Page 27 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

philosophy also provides an account of the relationship of Art to other domains of
human activity, such as morality, politics and commerce.
Cultural studies developed in part through criticism of the notion of universal
4 aesthetic criteria and the class-based cultural elitism that it contains. The
anthropologically oriented understanding of culture as ‘ordinary’ that forms a
bedrock assumption of cultural studies was developed in opposition to the elite
notion of culture as being concerned only with high culture, that is, cultural forms
that elite critics defined as the aesthetically good. The policing of the boundaries of
a canon of ‘good works’ by aesthetic theory had historically led to the exclusion of
popular culture. However, writers interested in popular culture have argued that
there are no universal grounds for drawing lines between the worthy and the
unworthy so that evaluation is not a sustainable task for the critic. The obligation
of the critic is not to make aesthetic judgements but to describe and analyse the
cultural production of meaning. This stance had the great merit of opening up a
whole new array of popular cultural texts for legitimate discussion.
The problem for aesthetic theory from a cultural studies perspective is that the
concepts of beauty, harmony, form and quality can be applied as much to a steam
train as to a novel or a painting and are thus culturally relative. As such, high
culture is another subculture. Further, Art can be understood as a socially created
category that has been attached to certain external and internal signals by which
art is recognized. Hence the ‘art gallery’ and the theatre. Art is not the outcome of
the mystical practices of geniuses or of a different order of work from the creation
of popular culture but is an industry with its owners, managers and workers.
Cultural studies does, of course, make value judgements about culture. However,
these are characteristically ideological and political judgements rather than ones
based on aesthetic criteria. Thus cultural studies has developed arguments that
revolve around the social and political consequences of constructing and
disseminating specific discursive constructions of the world with a view to
understanding the way cultural and symbolic processes are connected to power.
Links Author, canon, cultural studies, culture, essentialism, ideology, symbolic

Agency The concept of agency can be understood to mark the socially determined
capability to act and to make a difference. Agency has commonly been associated
with notions of freedom, free will, action, creativity, originality and the possibility
of change brought about through the actions of sovereign individuals. However,
there is an important conceptual difference between agents who are held to be free
in the sense of ‘not determined’ and agency understood as the socially constituted
capacity to act. While the former concept makes no sense, for there can be no
uncaused human acts, the latter asks us to consider agency as consisting of acts that
make a pragmatic difference. Here, agency means the enactment of X rather than
Y course of action. Of course, precisely because socially constructed agency involves
differentially distributed social resources that give rise to various degrees of the
ability to act in specific spaces, so some actors have more scope for action than do
others.