​Cultural Studies and Beyond



Can “the central strand of cultural studies be understood as the study of culture and as the signifying practices of representation”? We have to ask this question. Thus we can find an answer for what the propose of cultural studies is. And we try to find how effective are the research ways and the facts to understand cultures are and the basic knowledge of society is. Barker tries to answer this issue and he mentions ‘generalization’ in cultural studies.



 

…I want to justify this degree of generalization about cultural studies. I maintain that the term ‘cultural studies’ has no referent to which we can point. Rather, cultural studies is constituted by the language-game of cultural studies. The theoretical terms developed and deployed by persons calling their work cultural studies is what cultural studies ‘is’. I stress the language of cultural studies as constituve of cultural studies and draw attention at the start of each chapter to want I take to be important terms. [1]



My opinion is that a perspective including geography, history and the totalizing of knowledge can be useful for this matter. Only a literactucal or methodological issue won’t help us. We have to find a method that has an experimental description and examination. “Cultural facts can only be described and understood in their own languages” can be the thesis statement of this matter. Culture is formally atonomous; however do cultural studies need to be made by the persons who have that culture? This subject can be discussed. Besides, this discussion has to be interrogated with different cultures that use the same language. As it is one of the research methods of sociologists, the main topic to dwell upon here is to participate in a concreteness place?. At the level of cutural examination, being in that culture can be the best way to understand and describe it. Because of this reason, many cultural investigation programs in America and Europe have academicians that are from colonial countries such as Hall and Spivak.

This experience can be found in today’s capitalist pronunciations as a ‘profit motive’ understanding and served by the media. This situation takes us to cultural materialism. Also this condition is about improving nations. National’s borders disappear and new media borders develop but not at the same time.

 

 

From the geopolitical position of the third world, the traces of colonialism cannot be so easily erased, and the economic and cultural forces of neo-colonialism can perhaps more readily be seen to be alive and well -also ‘ the media’-. Cultural studies’ recent attempt to move out of the ‘local’, to take into account the globalism of culture, thus has to address these issues historically, structurally and politically. [2]



This situation can help that global and local differences realized more than ever.? As cultural studies responded to the conditions surrounding the new right’s emergence, the discipline became internationalized.[3]



 

If we have to discuss the matter of cultural formal constitution and especially the matter of that culture is likely a language form: firstly we need to look at the structural status of culture. For most people the concept of ‘language’ is so abstract, but ‘culture’ is not. For example, they give culture some humane attributes: “alive culture”, “rich culture”, “death culture”, “lost culture”…etc. For this reason imitation of culture to language form by Barker, had made it harder to understand perceptionally.



In the same way as cultures, languages are also effected and globalized. Beyond a global language like English, all the languages are colonized with foreign words. Also Culture had experienced the same colonialization. Although we live in a post-colonial world, we are invaded by linguistic expressions. In the cultural domain, according to different points of view, this is often defined as degeneration and modernization.



 

Although in ‘Popular Life’ (Hall) this is not called degeneration/corruption, the semantic integrity of the words which we use in everyday language can produce corrupted perceptions.

Most dramatically we see Popular Culture’s national perspective and its national hegemony and power over social classes in the media. We can easily understand that as a natural echo of the politics, the media programming on social classes also has a further effect on the separation of those classes.



The question ‘who possess the Power’ is another dilemma here. And there is another matter that has to be discussed; the societies which have Power depression create their own chaotic environment and make their dilemma a more dramatic.

 

If the Politics, State and social organizations or congregations continue to reduce their benefits to cultural pronunciations, they will either start to talk about some racial topics or they won’t stop until they destroy and dissolve their own society. This type of institutions can get into different forms and are able to find new outcomes but the centralization of culture is against its nature. Culture doesn’t mean everything but if it will be approved as an accumulation then its better not to let it dissolve. “…it’s not that we are not assimilated by the first world, but that in fact straddle the home base and the metropolitan base and are not completely at home in either place, although we operate fairly intimately in both places” [Spivak]



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[1]Chris Barker - Cultural Studies: Theory and practice p.4
[2]Stuart Hall: Critical dialogues in cultural studies – Edited by David Morley and Kuan-Hsing Chen, p.10
[3]Simon During - “Introduction”, The Cultural Studies Reader, p.13