ABSTRACT
As Alan McKee notes in a characteristically lucid paper, “One of Cultural Studies’ most important contributions to academic thinking about culture is the acceptance as axiomatic that we must not simply accept traditional value hierarchies in relation to cultural objects.”1 One of McKee’s aims in this essay is to counter the oft-encountered argument that poststructuralist theorizing results in “anything-goes relativism,” because, he correctly points out, “Postmodern thinking, and the sociological turn in Cultural Studies informed by the work of Bourdieu, do not refuse all distinctions. Neither do they refuse all evaluation.”2 The move to which McKee objects is a bad inference from a true claim-“the Cultural Studies/postmodern turn denies absolute, universal value judgments”—to a false one: “This means that everything is relative, anything goes …”3 For, as McKee and numerous other television studies scholars such as Charlotte Brunsdon have observed, even as these theoretical debates play out, “judgments are being made.”4
