ABSTRACT
Cultural Studies is no longer a dependent intellectual colony. It has a direction, an object of study, a set of themes and issues, a distinctive problematic of its own. The abstraction of texts from the social practices which produced them and the institutional sites where they were elaborated was a fetishization–even if it had pertinent societal effects. This obscured how a particular ordering of culture came to be produced and sustained: the circumstances and conditions of cultural reproduction which the operations of the 'selective tradition' rendered natural, 'taken for granted'. In the effort to give culture its own specificity, place and determinate effect, The Long Revolution had also proposed a radical revision to the 'base/superstructure' metaphor. It said, in effect, all the practices–economic, political, ideological, cultural–interact with effect on each other.
