ABSTRACT
In the wake of political developments in Europe and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, 'the left', as a unified western political culture, ceased to exist. Cultural studies is politically a child of the 1960s, when political radicalism was not only liberating but hip, when public affairs expanded to encompass the mind, when the boundaries between politics, music, sex and drugs became blurred, and when alternative, counter and sub cultures sprang up to claim attention like so many doggies in the window. The response of cultural studies takes two forms: institutionalization and ancestralization. Cultural studies has dwelt on popular reality as part of a more general intellectual endeavour, namely to demonstrate the way in which reality is not only constructed textually and socially, but also popularized in line with political and ideological dispositions of power.
