The Cultural Studies Reader

Introduction :
The second distinguishing characteristic of early cultural studies was that it
was an engaged form of analysis. Early cultural studies did not flinch from the fact
that societies are structured unequally, that individuals are not all born with the
same access to education, money, health care etc., and it worked in the interests
of those who have least resources. In this it differed not only from the (apparently)
objective social sciences but from the older forms of cultural criticism, especially
literary criticism, which considered political questions as being of peripheral
relevance to the appreciation of culture. For cultural studies, culture was not an
abbreviation of a high culture assumed to have constant value across time and
space. Another founding text of cultural studies, Raymond Williamss Culture and
Society, 17801950 (1958), criticized the consequences of uncoupling culture
from society, and high culture from culture as a whole way of life, although
Williams also conceded that it was through this uncoupling that modern culture
acquires its particular energy, charm and capacity to inform.

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Cultural studies has been, as we might expect, most interested in how groups with least
power practically develop their own readings of, and uses for, cultural products
in fun, in resistance, or to articulate their own identity.
Morley divides
the possibilities of decoding Nationwide into three categories: first, an acceptance
of the preferred reading, second, flat opposition to it (mainly, as it turned out, by
being extremely bored by it); and third, negotiation with it. His fieldwork findings
were somewhat unexpected, though: there was no clear correlation between the
socio-cultural position of the groups and their response to the program