If these are the social, biographical, and theoretical roots that established cultural studies as a realm of inquiry in the second half of the twentieth century, they are roots that have borne a cornucopia of fruits - fruits that are themselves hard to define and classify. As it has been transplanted into new soil (North America, the former colonies of the British Empire, the "Third World"), as new "gardeners" have come to tend those fields (women, postcolonial, subaltern peoples), and as new rootstalk has been grafted on to the old stock (feminism, postmodernism, post-structuralism), cultural studies has proliferated and evolved. It is a field virtually impossible to summarize.
19 For examples of the sorts of developments made by Hall and his colleagues on questions of subjectivity and identity, see Hall and du Gay (1996).
The key starting point for cultural studies, however, is easily described. As John Fiske notes, "culture" as it is understood in cultural studies "is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political" (Fiske 1992, quoted in Storey 1996: 160). Cultural studies, in the eyes of its practitioners, is "committed to the study of the entire range of society's arts, beliefs, institutions, and communicative practices" (Nelson et al. 1992: 4). The range of research rallying under the banner of cultural studies is therefore breathtaking. It includes everything from concerted efforts at culture theory development (as we have seen with Williams and Hall, and as we will continue to see throughout the rest of the book), to empirical studies of people's television-viewing habits; from examinations of the political power of sexual "deviance" to decodings of symbolic codes of pornography; from studies of national identity formation to the politics of shopping; from sports to rock music; from jazz to public art; from street carnival to AIDS; from the cultural construction of scientific knowledge to the theory of language; from race to gender to sexuality to ethnicity; from style to ideology; from resistance to subjectivity; from history to geography; from sociology to psychology; and from political economy to "Rambo and the Popular Pleasures of Pain" (as one 1992 essay is subtitled).
Certainly influenced by the agenda set by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, practitioners in the burgeoning field of cultural studies also drew, in the 1980s and 1990s, explicitly on the influential work of French structuralists and post- structuralists such as Jacques Lacan, Julia Kristeva, Louis Althusser, Michel Fou- cault, Jean-Frangois Lyotard, Roland Barthes, Pierre Bourdieu, Luce Irigaray, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari. Perhaps the most important point taken from the work of the French theorists was that "theory" itself was political, and incapable of "standing] outside the field it claimed to tell the truth about as if it were a 'meta- discourse'" (During 1993b: 15). Cultural theory, therefore, in many ways turned in on itself in an endless swirl of hermetic self-reference, as theorists sought to unravel the politics not of the world outside of theory, but of theory itself (since, so the argument goes, it is not even possible to know the world without theory). There is an important political move here: as culture was seen more and more to be political to its core, theories about culture became relatively depoliticized - that is, if we take for the moment a definition of politics that sees it as the attempt to act on and change the world. The preferred mode of analysis for cultural studies was to understand cultural movements and practices - along with whole fields of "otherness" - as relatively autonomous, as valuable in their own right, and not necessarily as always and everywhere even potentially "oppositional." "This new mode of cultural studies no longer concentrated on reading culture as primarily directed against the state," as had been the case with Williams, Hall, and other founding New Leftists. Rather, it worked to "affirm 'other' ways of life on their own terms This moment in cultural studies pictured society as much more decentred" than the Birmingham Centre, and developed what Simon During (1993b: 15-16) calls "a looser, more pluralistic and postmodern, conceptual model than those which insist that capitalism and the free market produce interests structurally unequal and in conflict with each other." Unlike the social democratic thought that drove much of the early work in cultural studies (and which was absolutely the cornerstone of Williams's theories of culture), "the new cultural studies no longer aimed at a radical transformation of the whole system of social fields" (During 1993b: 16).
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In other words, at exactly the moment that capitalism, in response to its crises of the 1970s was engaged in a radical global restructuring, cultural studies - or at least significant parts of it - both globalized itself and turned away from seeking to understand the totality of social life. Now it was precisely the local (both in terms of geographical scale and in terms of social sweep) that garnered the most interest. This has meant - for better and for worse - a shift from the study of social life in its totality, to the study of social life in all its plurality. The shift is not complete, however, and in reality, cultural studies, like new cultural geography, works product- ively through the tensions implicit in understanding "culture" as both part of a integrated whole and a set of often radically disarticulated practices. This book too is a product of exactly that tension (though it'll become quite clear in the next section and in chapter 3, if it isn't clear enough already, just which side of the tension in cultural theory I favor).