Page 14 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

xii Preface

deceptive trickery to attain purely expedient and unprincipled ends, and
a predatory empiricism that limits knowledge to unimaginative surveying
of one ’ s surroundings and of others in order to control for the possibility
of danger, with danger consisting of any threat to the over - accumulation
of resources and one ’ s position of domination in a hierarchical model of
society. As critics of this situation and of this conservative strand of human-
ity, Cultural Studies scholars tend to be skeptical regarding cultural ideolo-
gies that justify domination and over - accumulation. Many are concerned
with the cultural forms that result from that human situation, forms that
are expressive of the lives of those victimized by it. Some are concerned
with the forms of civility, the ways we human have of developing alterna-
tives to violence, domination, and over - accumulation. Others study the
way we humans use our creativity to challenge that situation of violence,
domination, and injustice or to make artifacts that propel humanity toward
new forms of life, new styles, new identities, new ways of being as either

individuals or civil communities. It is a rich new field of intellectual
endeavor, and this book is designed to introduce you to how it is done and
to give you practice in doing it yourself. It is intended to complement
Cultural Studies: An Anthology (Wiley, 2008), and ideally, you should read
the selections in the anthology pertaining to each chapter in this book
before plunging into each chapter. That way, you will have the theory or
the ideas that I take for granted here at your disposal. I apologize for the
fact that the anthology contains no readings to match the chapter entitled
“ Bodies and Things. ” That oversight ideally will be corrected in the second
edition of the anthology.