Page 13 - Decoding Culture

6 DECODING CULTURE

seemingly exponential growth of textbooks and edited collections
is clearly feeding a hunger for the subject, whatever it might be,
but it is also bringing with it a diffuseness which does nothing to
improve our sense of what the project is all about.
Of course, I recognize that I too am contributing to this expan­
sion by writing this book. In mitigation I shall immediately concede
that I am not seeking to define cultural studies, or limit it to some
set of practices that I think are right and proper. I shall use the
term rather as people in everyday life use genre categories such as
romantic fiction or horror: that is, to invoke a tradition which is pre­
sumed to exhibit significant shared features and which would be
recognized as such by a culturally competent observer. This does
not exclude boundary disputes since, like genres and other disci­
plines, cultural studies is necessarily blurred at its edges. Indeed,
cultural studies is especially so in that it is itself comprised of inputs
from a whole range of disciplinary environments that pre-existed it.
One of its principal distinguishing characteristics is precisely that
it drew together conceptual material which began life in other dis­
ciplinary domains but which was transmuted in the transfer from
one context to another. Linguistics, literary criticism, media
research, sociology, philosophy, history, film studies, and others,
are all part of the genetic mix of cultural studies. It is hardly sur­
prising, then, that we should find centrifugal inclinations in such a
trans-disciplinary 'discipline'. As Frow (1995: 7) observes, 'cultural
studies exists in a state of productive uncertainty about its status as
a discipline'.
Since the task of disciplinary definition is fruitless in any form
that escapes vacuity, I shall instead try to examine the main ana­
lytic positions that have been historically recognized as prominent
in the formation of the field. By constructing an analytic history I
shall be able to examine the arguments linking various elements in
the cultural studies mix, so identifying the key concepts that have

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