Key Concepts in Critical Cultural Studies

Introduction: Working the Hyphen in Critical-Cultural Conversations

Introduction W or king t he Hyphens in Cr it ica l -Cul t ur a l Con ver sat ions Linda St einer a nd Cl if f or d Chr ist ia ns This volume addresses the ways and extent to which key concepts in critical and cultural studies remain useful to scholars, to policy makers, and to citizens—or the ways they need to be rethought and reconsidered if they are to continue to be viable. The essays, individually and taken as a whole, engage in debate about culture and communication and about cultural and critical studies. In responding to emerging political, social, and cultural problems, the field has changed over the years. Thus the meanings, significance, and interrelationships of its central concepts have changed, as the authors here show. Nonetheless, these terms are consistent and remain at the fore and center. This book’s title signals its inspiration from Raymond Williams, whose various editions of Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society underscored the importance of recording and investigating problems of meaning but also emphasized how meanings change, as do the social formations and practices in which those meanings are embedded. Others using the genre of Williams’s Keywords offer, as x Linda Steiner and Clifford Christians he did, an encyclopedic but necessarily abbreviated alphabetized list of many words. We have chosen instead to trace the intellectual and historical trajectories of the major terms defining the field. Moreover, we use the term keywords, but we do so in a slightly different way. First, we use the term to refer to significant concepts, not to refer to search terms used for targeting and retrieving relevant information in a database. Second, our concern here lies more with the relationships among literatures rather than with the historical origins and evolution of individual dictionary entries. Carey, for example, listed culture, communication, technology, community, time, and space as “the key words” of Communication as Culture (1989, 243).As Barbie Zelizer observes in the epilogue, using keywords in the Williams tradition enables us to juxtapose ideas. This allows the concepts individually to provoke a variety of trajectories, while collectively they suggest interlocking patterns for productive scholarship. Each concept points to its own projections of meaning; at the same time composites of these terms open new vistas. Meanwhile, as Williams (1983, 15) noted, each provokes ways of both discussing and seeing many of our central experiences. As critical-cultural studies enters what might be called its middle age, it becomes important to take stock of key terms and see the extent to which consensus has emerged on the meanings and usefulness of the central concepts. We want to figure out how and when these concepts work. We want to evaluate how far these concepts take us and determine where they cannot take us. To what tradeoffs —with more or less self-consciousness of the deals struck—do they point? Indeed, as the epilogue notes, keywords in Williams’s sense not only provide a guidebook showing us how to navigate a world but also help us imagine new worlds where we have not traveled. This book responds to a call for a coherent, consistent volume that establishes the form and substance of critical-cultural studies and takes stock of an increasingly influential body of work. An oft-cited remark from Kenneth Burke describes how these chapters deal with the crucial concepts in critical and cultural studies: Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The int ro du c t io n xi hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress. (Burke 1974, 110–11) Thus we...