Cultural studies is not simply the study of culture. We can appreciate this point if we contrast it to other established fields where culture is the object of study. Ethnographers, for instance, have always studied culture but -- until recently at any rate - the cultures of isolated ethnicities in foreign lands, with the aim of creating a complex mapping of the varieties of human societies (the "family of Man"). Nevertheless, some of the best definitions of culture are found in ethnography. Or, to take a second example where culture is the primary object of study -- the liberal arts. However, there it tends to mean aesthetic artifacts like novels, symphonies, paintings, and plays - select works of the imagination that one studies simply to appreciate the experience of consuming them.
By contrast, cultural studies is a different constellation - a new area and mode of study - which is to say an ensemble that combines the methodologies of several disciplines, including literary theory. As an area, it made the study of plebeian art works respectable -- diaries, broadsheets, notebooks, rock songs, advertisements, or everyday practices like picnics, poker games, or carnivals. As a mode, it opposed market society's emphasis on specialization and narrow professional training by promoting what I will give the name "generalism." It was not just an interdisciplinary approach but an anti-disciplinary one. This is important, for it sets it off quite radically from other approaches. Its intention in this respect is to see the broad connections that academic or media specialists typically miss, in order to understand the social totality. These ambitions have opened the field up to the charge of dilettantism (at times justifiably), but in the course we will try to show that dilettantism is not a necessary feature of cultural studies, and that one can rove widely without being shallow.
For a number of accidental reasons, the field of cultural studies has concentrated on the present. Earlier expressions of the field - where it came from - are ignored, and attention is never given to a range of pioneers including the young Hegelians, early Freud, Georg Simmel, the first avant-gardes, Henri Lefebvre, Guy Debord, German Kulturkritik, C. L. R. James and Chilean media critique of the early 1970s. This course, then, will try to provide a historical and textual understanding of these neglected sources by showing how the term "culture" became a problem rather than a set of practices to be unthinkingly lived.