Page 65 - Communication Cultural and Media Studies The Key Concepts

CULTURAL STUDIES

studies was no longer ‘the human condition’ but ‘power’. The shape of
cultural studies has been directly influenced by its own struggle to
decolonise the concept inherited from literary and art criticism, and to
make criticism itself more self-reflexive.
Cultural studies has developed a body of work which attempts to
recover and place the cultures of hitherto neglected groups. Initially
this entailed attention to the historical development and forms of
working-class culture and analysis of contemporary forms of popular
culture and media.
Partly in response to the intellectual and political upheavals of the
1960s (which saw rapid developments internationally in structuralism,
semiotics, Marxism and feminism), cultural studies entered a period of
intensive theoretical work. The aim was to understand how culture
(the social production of sense and consciousness) should be specified
in itself and in relation to economics (production) and politics (social
relations).
This required the elaboration of newtheoretical models, and the
reworking of certain central organising concepts (for example, class,
ideology, hegemony, language, subjectivity). Meanwhile, attention at
the empirical level was focused on ethnographic and textual studies of
those cultural practices and forms that seemed to showhowpeople
exploit the available cultural discourses to resist or rework the
authority of dominant ideology.
Thereafter, a series of intellectual and political encounters
progressively remodelled the shape and direction of cultural studies.
Serious dialogues were conducted with feminists (attention to
subcultures ignored women), sociologists (problems of method and
generalisability), psychoanalytical theorists (identity and subjectivity),
anthropologists (ethnographic method), post-colonial and ‘subaltern’
writers (multiculturalism, the Anglo-American bias of cultural
studies), Foucauldians (debates about power), policy-makers (the
ability of cultural studies to engage in public policy formation) and
cultural activists (culture jamming).
Throughout its short history, cultural studies has been characterised
by attention to the politics of both methods of study and academic
disciplines. It makes explicit what other academic disciplines often
leave implicit – that the production of knowledge is itself a ‘ruse to
power’.

Further reading: Carey (1989); Grossberg et al. (1992); Hall et al. (1980); Turner
(1990)

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