Page 65 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

DICTIONARY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Cultural populism At one level the idea of cultural populism is simply that
assumption central to cultural studies that popular culture is valuable and worthy
of serious study. However, the concept was given a twist by McGuigan in the early
42 1990s and made into the centrepiece of a critique of the direction being taken by
cultural studies at that time. In particular, the respect accorded to popular culture
by cultural studies was said to have turned into uncritical valorization of the
consumption of commodity culture. Further, cultural studies was said to lack an
adequately materialist understanding of culture and was thus unable to grasp the
material circumstances and power relations of the contemporary world.
The argument was that cultural studies rightly took issue with ideas of ‘mass
culture’ that denigrated popular culture as unworthy of either participation or study.
However, the increased ‘postmodernization’ of culture was said to have itself
collapsed the high–low division. Further, the celebration of the productive and
resistive capacities of audiences by cultural studies writers was argued to have gone
too far so that it had become complicit with the ideology of consumer sovereignty.
For McGuigan, cultural studies was unable to critique the products of consumer
culture because it had lost sight of any profound conception of cultural value from
which to critique texts. Further, it over-endowed audiences with the cultural
competencies to deconstruct ideology.

Links Common culture, consumption, cultural materialism
Cultural studies The domain of cultural studies can be understood as an
interdisciplinary or post-disciplinary field of inquiry that explores the production
and inculcation of culture or maps of meaning. However, ‘cultural studies’ has no
referent to which we can point; rather, it is constituted by the language-game of
cultural studies. That is, the theoretical terms developed and deployed by persons
calling their work cultural studies constitutes that which is ‘cultural studies’. These
are concepts which have been deployed in the various geographical sites of cultural
studies and which form the history of the cultural studies tradition as it emerged
from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies and proliferated across the
globe from the 1960s onwards.
Cultural studies can be also be grasped as a discursive formation; that is, a group
of ideas, images and practices, that provide ways of talking about, and conduct
associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site. That is,
cultural studies is constituted by a regulated way of speaking about objects (which
cultural studies brings into view) and coheres around key concepts, ideas and
concerns that include articulation, culture, discourse, ideology, identity, popular
culture, power, representation and text. Indeed, the production of this dictionary
forms a part of the process by which cultural studies constitutes itself.
Clarifying the boundaries of cultural studies as a coherent and unified discipline
with clear-cut substantive topics, concepts and methods which differentiate it from
other disciplines remains difficult. Cultural studies is, and always has been, a multi-
or post-disciplinary field of inquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself and
other ‘subjects’. Indeed, cultural studies draws important concepts from other