Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that analyzes culture from diverse perspectives. It transcends traditional academic disciplines and brings together approaches from fields like history, philosophy, literary criticism, media studies, and political theory. Cultural studies examines how social hierarchies and power structures shape cultural production and meanings. It rejects distinctions between high and low culture, and analyzes the political and economic forces that influence cultural works and their distribution. A key goal is understanding culture as a site of social and political struggle.

1. Four Goals of
Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies

2. ● Prepared by: Nilay Rathod
● MA Sem: 3
● 22410 Paper 205A: Cultural Studies Post-Independence
● Roll No: 17
● Enrolment No: 4069206420210030
● Submitted to: Department of English,
Maharaja Krishnakumarsinhji Bhavnagar University

3. What is Cultural Studies
According to M. H. Abrams
Cultural studies designates a cross-disciplinary enterprise for analyzing the
conditions that affect the production, reception, and cultural significance of all
types of institutions, practices, and products; among these, literature is
accounted as merely one of many forms of cultural “signifying practices.” A
chief concern is to specify the functioning of the social, economic, and political
forces and power structures that are said to produce the diverse forms of
cultural phenomena and to endow them with their social “meanings,” their
acceptance as “truth,” the modes of discourse in which they are discussed,
and their relative value and status.

4. According to 'A Dictionary of Critical Theory'
“An interdisciplinary approach to the study and analysis of culture understood
very broadly to include not only specific texts, but also practices, and indeed ways
of life.”
The Most influential Works:
Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler’s mammoth Cultural
Studies (1991) and introductory textbooks like John Fiske’s Reading the Popular
(1989)
These works reflects not only the heterogeneous nature of work calling itself
Cultural Studies, but the fact that in a very real sense Cultural Studies is
theoretically provisional and avant-garde. (Buchanan)

5. As Patrick Brantlinger has pointed out,
cultural studies is not "a tightly coherent,
unified movement with a fixed agenda," but a
"loosely coherent group of tendencies, issues,
and questions" Arising from the social turmoil
of the 1960s, cultural studies is composed of
elements of Marxism, poststructuralism and
postmodernism, feminism, gender studies,
anthropology, sociology, race and ethnic
studies, film theory, urban studies, public
policy, popular culture studies, and
postcolonial studies: those fields that
concentrate on social and cultural forces that
either create community or cause division and
alienation.

6. Cultural studies was initially developed by British Marxist academics in the late
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, and has been subsequently taken up and transformed by
scholars from many different disciplines around the world. Cultural studies is
avowedly and even radically interdisciplinary and can sometimes be seen as anti-
disciplinary. A key concern for cultural studies practitioners is the examination of
the forces within and through which socially organized people conduct and
participate in the construction of their everyday lives. (Pain et al.)
Cultural studies as a field was when Richard Hoggart used the term in 1964 in
founding the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University
of Birmingham. (Dworkin)
Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, Stuart Hall and Tony Bennett are the
central figures of "Birmingham School" of cultural studies.

7. 1 2 3 4
Four Goals
Cultural studies
transcends the
confines of a
particular discipline
such as literary
criticism or history.
Cultural studies is
politically engaged.
Cultural studies
denies the
separation of “high”
and “low” or elite
and popular
culture.
Cultural studies
analyzes not only
the cultural work,
but also the means
of production.

8. Cultural studies transcends the confines of a particular discipline
such as literary criticism or history.
Cultural studies is not bound by any discipline or field.
Cultural Studies, editors Lawrence Crossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler
emphasize that the intellectual promise of cultural studies lies in its attempts to "cut
across diverse social and political interests and address many of the struggles within
the current scene"
Cultural studies combines a variety of politically engaged critical approaches drawn
including semiotics, Marxism, feminist theory, ethnography, post-structuralism,
postcolonialism, social theory, political theory, history, philosophy, literary theory,
media theory, film/video studies, communication studies, political economy,
translation studies, museum studies and art history/criticism to study cultural
phenomena in various societies and historical periods.

9. ● Cultural studies are interdisciplinary,
which means that they are not
restricted to any one domain but also
include the critic's personal
relationship to the discipline being
analyzed.
● Henry Giroux and others write in their
Dalhousie Review manifesto that
cultural studies practitioners are
"resisting intellectuals" who see what
they do as "an emancipatory project"
because it erodes the traditional
disciplinary divisions in most
institutions of higher education.

10. Cultural studies is politically engaged.
● How Cultural studies is (are) politically engaged?
● Society operates within a cultural and political structure. Society is formed
into power hierarchies, which raises the issue of social inequality. (or power
as system of symbol)
● As Wilfred Guerin has noted “Cultural studies question inequalities within
power structures and seek to discover models for restructuring relationships
among dominant and "minority" or "subaltern" discourses. Because meaning
and individual subjectivity are culturally constructed, they can thus be
reconstructed.

11. ● Michel Foucault, a French philosopher, is considered an influential theorist of
power and knowledge and how they are used as a form of social control.
● Jonathan Gaventa remarks, “His work marks a radical departure from
previous modes of conceiving power and cannot be easily integrated with
previous ideas, as power is diffuse rather than concentrated, embodied and
enacted rather than possessed, discursive rather than purely coercive, and
constitutes agents rather than being deployed by them.”
● Further he explains that for Foucault power is neither wielded by individuals
nor by classes nor institutions – in fact, power is not ‘wielded’ at all. Instead,
it is seen as dispersed and subject-less, as elements of broad ‘strategies’ but
without individual authors.

