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Genealogy of Cultural Studies 89

4. Richard Johnson, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 16 (Winter
1986–1987): 38.
5. Blundell et al., “Editor’s Introduction,” 4.
6. Ziauddin Sardar and Borin Van Loon, Introducing Cultural Studies (St.
Leonards: Allen and Unwin, 1998), 8.
7. Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Analytical Debates: Understanding the Relative Auton-
omy of Culture,” in Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates, ed. Jeffrey C.
Alexander and Steven Seidman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990),
1–29. The distinction proposed by Stuart Hall is between “culturalism” and “struc-
turalism.” Hall associates “culturalism” with the founding British theorists (Hoggart,
Williams, and Thompson), and “structuralism” with such French theorists as Levi-
Strauss and Althusser. The former, according to Hall, addressed the social totality as
an indeterminant system and highlighted human agency, whereas structuralists have
been most concerned with detecting determinisms. In this book, however, I argue that
the cultural studies of Hoggart, Williams, and Thompson, while certainly addressing
the social totality and insisting on human agency, also emphasized such “structural-
ist” concerns as soft determinisms, disparities in wealth and power, and institutions
including laws and media corporations. “Culturalism” as practised by Hoggart,
Williams, and Thompson, in my view, at the very least complements “structuralism,”
as opposed to being antithetical to it, as Hall suggests. The real antithesis to Williams’
“culturalism” (or better, his “cultural materialism”), I argue here, is “poststructural-
ism.” Williams himself referred to his position as “cultural materialism,” which he de-
fined as “a theory of the specificities of material cultural and literary production
within historical materialism.” See Stuart Hall, “Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms,”
Media, Culture and Society 2 (1980): 57–72; Adam Katz, “Postmodern Cultural Stud-
ies: A Critique,” Cultural Logic 1, no. 1 (Fall 1997): 1–16; Vincent Leitch, “Birm-
ingham Cultural Studies: Popular Arts, Poststructuralism, Radical Critique,” Journal
of the Midwest Modern Language Association 24, no. 1 (Spring 1991): 74–86; John-
son, “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” and Raymond Williams, Marxism and Lit-
erature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 5.
8. David Deacon, Michael Pickering, Peter Golding, and Graham Murdock, Re-
searching Communications: A Practical Guide to Methods in Media and Cultural
Analysis (London: Arnold, 1999).
9. David Macey, The Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory (London: Penguin
Books, 2000), 77.
10. Lawrence Grossberg and Janice Radway, Cultural Studies (1992): 111; as
quoted in Lee, Life and Times of Cultural Studies, 2.
11. In this regard, Grossberg is fully in accord with poststructuralism’s “founding
texts.” Adam Katz, for example, maintains that Baudrillard, Delueze, Guattari, Der-
rida, Foucault, Lacan, and Lyotard—poststructuralism’s founding fathers—all privi-
leged “the local and specific,” and resisted “totalizing abstraction.” Adam Katz,
“Postmodern Cultural Studies: A Critique,” 11.
12. Lawrence Grossberg, “Aims and Scope,” Cultural Studies (2007), www.
tandf.co.uk/journals/routledge/09502386.html (accessed Dec. 16, 2007). Emphasis
added.