ABSTRACT
Media and cultural studies has developed a distinctive rhetoric. It is proclaimed periodically that a new ‘turn’ is taking place. Authoritative figures are then cited to assure readers that if they join this ‘turn’, they will be travelling in good company to the latest intellectual fashion resort. There is, we are told, a new awareness of a central weakness in the field, or a general awakening to a new insight. Not to join this new ‘turn’ implies that one prefers to remain mired in error or to cut oneself off from the very latest in new thinking.
