ABSTRACT
The term culture, as used in the phrase “cultural studies,” is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political. Culture is not conceived of as the aesthetic ideals of form and beauty found in great art, or in more humanist terms as the voice of the “human spirit” that transcends boundaries of time and nation to speak to a hypothetical universal man (the gender is deliberate-women play little or no role in this conception of culture). Culture is not, then, the aesthetic products of the human spirit acting as a bulwark against the tide of grubby industrial materialism and vulgarity, but rather a way of living within an industrial society that encompasses all the meanings of that social experience.
