Page 10 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 9

Materialism and non-reductionism

Cultural studies has, for the most part, been concerned with modern industrialized
economies and media cultures organized along capitalist lines. Here representations are
produced by corporations who are driven by the profit motive. In this context, cultural
studies has developed a form of cultural materialism that is concerned with exploring
how and why meanings are inscribed at the moment of production. That is, as well as
being centred on signifying practices, cultural studies tries to connect them with polit-
ical economy. This is a discipline concerned with power and the distribution of eco-
nomic and social resources. Consequently, cultural studies has been concerned with:

v who owns and controls cultural production;
v the distribution mechanisms for cultural products;

v the consequences of patterns of ownership and control for contours of the cultural
landscape.

Having said that, one of the central tenets of cultural studies is its non-reductionism.
Culture is seen as having its own specific meanings, rules and practices which are not
reducible to, or explainable solely in terms of, another category or level of a social
formation. In particular, cultural studies has waged a battle against economic reduc-
tionism; that is, the attempt to explain what a cultural text means by reference to its
place in the production process. For cultural studies, the processes of political econ-
omy do not determine the meanings of texts or their appropriation by audiences.
Rather, political economy, social relationships and culture must be understood in
terms of their own specific logics and modes of development. Each of these domains
is ‘articulated’ or related together in context-specific ways. The non-reductionism of
cultural studies insists that questions of class, gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, nation
and age have their own particularities which cannot be reduced either to political
economy or to each other.

Articulation

Cultural studies has deployed the concept of articulation in order to theorize the relation-
ships between components of a social formation. This idea refers to the formation of a
temporary unity between elements that do not have to go together. Articulation suggests
both expressing/representing and a ‘putting-together’. Thus, representations of gender may
be ‘put-together’ with representations of race or nation so that, for example, nations are
spoken of as female. This occurs in context-specific and contingent ways that cannot be
predicted before the fact. The concept of articulation is also deployed to discuss the relation-
ship between culture and political economy. Thus culture is said to be ‘articulated’ with

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