What Is Cultural Studies?
Graeme Turner
In British Cultural Studies: An Introduction Graeme Turner identifies 3 common influences on most work in Cultural Studies:
Saussure & Semiotics
"Language does not name an already organized and coherent reality; its role is far more powerful and complex. The function of language is to organize, to construct, indeed to provide us with our only access to, reality" (13).
"There is a link, however, between aesthetic analysis and semiotic analysis: the strategy of calling the object or site of one's analysis a text. The term is appropriated from literary studies and depends on an analogy between the close analysis conventionally applied to literary texts and the close analysis cultural studies applies to popular cultural texts" (23).
Critical Marxism & Theories of Ideology
"The Marxism which informs the cultural studies approach is a critical Marxism in the sense that it has contested the reductionist implications of earlier Marxist approaches to the study of culture" (24).
"Althusser argues that ideology operates not explicitly but implicitly; it lives in those practices, those structures, those images we take for granted. . . . It is unconscious" (27).
Lacanian & Other Theories of the Subject
"[Lacan argues that] Our view of ourselves is composed from a repertoire given to us, not produced by us, and so we are the subjects, not the authors, of cultural processes" (28).
Graeme also mentions the influence of Antonio Gramsci's notion of "hegemony" and Michel Foucault's reconceptualization of power.
Professor DeHay
To attempt to define Cultural Studies would be a sort of contradiction in that one of its attractions for me as a field of study is its openness, its ability to retain a critical position and to address what Colin Sparks refers to as "omnivorous concerns." He defines cultural studies as it has developed as "a veritable ragbag of ideas, methods and concerns from literary criticism, sociology, history, media studies, etc." British Cultural Studies in the 1950s came out of the academic discipline of English, but very quickly became a strongly interdisciplinary, if not anti-disciplinary movement (following Foucault's notion of disciplines as limiting and excluding discourses). For example, the literary text is retheorized outside of the traditional concepts of Literature, challenging the very construction of the "literary" and its position in relationship to culture as a whole. The focus shifts more toward the relationship of literature to the construction of meaning, to the "maps of meaning' in daily life. So I no longer think of literature as a separate and privileged space, but rather as one type of cultural production, one kind of text in a vast textualized world.
Culture is then seen as political, not artistic, and the work of art is a product of this culture. Raymond Williams, one of the originators of Cultural Studies, defined culture as "a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group." He and other early critics rejected any specific notion of culture, preferring to study culture as a whole way of life, and the patterns of organization, "maps of meaning" in daily life. Culture understood in this way is emphatically not "an autonomous or determined field, but a site of social differences and struggle" (Green).
Cultural Studies from the beginning has shared concerns and methods of analysis with Marxist theory. One shared assumption is that culture is dialectical in nature: we make culture and we are made by culture; just as there is individuals agency, there is external structure. Because cultural processes are intimately connected with social relations, especially class, gender, and racial structural divisions, culture is understood to involve power and helps maintain and create inequalities within and between social groups. As part of the dialectic of culture, resistance is always present in that a dominant cultural process will generate its own critical response. for this reason Cultural Studies emphasizes the importance of analyzing the dialectical play between resistance and incorporation of cultural production. And again like Marxist criticism, Cultural Studies focuses on the relationship between social practices commonly separated so that culture is seen as a whole way of life, a social totality (Choen).
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