Page 169 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Accordingly a full analysis of any cultural practice requires the analysis of both
‘economy’ and ‘culture’, including the articulation of the relations between them.

Links Articulation, circuit of culture, cultural materialism, Marxism, reductionism, social
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formation

Politics Politics is concerned with the numerous manifestations and relations of power
that occur at all levels of human interaction. Since cultural studies is a field of study
centred on the examination of the relations of culture and power, then it follows
that the concept of politics is a core concern. However, politics as understood in the
context of cultural studies is not simply a matter of electoral parties and
governments but of power as it pervades every plane of social relationships. Power
is not simply a coercive and constraining force that subordinates one set of people
to another, though it certainly is this, but it also generates and enables social action
and relationships. In this sense, power, while certainly constraining, is also
enabling. Thus, politics is a central activity in the generation, organization,
reproduction and alteration of any social and cultural order.
Cultural studies has been particularly concerned with the ‘politics of
representation’, that is, the way that power is implicated in the construction and
regulation of cultural classifications. A politics of representation concerns questions
of discourse, image, language, reality and meaning and is ‘political’ because these
issues are intrinsically bound up with questions of power. This is so because
representation involves questions of inclusion and exclusion, that is, the issue of
what is recorded in a representation and what is left out. This involves the
enactment of power. For example, to represent the category of African Americans
as constituted by full human beings and citizens with equal social rights and
obligations is quite a different matter from representing them as a group of sub-
human criminals and/or social problems.
Representations infused with power are the very building bricks that constitute
culture and thus they guide our behaviour as ‘maps of meaning’. In particular,
cultural studies has explored popular culture as the political ground on which
consent to a cultural order is won or lost through the play of power and
representation. The forms of power that cultural studies explores are diverse but
include the formation and performance of gender, race, class, colonialism etc.
Further, cultural studies has sought to explore the connections between these forms
of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be
utilized by agents in the pursuit of change. That is, cultural studies as a discipline
has been predominantly concerned with issues of cultural politics.
Links Cultural politics, hegemony, ideology, power, power/knowledge, representation

Polysemy In the context of cultural studies the concept of polysemy highlights the
notion that signs carry many potential meanings. Signs do not signify only one
thing but are polysemic, that is, they are ambiguous in terms of their sense and
significance. This is so because signs do not have transparent and authoritative
meaning by dint of reference to an independent object world but rather generate