Page 11 - Decoding Culture

4 DECODING CULTURE

What cultural studies is not

In some part, this book is my answer to these questions. It is not a
complete answer, nor could it be. I make no claim to be defining
'cultural studies' here or to be defending some such paradigmatic
practice. What I shall try to do is lay out the kinds of arguments
that formed what Chaney (1994: 9) wisely prefers to call 'the field of
cultural studies' in full recognition that there is much more to
which the label attaches than I shall consider here. In so doing I
shall be examining many of the individual works and schools of
thought that feature in the standard textbooks of the area (for
example Turner, 1990, or Storey, 1993). However, it is important to
stress that I am not seeking to provide an alternative to those excel­
lent introductory texts. My aim here is to present an analytic
history of cultural studies that focuses primarily upon the field's
theoretical and methodological dynamics. My exposition, there­
fore, is not designed with a view to the completeness of coverage
that a textbook would require; instead I select the analytic issues
that I consider to be the most significant. In general terms I shall
return constantly to issues of epistemology and ontology. What
kind of knowledge claims are made by different cultural studies
practices and on what grounds are they warranted? What kinds of
assumptions do they make about the nature of culture and social
life and what are their implications? And perhaps most generally of
all, what conceptions do they hold concerning the ubiquitous ten­
sion between the structuring capacity of cultural forms and the
activity of human agency?
My aim, then, is analytic, not descriptive. Indeed, even to try to
describe everything to which the term cultural studies has been
applied would keep us here from now until Doomsday, and later
still. Over 20 years ago Colin Sparks (1996a: 14) opened a discus­
sion of cultural studies' evolution by observing how difficult it was

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