Soziologie und das Versprechen der Cultural Studies

Abstract

How can cultural analysis and cultural studies be relevant to everyday experience and its complexity? Cultural studies has had many emphases during its history, particularly the rehabilitation of popular culture. This article argues, however that this is no longer the main priority, and that cultural studies cannot be adequate to contemporary experience unless in some way it engages, first, with the consequences of living under neoliberal regimes and labour conditions, and second, with the consequences of living within a constructed conflict between ‘the West’ and its imagined other, often ‘Islam’. Although some cultural studies has been hostile to sociological method, the article argues that it is only through a sociological method that gives weight to questions of symbolic power that these fundamental issues can be addressed.