Page 12 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 5

to offer any kind of precise definition: 'tal veritable rag-bag of
ideas, methods and concerns from literary criticism, sociology,
history, media studies, etc., are lumped together under the conve­
nient label of cultural studies'. As many later commentators have,
he resolved his definitional problem by attending primarily to the
work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, a move
which is convenient but which has become increasingly misleading
as the years have gone by. Sparks is guiltless in this respect; he rec­
ognizes that the CCCS' work represents 'a very limited part' of the
larger and more complex enterprise. Later authors - not least
those who have sought to carry the word of British cultural studies
across the Atlantic - have been less scrupulous however, and con­
temporary students looking to such sources for enlightenment
could be forgiven for thinking that the CCCS and 'cultural studies'
were more or less conterminous.
That is at one end of the scale. At the other end, the question of
definition is dealt with not by restriction but by unfettered inflation.
This was always likely, of course, given the range of disciplinary
environments on which early cultural studies drew. But even some
of the more precise attempts to formulate the parameters of the
enterprise have found themselves rapidly ascending the ladder of
generality. Richard Johnson's (1986: 45) much quoted 'What is
Cultural Studies Anyway?' at one point sees the cultural studies
project as being 'to abstract, describe and reconstitute in concrete
studies the social forms through which human beings "live",
become conscious, sustain themselves subjectively'. Some might
claim that to be a decent enough definition of sociology rather than
cultural studies, though not Johnson, who writes as a historian and
a marxist, and it certainly proclaims a very large field of study.
Again, as time has gone by, less rather than more care has been
exercised, with the 1990s bringing a vast increase in work labelled
'cultural studies' but sharing little more than that label itself. The

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