What Makes Cultural Studies Political

Raymond Williams, in a foundational moment for cultural studies, defined culture as a realized signifying system (1981, 12), arguing that culture defined in this way is fundamental to the shaping and holding together of all ways of life, insisting that it should be seen as essentially involved in all forms of social activity (ibid., 13).As he further explained, the social organisation of culture, as a realised signify ing system, is embedded in a whole range of activities, relations and institutions, of which some are manifestly cultural (ibid., 209).While there is more to life than signifying systems, it is nevertheless the case that it would [] be wrong to suppose that we can ever usefully discuss a social system without including, as a central part of its practice, its signifying systems, on which, as a system, it funda mentally depends (ibid., 207).In other words, signification is fundamental to all human activities, including practices we call political.As Williams insisted, Signification, the social creation of meanings [] is [] a practical material activity (1977, 34).To share a culture, therefore, is to inter pret the world, make it meaningful and experience it as meaningful in recogniz ably similar ways.When Williams said that culture is ordinary (1989, 3), he was drawing attention to the fact that meaningmaking is not the privileged activity of the few, but something in which we are all involved.However, this does not, of course, mean that we are all involved in it in the same way; meaningmaking, like all social activities, is usually entangled in relations of power.While we may all be involved in the making of meanings, it is also the case that some meanings and the people who make them have more power than other people and other mean ings.Therefore, signifying systems consist of both shared and contested meanings.Culture is where we share and contest meanings of ourselves, of each other and of the social worlds in which we live.Williams' argument is informed by his reading of Gramsci's concept of hege mony, used to describe processes of power in which a dominant group does not merely rule by force but leads by consent; a specific kind of consensus in which a social class presents its own specific interests as the general interests of the society as a whole.As Williams explained, hegemony is a lived system of meanings and