CULTURAL STUDIES

Cultural Studies

Cultural Studies and Textual Analysis

Cultural forms have themselves been studied within a giddying acceleration of theoretical and “methodological” paradigms. While some semio-logical work has seemed to remain text-bound and perhaps spuriously scientific, it has drawn attention to languages and procedures of representation. That meaning is constructed through language is illuminated powerfully both in work on discourse in critical linguistics and in foucault's work on forms of knowledge and power. Quite other dimensions of culture such as subjectivity, fantasy, and sexuality have been broached through the difficult terrain of psychoanalytic thought. Even so, there are other areas of culture where an adequate language of analysis is still to be found (for example, music) or where work has hardly begun (for example, religion).

The characteristic object of cultural studies is, however, neither a theoretical commentary strengthened by cultural references nor a particular form of culture, but a cultural process or moment, analyzed for particular purposes and in a specific place and time. Culture is located neither in texts, nor as the outcome of its production, nor only in the cultural resources, appropriations, and innovations of lived everyday worlds, but in different forms of sense making, within various settings, in societies incessantly marked by change and conflict. Culture is neither institutions nor genres nor behavior but complex interactions between all of these. It has been the decisive contribution to cultural studies of ethnographies, participant observation, interviewing, and the study of lived worlds to show, for example, that however sophisticated may be the cultural study of a text, a policy, an ideology, or discourse, a form is used, reworked, and transformed by different groups in ways unpredictable from formal analysis. This is true of how media are taken up, selectively used, and explained (see encoding/decoding), the ways in which school pupils or a ...