ABSTRACT

This chapter is organized according to historical chronology as well as conceptual development in cultural criticism. Cultural studies have both a general meaning and a more specialized one. While eclectically drawing on certain theoretical aspects of earlier forms of critical cultural discourse, cultural studies are oriented toward the analysis and practical critique of concrete, contemporary cultural distinctions that are based on and that propagate differentials in economic and political power. From the point of view of cultural critique, semiology had two important implications. First, it permitted culture in general to be viewed as a total system of signification, operating independently of the individual psychologies of its participants. Second, however, it contained an implicit critical dimension in its insistence on the arbitrariness, that is, the nonnatural character, of all signs. During the period between the world wars, cultural critics found the limitations of semiology and structuralism especially troubling.