Page 20 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

INTRODUCTION

for example, universities and publishing houses. Consequently, as it has become
something to be taught, so cultural studies has acquired a multitude of institutional
bases, courses, textbooks and students. In due course, this process leads to a certain
‘disciplining’ of cultural studies. The courses now offered by universities for xix
undergraduate students constitute a broad ‘definition’ of the parameters of cultural
studies. The textbooks that follow, including my own (Barker, 2000), reinforce this
process. Many cultural studies practitioners have felt ill at ease with the forging of
institutional disciplinary boundaries for the field. Professionalized and institutionalized
cultural studies might, feared Hall, ‘formalize out of existence the critical questions of
power, history and politics, (Hall, 1992: 286).
However, although higher education is a branch of government and thus teachers are
an arm of the state, higher education remains, at least within liberal democracies, a
privileged site of critical inquiry. Writers, researchers and teachers in higher education
may not be the ‘organic’ intellectuals that the ‘pioneers’ of cultural studies hoped for.
However, they are in a position to speak with, and provide intellectual resources for,
New Social Movements, workers in cultural industries and those involved with the
forging of cultural policy. To some extent, cultural studies is constrained by its
institutionalization, yet, it retains a critical edge. Likewise, while cultural studies is to a
degree an academic discipline of the university system, it nevertheless continues to slip
away from its moorings and slide across the surface of culture, its infinite object of
inquiry and desire.
In sum, cultural studies can be understood as an intellectual enterprise that is
constituted by a set of overlapping language-games. Nevertheless, for those readers
frustrated by my evasion in refusing to define cultural studies, I shall now make the
claim that an exploration of the contemporary vocabulary of cultural studies suggests
that we might understand it thus:

Cultural studies is concerned with an exploration of culture, as constituted by the
meanings and representations generated by human signifying practices, and the
context in which they occur. Cultural studies has a particular interest in the
relations of power and the political consequences that are inherent in such
cultural practices. The prime purposes of cultural studies, which is located in the
institutions of universities, publishing houses and bookshops, are the processes of
intellectual clarification that could provide useful tools for cultural/political
activists and policy makers.

Of course, the tools of cultural studies are words and concepts – hence, in my view, the
significance of a dictionary.

FEATURES OF THE DICTIONARY

This dictionary follows the format of most others, in that there is an alphabetical list of
concepts that can be consulted whereupon one will find a discussion of the meanings
and uses associated with that concept in the context of cultural studies. However, I have