> It seems to me fairly clear that there is no possibility of carrying on
> an intelligible conversation in which the word "culture" figures. No one
> can _either_ define clearly enough their _own_ usage of it the word _or_
> identify clearly the realm of human activity to which the term is to
> apply (as _distinct_ from those realms of activity to which the term
> does NOT apply. Unless areas of _important_ human activity can be
> identified that are _not_ part of culture, the word is meaningless (as
> say "elephant" would be if it also referred to protozoa, zebras, &
> molluscs).
This is not unassailable, nor should it be (check the negotiation and renegotiation box). I'm not sure the cultural is confined to that which is about "groups", and there are interesting arguments that the cultural is just a better word for the social and thus is everything except the material (which we can only perceive socially anyway). But it's a worthwhile one, and one I work with most of the time, and certainly a fair description of how CS defines itself around a very loose and malleable definition of culture.
> To merely say, for example, that to think about culture is to
> think about relations of production is to say that neither term is of
> any use. (Some Supreme Court justice said he couldn't define "obscenity"
> but knew it when he saw it. I think in some instances that is an
> allowable procedure, but not in respect to the topics now under
> consideration.) Unless some realm of human activity can be roughly
> delimited _in distinction from_ other fundamental realms of human
> activity, and that realm labelled "culture," it is difficult to see how
> "Cultural Studies" has any content other than the demand of some sectors
> of academia that they have departmental sovereignty.
Huh? CS practitioners don't often demand and even less often have departmental sovereignty -- last I knew this was still true in the states. Analysing profit margins won't turn up on a CS curriculum, but analysing media coverage of them can; analysing rice or car production can, but only in terms of its cultural (by the above kind of definiton) forms. However, because I can just imagine the comfortable placement of CS as secondary according to this statement, "class" and "ideology" are forms of "cultural" analysis. Unless you want jettison everything Marxism has actually offered to the analysis of all those relations- of-production you cannot dismiss or sideline "culture". Economics as a discipline, Marxism as a field of theories -- "culture".
Catherine
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