1-13
Cultural studies is “a philosophy of plenty” instead of scarcity like traditional economics claim.

1
“Cultural studies has come of age; it has achieved sufficiently wide popular recognition to become a butt of jokes in the media, and denunciation in the daily press.”
“Even within intellectual communities and academic institutions, […] the field is riven by fundamental disagreements about what cultural studies is for, in whose interests it is done, what theories, methods and objects of study are proper to it, and where to set its limits.”

4
“As a philosophy of plenty, cultural studies introduced into the academy the novel idea that you might not have to choose between high and low culture, or even between the rich and the dispossessed, but instead you needed to find out what connected, drove, and separated these differences.”

5
“The implication of cultural studies [is] to focus on the expansion of difference, not on vanquishing outmoded cultural forms.”

10
Definition “cultural studies”:
“It [cultural studies] was a philosophy of plenty. It was:

• Dedicated to the study of the expansion of difference in human affairs (during an era of increasing globalisation, corporate concentration and technological integration of those affairs);
• An assemblage of intellectual concerns about power, meaning, identity and subjectivity in modern societies;
• An attempt to recover and promote marginal, unworthy or despised regions, identities, practices and media (it was a profane pursuit);
• A critical enterprise devoted to displacing, decentring, demystifying and deconstructing the common sense of dominant discourses;
• An activist commitment to intellectual politics – making a difference with ideas, to ideas, by ideas.

It was also a publishing enterprise, partly defined by cultural entrepreneurs in both the academy and the publishing industry. Cultural studies was what its practitioners and publishers said it was.”

13
“Once released, ideas tend to dart about like quarks in the cosmos – everywhere and nowhere at once; hard to identify but important to understand.”

33
“More recently, popular culture and high culture were reunited in the cause of national and regional economic development, recast as the ‘creative industries’ […]. ‘Cultural entrepreneurs created wealth as well as culture, using ‘thin-air’ resources like talent and intangible assets like know-how.”

34
“Cultural studies, as an emancipatory discourse, was itself ‘governed’ by an intellectual tradition with sometimes alarmingly anti-democratic tendencies.”

43
“The great Shakespearian discovery was that quality extended vertically through the social scale, not horizontally at the upper genteel, economic and academic levels.” Alfred Harbage, As They Liked It. (Cited thus in Hall and Whannel, 1964: 66)

58
“But method was itself controversial, since from the start cultural studies was regarded by proponents and critics alike as an avant-garde enterprise, which entailed that it was hard to accept any standardisation or codification of method. And the kind of work done by those with a literary training, differed markedly from what was done in social science contexts. Social sciences were more interested in methodology, and more likely to propose replicable research routines, often quantitatively based, while people from the arts and humanities were apt to rely on critique, the essay form, and one-off analytical performances.”

61
“Thus the methodology inherited by cultural studies included a constructivist version largely imported form the visual arts, as well as a realist version more familiar in the social sciences.

• Realists sought to use scientific observation and empirical methods to ascertain objective information that existed independently of the investigator.
• Constructivists sought to show the constructed nature of the real – especially its socially constructed nature. […]”

“But the concept and analysis of power became central to cultural studies, not least because it was the object of study for both realists and constructivists. Realists found power in the ownership and control of modern corporations and government, while constructivists found it in language, ideology and discourse.”

73
“From these ingredients, cultural studies inherited a methodological recipe of pursuing high modernist abstraction in the form of theory, mixed with an equal portion of suspicion for mere naturalistic empiricism in the quantitative sciences – e.g. sociology and its commercial sibling audience research, and psychology and its commercial sibling, marketing.”

89
“Culture was seen as a product of economy. This was the classic Marxist doctrine of causation, stating that productive economic activity in large-scale, complex, industrialised societies determined what people thought, not the other way round.”

