Page 14 - Decoding Culture

THE STORY SO FAR 7
moulded analysis and the key problems that have surfaced repeat­
edly. Inevitably that results in serious omissions, particularly in
the recent period when cultural studies has spiralled out into a
whole range of new applications. For instance, I shall not discuss
the emergence of 'post-colonial' cultural studies, or the significant
recent considerations of race and 'otherness' in culture. This is
not because I consider these issues unimportant. It is because, for
all their undoubted importance, they are not addressed to the cen­
tral analytic problems of the cultural studies tradition. Even those
issues associated with the so-called 'postmodern turn' (the decline
of 'grand narratives', relativism, fluid subjectivity, and the like) will
only interest me here in as much as they can be seen to have
emerged, not from the force of postmodernity itself, but as a con­
sequence of the internal logics of the tradition. Postmodern
cultural form is an interesting topic for cultural studies research,
but its ideas are less than interesting as a conceptual resource for
cultural studies theory. This judgement might have to alter, of
course, although views on that will vary according to the degree to
which recent cultural change is seen as a recognisable extension of
late modernity or a more radical dislocation. On that question the
jury is still out, and, while I know my own position, it would be pre­
mature here to speculate upon the likely verdict.

Once upon a time

What, then, is the broad shape of this 'history' that I shall examine?
In the much simplified narrative that will occupy the rest of this
chapter - and structure the rest of the book - I shall view it as a
series of phases, the move from one to the next occasioned by per­
ceived failings of each and consequent attempts to reconstruct the
tradition in such a way as to overcome those failings. Note that this

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