Page 195 - Decoding Culture

188 D E C O D I N G C U L TURE

knowledge that cultural studies seeks and about the methodolo­
gies best suited to the task of establishing such knowledge. The
third is primarily political, involving differences about the critical
positions that cultural studies should or could adopt in analysing
the role of cultural forms in modern societies. And the fourth
raises related questions of aesthetics and evaluation, asking
whether and in what degree cultural studies should seek to make
judgements of quality about the artefacts that it examines.
Needless to say, all four interrelate in a variety of ways. Linked
issues of theory, method, politics and aesthetics have featured
prominently in the short lifetime of cultural studies, so it is hardly
surprising to find that they form the main fault-lines along which
divisions open up in times of change.
I shall consider these four dimensions in reverse order, begin­
ning with what some might argue is the most long-lived but least
interesting issue: the problem of making judgements of quality.
In cultural studies' earliest manifestations the question of quality
was clearly to the fore. Exponents of the culture and civilization
tradition saw discrimination between 'good' and 'bad' culture as
central to the whole enterprise, as did their revisionist successors
such as Hoggart, Williams, and those who sought to demonstrate
that popular culture, too, was capable of profundity and serious­
ness of purpose. This much we saw in Chapter 2. The arrival of
structuralism, however, signalled a move away from issues of
quality, encouraging questions about how it was that cultural
artefacts actually functioned rather than seeking to make judge­
ments about their aesthetic and moral value. This is not to
suggest that evaluative concerns disappeared entirely. There has
always remained at least a residual interest in critical discrimi­
nation, a topic given periodic renewal in highly publicized
attempts to define the 'canon' in different cultural forms - espe­
cially literature - or to rescue commonly devalued texts (such as

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