The cultural studies' crossroads blues

This article examines the current state of cultural studies. It argues for the need to delimit the field of cultural studies, proposing that the specificity of cultural studies as a way of politicizing theory and theorizing politics is given by its radical contextuality. It then goes on to consider some of the challenges that the contemporary context poses to cultural studies, and which cultural studies has been largely unable to address. It suggests that this failure may be due to the modernist inheritance of cultural studies, and begins to offer a genealogy of the category of culture. Specifically, it looks at the relationship of culture, mediation and signification and proposes the need for a non-mediational theory of culture.