Page 68 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

CULTURE

industrialized cultures (rather than to the cultures of colonized peoples) is to say
that we are all cultured. We all know ‘how to go on’ within our form of life. Further,
within the context of modernity, an anthropological definition of culture offered
a critical and democratic edge, since to comprehend culture as a ‘whole way of life’ 45
involves splitting off the concept from the ‘Arts’. This argument helps to legitimize
the study of popular culture and to put questions of cultural democracy to the fore.
Culture is commonly held to concern questions of shared social meanings, that
is, the various ways we make sense of the world. However, meanings are not simply
floating ‘out there’, rather, they are generated through signs. Hence the
investigation of culture has become closely entwined with the study of signification.
Cultural studies has argued that language is not a neutral medium for the formation
of meanings and knowledge relating to an independent object world outside of
language, but rather is constitutive of those very meanings and knowledge. That is,
language gives meaning to material objects and social practices that are brought
into view by language and made intelligible to us in terms which language delimits.
These processes of meaning production are signifying practices and to understand
culture is to explore how meaning is produced symbolically as forms of
representation.
Consequently, cultural studies has, for many of its proponents, become
centred on questions of representation with an especial emphasis on the ways by
which the world is socially constructed and represented to and by us. This
requires us to explore the textual generation of meaning in tandem with its
subsequent consumption in a variety of contexts. Further, cultural representations
and meanings have a certain materiality; they are embedded in sounds,
inscriptions, objects, images, books, magazines and television programmes. They
are produced, enacted, used and understood in specific social and material
contexts. Thus, the central strand of cultural studies can be understood as the
study of culture where this concept is understood to mean the signifying practices
of representation set within the social and material contexts of production,
circulation and reception.
Significantly, the sites of contemporary cultural production and reception are no
longer confined within the borders of nation-states. Rather, in the era of
globalization culture is best thought of not as a bounded unit but as a set of
overlapping performative language-games that flow with no clear limits or
determinations within the global whole of human life. Culture is becoming less a
matter of locations than of hybrid and creolized cultural meanings and practices
that span global space. Cultures are syncretic and hybridized products of
interactions across space and are increasingly thought of as carving routes rather
than possessing roots. They are constellations of temporary coherence, or knots in
the field of social space that are the product of relations and interconnections from
the local to the global.

Links Cultural studies, language, meaning, performativity, popular culture, representation,
signs