Cultural Studies or Criticism of Culture: Notes on Dialectic and the Viewpoint of the Totality

The following article, based on a review and critical analysis of sources and secondary bibliography, presents a reading of so-called Cultural Studies, indicating some of their weaknesses as theoretical-political thought. The analysis concentrates on the limits encountered regarding the way such studies conceive society: as a more or less random superposition of cultural fragments, speeches, etc. The assumed viewpoint, according to which "it is the social being of man that determines his conscience," makes it possible to note the historic and social conditions that have made the present forms of the Cultural Studies possible at the same time that it questions some of the present tendencies marked. by the absence of dialectic and the totality category.