Page 18 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

INTRODUCTION

THE DICTIONARY AS TOOLBOX

This book is centred on a series of concepts that I take to be important to cultural
studies. Other cultural studies writers will differ about how to deploy these concepts xvii
and about which are the most significant. I also recognize that members of the
cultural studies community may well disagree with my inclusion/exclusion of certain
ideas. At the same time, I would be very surprised if we could not agree that a good
deal of the concepts are a necessary part of cultural studies as it is currently
constituted. I doubt that we would recognize a domain of study that did not include
certain words – articulation, culture, discourse, hegemony, identity, ideology, popular
culture, power, representation, sign, subjectivity, texts, to name but a few – as cultural
studies.
These are amongst the theoretical concepts that constitute the framework within
which cultural studies writers understand the world and might carry out empirical
research and interpret their evidence. Thus it is this theoretical language of cultural
studies that gives it its distinctive cast. This is a toolbox that is drawn from a number
of different theoretical streams and methodological approaches that constitute the field.
Broadly speaking, the tributaries of cultural studies are:

Ethnography Feminism Marxism
Philosophy of language Political economy Postcolonial theory
Post-Marxism Poststructuralism Pragmatism
Psychoanalysis Structuralism Textual analysis

Consequently, it has always been difficult to pin down the boundaries of cultural studies
as a coherent, unified, academic discipline with clear-cut substantive topics, concepts
and methods. However, the problems of definition and disciplinary boundaries are not
uniquely problematic for cultural studies nor do they pose problems of unique
complexity. It is just as difficult to achieve this task for sociology, women’s studies,
physics, linguistics and Buddhism. Thus, in trying to establish sociology as a coherent
discipline Durkheim instituted a stream of thought that has been influential across time
and space. Nevertheless, he did not define sociology for all time since this particular
language-game has mutated and splintered.
Cultural studies has always been a multi- or post-disciplinary field of inquiry that
blurs the boundaries between itself and other ‘subjects’. Further, cultural studies has
been something of a magpie; it has its own distinctive cast, yet it likes to borrow
glittering concepts from other nests. However, the current vocabulary or toolbox of the
field suggests that cultural studies is centrally concerned with culture as constituted by
the signs, meanings and representations that are generated by signifying mechanisms
in the context of human practices. Further, cultural studies is concerned with the
construction and consequences of those representations and thus with matters of power
since patterns of signifying practices constitute, and are constituted by, institutions and
virtual structures. Here cultural studies is very much concerned with cultural politics.
Knowledge is not simply a matter of collecting facts from which theory can be
deduced or against which it can be tested. That is, `facts’ are not neutral and no amount