is the software of our lives.
It is the program we live by, the rules that determine how we think and
act. But it is also the malleable, rewritable script that we ourselves rework
and recreate as we live and produce creative works and say and do creative
things in our lives. Culture is a more inclusive term than art , another name
for human creativity, because it allows for everyday art and common crea-
tivity, something that happens without frames or legitimizing institutions
such as galleries or museums or concert halls. When girls take to body
piercing and young men to tattooing as a way of “ expressing ” themselves,
of distinguishing their identity from that of others amongst their peers or
from their parents ’ culture, they are being creative culturally in this larger
sense. Artists of everyday life, they are practicing an everyday aesthetics that
has more to do with lived life than with the frames of institutional art.
Indeed, Cultural Studies came into being in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s
to a large degree as an examination of such creativity and of the ways it
clashed with institutional, legitimate, or formal culture. Punk style, such

scholars argued, was significant within the culture precisely because it
sought to shatter culture understood as behavior - determining norms. The
most interesting tension in culture will occur at the frontier running
through everyday life where the normative and the creatively dissonant
collide. Normative culture must respect established forms and prescribed
practices. It is our way of maintaining the stability of our civil life in com-
munities. Creative culture has less respect for such things; indeed, it is

defined as disrespect for whatever would make the new resemble the old.
Culture in this sense is human life remaking itself anew every day. It
is creative destruction as much as it is system maintenance through
embedded normative prescription.
Culture understood as what maintains civility in communities is neces-
sary because nature propels humans toward physical survival in ways that
can lead to violence, domination, and injustice. Culture and civility are our
ways of tempering those physical urges, but violence, domination, and
injustice occur nevertheless, and Cultural Studies has a moral, ethical, and
political dimension to the degree that it takes stock of that reality. In some
humans, at least, there is a strong drive toward the over - accumulation of
social resources, the subordination of others through dominance behavior,