Page 64 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CULTURAL POLITICS

Links Cultural politics, culture, governmentality, power, power/knowledge, pragmatism

Cultural politics Cultural politics is about the power to name, and thus legitimate,
objects and events, including both common sense and ‘official’ versions of the 41
social and cultural world. One of the central arguments of cultural studies is that
culture is a domain in which competing meanings and versions of the world have
fought for ascendancy. In particular, meaning and truth are constituted within
patterns of power and subject to processes of contestation. Thus, cultural politics
can be understood in terms of the ability to represent the world and to make
particular descriptions ‘stick’. Here social change becomes possible through
rethinking and re-describing the social order and the possibilities for the future.
All forms of cultural representation are intrinsically ‘political’ because they are
bound up with the power that enables some kinds of knowledge and identities to
exist while denying it to others. For example, to describe women as full human
beings and citizens with equal social rights and obligations is quite a different
matter from regarding them as sub-human domestic workers with bodies designed
to please men. To use the language of citizenship to describe women is a different
representation of common sense and official ideology from one in which they are
described as whores, tarts and servants. The language of citizenship legitimates the
place of women in business and politics while the language of sexual and domestic
servitude denies this place, seeking to confine women to the traditional spheres of
domesticity and as objects of the male gaze.
As a form of cultural politics, cultural studies has sought to play a deconstructive
and de-mystifying role by pointing to the fabricated character of cultural texts. It
has aimed to highlight the myths and ideologies embedded in texts in the hope of
producing subject positions, and real subjects, who are enabled to oppose
subordination. Deconstructing texts helps us to understand how they work and in
particular to be aware of their political implications. Thus we are enabled to grasp
the culturally constructed nature of the descriptions that regulate our
understanding of the world and their possible consequences in terms of politics,
values and purposes.
At its best, the development of critical positions and new theory aims to be
linked to communities, groups, organizations and networks of people who are
actively involved in social and cultural change. Indeed, as a political theory cultural
studies has hoped to organize disparate oppositional groups into an alliance of
cultural politics. Given that the emergence of cultural studies as an institutionally
located enterprise did not coincide with an upsurge of class struggle, it has been the
‘new’ social and political movements of identity politics which have more often
than not attracted the attention of cultural studies writers. Here cultural politics has
been conceived of as a series of collective social struggles organized around gender,
race, sexuality, age etc. which seek to re-describe the social in terms of specific values
and hoped for consequences.
Links Cultural policy, deconstruction, dialogic, hegemony, identity politics, ideology,
politics, polysemy