Page 223 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

perceived occurrences. It can also be grasped as a tool, instrument or logic for
intervening in the world through the mechanisms of description, definition,
prediction and control. Theory is not an unproblematic reflection or discovery of
200 objective truth about an independent object world. Rather, theory construction is
a self-reflexive discursive endeavour that seeks to interpret and intervene in the
world. It involves the thinking through of concepts and arguments, often re-
defining and critiquing prior work, with the objective of offering new tools by
which to think about our world.
Theoretical work has maintained a high profile position within cultural studies
and can be thought of as a crafting of the cultural signposts and maps of meaning
by which we are guided or, as argued in the introduction to this dictionary, as a
toolbox of concepts. Cultural studies has rejected the empiricist claim that
knowledge is 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 of
stacking up of ‘facts’ produces a story about our lives without theory.
Theory permeates all levels of cultural studies, which can itself be understood as
a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical
knowledge as a political practice. Here, theory is not held to be a neutral or objective
phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which one
speaks, to whom, and for what purposes. Within the domain of cultural studies
there are a variety of theoretical perspectives that compete for ascendancy, the most
prominent of which are Marxism, structuralism and poststructuralism.
Links Epistemology, Marxism, narrative, poststructuralism, structuralism, truth

Time–space geography Given the complexity of contemporary life it is a requirement
on us all to move across and through a variety of spaces and places, including places
of work, leisure, sleep, eating, shopping and so forth. Time–space geography is a
domain of study that has been concerned to map the movements and pathways of
persons through these physical environments and is especially interested in the
physical, technological, economic and social constraints on such movement.
Time–space geographers trace the variety of social activities that occur and the
constraints which material and social factors place on the patterns of our
movement. Time–space geographers claim to demonstrate how society and culture
are constituted by the unintended consequences of the repetitive acts of individuals.
On a larger scale, time–space geography has been concerned with explanations
for globalization expressed in terms of concepts like ‘time–space compression’ and
‘time–space distanciation’. Thus globalization can be understood in terms of an
intensified compression of the world, that is, globalization is constituted by the
ever-increasing abundance of global connections. According to Harvey, since the
early 1970s we have witnessed a phase of accelerated globalization marked by a new
dimension of time–space compression propelled by transnational companies’ search
for new sources of profit.
As understood by Giddens, time–space distanciation refers to the processes by
which societies are ‘stretched’ over shorter or longer spans of time and space. Of