12. ● Power is ubiquitous, and appears in every moment of social relations – hence,
the operations of power are not departures from the norm, but rather is
constantly present:
● “Power is everywhere: not because it embraces everything, but because it
comes from everywhere. … Power is not an institution, nor a structure, nor a
possession. It is the name we give to a complex strategic situation in a
particular society.” (Foucault)
● In Cultural Studies power structure is being studied as far as political aspect is
concerned but power doesn’t always have to be negative.

13. ● As Jonathan Gaventa elaborates, “power is not necessarily repressive,
prohibitive, negative or exclusionary (although it can be all of these
things): it is also positive.”
● We must cease once and for all to describe the effects of power in negative
terms: it ‘excludes’, it ‘represses’, it ‘censors’, it ‘abstracts’, it ‘masks’, it
‘conceals’. In fact power produces; it produces reality; it produces
domains of objects and rituals of truth. The individual and the knowledge
that may be gained of him belong to this production. (Foucault, Discipline
and Punish)
● Power can be of any source like wealth, force, state action, social norms,
ideas, or mass but it can shape manipulate structure or future in some
cases.

14. Cultural studies denies the separation of “high” and “low” or elite and
popular culture.
● There is no such thing as high or low culture in the discipline of cultural
studies. As people have moved around the world, so have their traditions
and culture.
● In the words of Wilfred Guerin “Being a "Cultured" person used to mean
being acquainted with "highbrow" art and intellectual pursuits.”
● He questions But isn't culture also to be found with a pair of tickets to a
rock concert? (Guerin)

15. ● Popular culture emerged in the 19th century and as it is believed that it
was culture of lower education lower class which was opposing official
culture of upper class with higher education.
● While some may consider pop culture to be the culture of the younger
generation, this is not how a cultural studies critic will perceive it. Take
the music industry, for example. Many pop stars are held in much higher
esteem than classical music composers, but it is important to remember
that both are equally important to the cultural world and to ignore one
would mean ignoring a huge chunk of culture!

16. Cultural Works and Means of Production
● The fourth purpose is closely related to Marxism since both marxists and
cultural critics examine capitalism, which is based on money. People might be
at a loss as long as a company is profitable. Capitalism is not concerned with
profit or the well-being of the people. It's not about people, but about money.
● Marxist critics have long recognized the importance of such paraliterary
questions as these: Who supports a given artist? Who publishes his or her
books, and how are these books distributed? Who buys books? For that
matter, who is literate and who is not? (Guerin)
● Jeremy Gilbert noted in the issue, cultural studies must grapple with the fact
that "we now live in an era when, throughout the capitalist world, the
overriding aim of government economic policy is to maintain consumer
spending levels. This is an era when 'consumer confidence' is treated as the
key indicator and cause of economic effectiveness."

17. ● Gramsci modified classical Marxism, and argued that culture must be understood
as a key site of political and social struggle. In his view, capitalists used not only
brute force (police, prisons, repression, military) to maintain control, but also
penetrated the everyday culture of working people in a variety of ways in their
efforts to win popular "consent."
● Hall has also noted For Gramsci historical leadership, or hegemony, involves the
formation of alliances between class factions, and struggles within the cultural
realm was important to understand. Hegemony was always, for Gramsci, an
interminable, unstable and contested process.
● Scott Lash writes:
● In the work of Hall, Hebdige and McRobbie, popular culture came to the fore...
What Gramsci gave to this was the importance of consent and culture. If the
fundamental Marxists saw the power in terms of class-versus-class, then Gramsci
gave to us a question of class alliance. The rise of cultural studies itself was based
on the decline of the prominence of fundamental class-versus-class politics

18. Works Cited
● Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms. Cengage Learning, 2015.
● Brantlinger, Patrick. Crusoe's Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and
America. Routledge, 1990.
● Buchanan, Ian. A Dictionary of Critical Theory. Oxford University Press,
2018.
● Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven F. Rendall.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
● Dworkin, Dennis L. Cultural Marxism in Postwar Britain: History, the
New Left, and the Origins of Cultural Studies. Duke University Press,
1997.
● Foucault, Michel. Discipline and punish. Translated by Alan Sheridan and
Alan Mark Sheridan Smith, Vintage Books, 1995.

19. ● Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1990. Accessed 7 October 2022.
● Gilbert, Jeremy. “AGAINST THE COMMODIFICATION OF EVERYTHING:
Anti-consumerist cultural studies in the age of ecological crisis: Cultural
Studies: Vol 22, No 5.” Taylor & Francis Online, 21 August 2008,
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09502380802245811.
● Grossberg, Lawrence, et al. Cultural Studies. Routledge, 1992.
● Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature.
Edited by Wilfred L. Guerin, Oxford University Press, 2005.
● Pain, Rachel, et al., editors. Fear: Critical Geopolitics and Everyday Life.
Ashgate, 2008.