Page 5 - Culture and Cultural Studies

4 CULTURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES

with empirical work). In doing so, I deploy a good number of theorists who would not
describe themselves as working within cultural studies but who have something to say
which has informed it. Thus, writers like Tony Bennett, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg,
Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Paul Willis would probably accept a description of their
work as ‘cultural studies’. However, though extremely influential, neither Foucault,
Derrida nor Barthes would have described himself in this way, just as Giddens would not
adopt this self-nomination today.
This book is a selective account because it stresses a certain type of cultural studies. In
particular, I explore that version of cultural studies which places language at its heart. The
kind of cultural studies influenced by poststructuralist theories of language, representa-
tion and subjectivity is given greater attention than a cultural studies more concerned
with the ethnography of lived experience or with cultural policy. Nevertheless, both do
receive attention and I am personally supportive of both.

Cultural studies does not speak with one voice, it cannot be spoken with one
voice, and I do not have one voice with which to represent it.

The title of this book is somewhat over-ambitious in its claims. Not only is this a selective
account of cultural studies, it is also one that draws very largely from work developed in
Britain, the United States, Continental Europe (most notably France) and Australia. I
draw very little from a growing body of work in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As such,
it would be more accurate to call this text ‘western cultural studies’. I simply do not feel
qualified to say how much cultural studies, as I understand it, is pertinent to the social
and cultural conditions of Africa.

The language-game of cultural studies

Further, this book tends to gloss over differences within western cultural studies, despite
doubts about whether theory developed in one context (e.g. Britain) can be workable in
another (e.g. Australia) (Ang and Stratton, 1996; Turner, 1992). Nevertheless, I want to
justify this degree of generalization about cultural studies. I maintain that the term ‘cul-
tural studies’ has no referent to which we can point. Rather, cultural studies is constituted
by the language-game of cultural studies. The theoretical terms developed and deployed
by persons calling their work cultural studies are what cultural studies ‘is’. I stress the
language of cultural studies as constitutive of cultural studies and draw attention at the
start of each chapter to what I take to be important terms. Subsequently, each of these
concepts, and others, can be referred to in the Glossary at the end of the book.
These are concepts that have been deployed in the various geographical sites of cultural
studies. For, as Grossberg et al. have argued, though cultural studies has stressed conjunctural

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