ABSTRACT
One of the appealing aspects of cultural studies is its critical, or even polemical, attitude toward every form of theoretical orthodoxy. The term elabore, used by Gramsci to stretch and test the limits of Marxism, captures better the sense of critical attitude I have in mind here. Elaboration has become for cultural studies a means to be critical of poststructuralism while working within the discipline. Cultural studies, in its attempts to draw attention to the material implications of the worldviews we assume, often delineates a literal and candid picture of ways of life that embarrass and baffle our previous theoretical understanding of those forms of life. This elaboration, candid and ethnographic in its approach to ways of life, has helped cultural studies to ground some of its key concepts in material conditions: for example, levels of abstraction, uneven development, articulation, positionality, and cultural specificity. On the other hand, the manner in which cultural studies posits identity politics as moments of difference and rupture in the discourses of Marxism or psychoanalysis has led its detractors to dismiss the “literal reading of events” as examples of nothing more than journalism among its practitioners.
