Page 28 - Culture and Cultural Studies

AN INTRODUCTION TO CULTURAL STUDIES 27

For Marxism, culture is a corporeal force locked into the socially organized production of
the material conditions of existence. Marxism has argued that the material mode of pro-
duction is ‘the real foundation’ of cultural superstructures. That is, the material – under-
stood here as the economic – determines the cultural. However, this orthodox reading of
Marx proved to be too mechanical and deterministic in exploring the specific features of
culture. Consequently, the narrative of cultural studies involves a distancing of itself from
Marxist reductionism. Instead, the analysis of the autonomous logic of language, culture,
representation and consumption was placed in the foreground. Structuralism provided
the means by which to explore language and popular culture as autonomous practices by
emphasizing the irreducible character of the cultural (as a set of distinct practices with
their own internal organization).
Some critics have felt that cultural studies has gone too far in its assertion of the
autonomy of culture and has abandoned political economy. Although this argument has
some merit, it is not the case in the multiperspectival approach offered by Hall et al.’s
‘circuit of culture’ (see Figure 2.2 on p. 61). Here a full analysis of any cultural practice
requires a discussion of both ‘economy’ and ‘culture’ and an articulation of the relations
between them.

The textual character of culture

The machinery and operations of language are central concerns for cultural studies.
Indeed, the investigation of culture has often been regarded as virtually interchangeable
with the exploration of meaning produced symbolically through signifying systems that
work ‘like a language’. This turn to studying language within cultural studies represents
a major intellectual gain and research achievement. It has also involved some partial
sightedness.
Most students of cultural studies are aware that culture can be read as a text, using
concepts like signification, code or discourse. However, an emphasis on structuralist and
poststructuralist accounts of signification has sometimes led cultural studies to reify lan-
guage as a ‘thing’ or ‘system’ rather than grasp it as a social practice. The danger here is a
kind of textual determinism. That is, textual subject positions are held to be indistin-
guishable from, and constitutive of, speaking subjects. The living, embodied speaking and
acting subject may be lost from view.
The metaphor of culture as ‘like a language’ has a great deal to recommend it. However,
there is also much to be gained by describing culture in terms of practices, routines and
spatial arrangements. Not only is language always embedded in practice, but also all prac-
tices signify. Further, the identification of textual codes and subject positions does not
guarantee that the proscribed meanings are ‘taken up’ by concrete persons in daily life
(see Ang, 1985; Morley, 1992). In sum, the study of language is absolutely critical to cul-
tural studies as an ongoing project while possessing limitations.

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