91

92
“Very gradually, the theoretical tide began to turn. The causal flow between consciousness and the economy was looked for as something that might move in the other direction as well – culture might be investigated as a cause rather than an effect of economic circumstances and political outcomes. It was therefore a suitable place for class struggle to occur.”

103
“The equation of ‘ownership and control’ with ‘power’, ‘power’ with ‘economics’, ‘economics’ with ‘capitalists’, and ‘capitalists’ with media moguls, meant that the requirement to analyse all the links in the cultural value chain from producer / distributor to consumer / user could all too easily be reduced to a fixation with individual corporations and their frequently demonised chief executives. Understanding the Sun meant investigating neither its content nor its readers, much less the cultural and historical context of popular politics to which it was a rude byt exuberant heir, but Rupert Murdoch.”

106
“There were, waiting in the wings as it were, some developments that provided cultural studies with alternative ways of both thinking about and dealing with the nexus between consciousness and the economy. The fist of these was ‘cultural policy studies’. Later on came ‘creative industries’. Each was a practical rethinking of this nexus, and both located the nexus itself in the concept of citizenship.”

129
“There was still some (residual) force in the idea that cultural studies looked at the West while anthropology studied the Rest, and that anthropology was biased towards the study of cultures without commerce.”
“[In anthropology] A suspicion remained that the version of ethnography done in cultural studies was methodologically flawed (indeed that cultural studies in general was a methodological wasteland), and that forays into the here and now were better left to more senior anthropologists.”

134f
“In Marxist terms, philosophy was therefore the material form taken by surplus value; in Thorstein Veblen’s terms it was a form of conspicuous leisure or waste, bringing repute in direct proportion to its disutility or wastefulness.”

150
“At the outset, the reader of cultural studies was presumed to be adult, probably male, politically radical or already a socialist by conviction, and activist in some political or intellectual pursuit. Later, readers were juvenated, feminised, multi-raced, multiculturalised and institutionalised as students. They were no longer presumed to be radical or activist, but were still frequently encouraged to radical activism (of the pen usually, rather than of the sword). They were also internationalised – from England and Europe to America, and thence to that place publishers call ROW, the rest of the world.”

152
“These [cultural studies] journals may in point of empirical fact have been read mostly by people working and studying in the academy. However, that was not their initial purpose. They addressed not academic readers but radical ones, people interested in social and cultural change, who believed that certain causes (socialism), or even organisations (like one of the numerous communist parties), were the appropriate agencies to achieve it.”
“Tacitly often, and sometimes explicitly, cultural studies addressed a revolutionary reader. The radical journals looked to ‘make socialists’ ([Stuart] Hall’s phrase), rather than teach students.”

162
“As a first step, we can try to offer a very general, generic definition of cultural studies. … Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary, transdisciplinary, and sometimes counter-disciplinary field that operates in the tension between its tendencies to embrace both a broad, anthropological and a more narrowly humanistic conception of culture. Unlike traditional anthropology… it has grown out of analyses of modern industrial societies. … Unlike humanism it rejects the exclusive equation of culture with high culture. … Cultural studies is thus committed to the study of the entire range of society’s arts, beliefs, institutions, and a communicative practices.”
The “Cultural Studies” conference in Urbana-Champaign, USA, turned into “a turf war”.

171
“Like other talent-based professions such as acting or art, cultural studies was focused obsessively on the supply side.”

172
“This tendency for discursive professionals to supply an imagined lack in an unknown audience without direct reference to that audience was just what cultural studies criticised in canonical media.”

175
“It [cultural studies] was still a philosophy of plenty, wishing to increase knowledge as it shared its own insights, the better to bring consumers, producers, analysts and activists into the same cultural commons, at least for the purposes of dialogue.”

176
“The new cultural studies was a hybrid, global, post-disciplinary conversation, whose differing participants could mutually recognise that ‘knowledge increased when it was shared’. But while conceding that culture – the latest service industry – was plentiful, cultural studies was still finding that there was real work to be done on the question of how it was shared.”