These five points constitute the more obvious aims of cultural studies. You will notice that they are supportive of each other and form a plastic set of parameters that are only ordered in this sequence out of necessity rather than as a natural progression:
1. to examine cultural practices in relation to power structures and therefore to make visible power relationships and examine how they influence and shape cultural practices...
2. to analyze the social and political contexts of culture (or a cultural product)...
3. to consider the objects of study also as the sites of political criticism and action... cultural studies is an intellectual as well as a pragmatic enterprise...
4. bring to light and erase the divisions of knowledge... overcome the split between tact (local knowledge) and objective knowledge...and similarly between the known and the unknown... the observer and the observed... therefore to equalize the ground by which these things are observed, interpreted, and produced....
5. to be value free... committed to social reconstructon and critical political involvement...
aims to understand and change the structures of dominance everywhere!
These points, individually and as a group, point directly to the role that individuals might take in society... particularly important is the link that might be made with Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci's notion of what an intellectual is/ might be... "The formation of Intellectuals" suggest two categories, "organic" and "traditional", that we might consider as distinctions in which individuals make commitments related to what is outlined in point 5; when we take action, when we become "engaged", the choices we make establish our lives within the framework of one or the other.
