Marx, K. (1973). Articulation is the making, unmaking, and remaking of relations according to a logic of contingency, what Stuart Hall (1983) called a theory “without guarantees.” If some theories treat the shape and structure of social contexts as inevitable, other theories tend to deny any stability or reality to the structures and relations of social life. It takes contestation for granted, not as a reality in every instance, but as a potential and a precondition for the existence of critical work, political opposition, even historical change. Two of the most important political assumptions of cultural studies are also among its most controversial. Moreover, there are several versions of cultural studies. Interrogating Cultural Studies: Theory Politics and Practice. Cultural studies. One dimension of power (e.g., class) does not necessarily explain another (e.g., gender), nor will changing one necessarily change the other. It does not start by defining culture or its effects, or by assembling, in advance, a set of relevant dimensions within which to describe particular practices. A consistent underlying theme in his work, which became more evident toward the end of his career, was the historical processes by which societies themselves are made, unmade, and remade. (2004). Instead of the disjunctive and reductionist logic that attempts to find the one thing that will explain something, cultural studies adopts an anti-reductionist and conjunctive rhetoric: “yes (it is that), and that .  (and that . 2. Cultural studies is committed to the reality of relations that have determining effects, and attempts to construct politically relevant descriptions of how contexts are continuously being made, unmade, and remade. ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’, Raymond Williams New Left Review, 82 (1973): 3–16. According to Marx, those who owned the means of production also controlled culture, or the “collective consciousness” of society–usually by repression or brute force. . Introduction to the Grundrisse. Cultural studies does not begin with a general theory of culture but rather views cultural practices as the intersection of many possible effects. Communication as culture: Essays on media and society. Grossberg, L. (1997). Of course, cultural studies recognizes that the relations among survival, change, struggle, resistance, and opposition are not predictable in advance, and that there are many forms and sites that each can take and has taken; these range from everyday life and social relations to economic and political institutions. Cultural studies is an intellectually grounded practice for intervening into the "becoming" of contexts and power. . Consequently, the common assumption that cultural studies is, necessarily, a theory of ideology and representation, or of identity and subjectivity, or of the circulation of communication (production-text-consumption), or of hegemony, is mistaken. All Rights Reserved Grossberg, L., Nelson, C., & Treichler, P. If people make history, but in conditions not of their own making, as Karl Marx suggested, cultural studies explores this process as it is enacted through cultural practices. While some of these traditions emerged as a result of an encounter and conversation with English-language work in cultural studies, others, especially in Asia and Latin America, emerged out of their own traditions of cultural and political analysis in the context of developments following World War II. Arising from the social turmoil of the 1960-s, Cultural Studies is an academic discipline which combines political economy, communication, sociology, social theory, literary theory, media theory, film studies, cultural anthropology, philosophy, art history/ criticism etc.