When someone would ask me what I study, and I would be in a lazy mood, I would say "history", or "literature", or "music" or something silimar. Sometimes I would take more trouble to try to explain that my studies are a mixture of cultural history, anthropology, literary theory, gender studies, art sociology and some other stuff.
What I actually do is a slow process of discovery for myself as well. Now and then I read a book than causes a minor breakthrough in my understanding of how everything I study is connected.
Literary theory: a very short introduction by Jonathan Culler was such a book. The book I'm currently reading is another one:
Introducing cultural studies by Sardar and Van Loon.
Let us from now on say that I do Cultural Studies.
What is cultural studies? Difficult question...
About the topics under investigation by people doing cultural studies I can be short: it's everything. Or actually a little bit less: it's everything humans do and have done and will do. Culture. So it doesn't study the earth as it would be without humans, or galaxies as they are without humans, or genetics as they would be without humans. But it does study
how humans study the earth as it would be without humans, etcetera. It does study science, art, everyday life, politics, sports. ettiquette, morals, media, mental conceptions, social stratification, the socio-economic history of cottage cheese farms (inspiration next to me on the table).... and that's just the beginnnig of a decimals-of-pi-kind-of-list.
Cultural studies may become a bit clearer to you when we consider the
perspectives from which it studies culture. A long list (again) of theories is available to the analyst of culture: materialist theory, feminist theory, post-colonial theory, queer theory, functionalism, structuralism, ideaism, relativism, culturalism, paradigm theory, reflectionism, post-modern philosophy, speech act theory, reception theory, deconstructionalism, et cetera. This al sounds very frightening (and it is...it is hard to find your way through all this...), but fortunately many of these theories turn out to have major overlaps in practice.
Often, these theories are interpreted as ideologies - in other words: often they
are ideologies. You might call yourself a feminist and be convicted (and in your academic work try to convince
others) that throughout history, the status of women has always been inferior to that of men, that men have been busy consolidating their power, and that women should challenge it because they are entitled to the same status, power, etc, as men. Or you might call yourself a post-feminist (as I happen to do) and argue that although this might be true to a certain extent, it is impossible to conceive of men and women as monolithic and diametrically opposed groups. For example, differences in power
between women are probably larger than differences of power between women on the one and men on the other hand. Many men have been/are dominated; many women have (had) power over men, or over other women. "Global sisterhood" or common interest is a fraud. Men have never unifiedly tried to control women. Historical figures, both men and women, have always been much more pragmatic. Second wave feminists have overestimated the consciousness and purposefulness of acts of domination. Powerrelations can be explained much more fruitfully if other factors, like class, sexuality and "race" are taken into account. In fact, here post-feminism, post-colonialism, modern marxism an some more theories/ideologies merge and become one.
However, all this was about these perspectives as ideologies. But you don't need to be a marxist to use marxist theories to analyse phenomena. Often it is interesting just to look what happens if you try to, for example, interpret a poem psychoanalytically. (Personally psychoanalytic ideology disgusts me, but it still offers valuable insights that can be used elsewhere).
But what makes people want to collect all those theories under a single name, cultural theory? Partly, it has to do with history, with the reserachers and the universities and the journals where all these ideas came together and influenced each other. However - and now I return to my book - there is one important aspect of cultural theory I haven't mentioned so far. That is, that it wants to be engaged. It is not just an academic exercise, because what would be its purpose? Other disciplines that are equally distant from and unintelligible for the general public (I guess all academic disciplines...) each have a relation to wider society in their own way: psychology might influence treatment, educationl studies might change educational strategies, medicine influences health, drama studies - performances, archaeology - museums, economics - financial policy, etc. I have given rather arbritrary and simplistic examples here, but you get the idea. So what does cultural studies want to do? I quote my book:
"Its constant goal is to
expose power relationships and examine how these relationships influence and shape cultural practices. [...] Its objective is to understand culture in all its complex forms and to
analyse the social and political context within which it manifests itself. [...] it is
both the object of study and the location of political criticism and action. [in other worsd: its articles and books want to influence society] It aims to be both an intellectual and a pragmatic enterprise. Cultural studies attempts to
expose and reconcile the division of knowledge [...] It assumes a common idenity and a common interest between the knower and the known. [in other words: it is not
about other people, observing them like you would observe bacteria; but is
to people: the reader, the researcher and the object of study become one!] Cultural studies is committed to a
moral evaluation and to a
radical line of
political action". [it does not believe that science can be objective or value-free.]
This is very ambitious. And I don't excpect to be able to live up to it. But I do believe it is a good ideal to reach out to. To extend the medicine-simile: (most) doctors don't expect to eradicate death or disease, but they do continue to try and cure people.
That was it for the moment: time to perform some cultural study!
