Page 10 - Decoding Culture

THE STO RY SO FAR 3

cosm of my attitude to cultural studies more generally. An uneasy
and ambiguous combination of fascination with its subject matter,
impatience with at least some aspects of its more 'literary critical'
inheritance, fury with its tendency toward exclusivism and theo­
retical fashion, admiration for its inter-disciplinary inventiveness,
and sympathy with its politically critical project. For over 30 years
I have watched the monster grow, largely as an interested
observer, though sometimes - especially where my first love, the
cinema, was concerned - as a more active participant. It has been
an eventful history. I have seen the rise and fall of several
marxisms, battles fought for possession of the true structuralist
spirit, disciplinary boundaries crumble then rebuild themselves,
psychoanalytic concepts of unparalleled obscurity spread far and
wide, active readers emerge to be celebrated, and passive victims
of media manipulation laid to uneasy rest.
Throughout this time I have been puzzled. Where did it all come
from, this intense commitment to remaking the map of culture, and
why did it take the form that it did? How was it that scholars trained
in disciplines normally consumed by mutual disrespect, not to
mention hatred, came to co-operate across the newly encountered
terrain? What intellectual earthquake gave rise to the extraordi­
nary fascination with theory (or perhaps it should be Theory')
that pervaded academic pursuits not previously distinguished by
their engagement with systematic abstraction? Along what road
had we travelled such that an abiding desire to discriminate
between high and low, good and bad culture, was transmuted into
a body of thought directed at analytic understanding but with no
particular reference to the aesthetic or moral value of specific arte­
facts? In short, what is cultural studies, where did it come from,
and what are its logics?

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