The cut+pasted definition I was talking about is for some reason not visible. Here it is: Culture -- "a contested and conflictual set of practices of representation bound up with the processes of formation and reformation of social groups" (Frow & Morris, Australian Cultural Studies, xx)
Quoting Catherine Driscoll <catherine.driscoll at arts.usyd.edu.au>:
> Quoting Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>:
>
> > 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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-- Dr Catherine Driscoll School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry University of Sydney Phone (61-2) 93569503
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