JOURNAL OFTO

COMING TERMS
SPORT WITH
& SOCIAL CULTURAL
ISSUES STUDIES
/ February 2002

COMING TO TERMS WITH

CULTURAL STUDIES
David L. Andrews

This article represents an abbreviated call to intellectual specificity in

response to the growing, if somewhat nebulous, presence of cultural studies
within the sociology of sport. Without acknowledged boundaries, cultural
studies is liable to lose its political, empirical, and theoretical impetus,
resulting in a slide into the morass of intellectual incomprehensibility and
disregard; discussions pertaining to boundary recognition, let alone mainte-
nance, thus being an absolute necessity. Therefore, the author hopes to
encourage the development of an approach that more closely engages the pri-
mary tenets and practices of the broader cultural studies project, while fur-
thering the understanding of contemporary sport culture. Through recourse
to Stuart Hall’s Marxism without guarantees and Lawrence Grossberg’s rad-
ical contextualism, this discussion advances an approach premised on, and
seeking to both excavate and theorize, the contingent relations, structure, and
effects of sport forms, an approach that could be characterized as a sport
without guarantees.

O ver the past decade, cultural studies—loosely defined as a form of

critical cultural analysis, initially developed among Left-leaning,
post-war British intellectuals (see Barker, 2000; DuGay, Hall,
Janes, Mackay, & Negus, 1997; Turner, 1996)—has become a forceful pres-
ence within the global academic marketplace, its influence transcending
national and disciplinary boundaries. Extending back more than two
decades, the sociology of sport’s engagement with cultural studies has never
been more pronounced than it is today. Although by no means a domineering
presence, cultural studies nevertheless represents an expanding niche
within the sociology of sport community; the number of people professing, in
print and conference presentations, to do cultural studies of sport seemingly
on an inexorable rise. Yet, all is not rosy in the cultural studies garden. For,
among sport scholars, it is not uncommon for devotees to display an uncon-
vincing and/or ill-informed comprehension of the cultural studies project
that they profess drives their scholarship. All too often, the trite appropria-
tion of cultural studies is manifest in what Gottdiener (2000, p. 7) referred to
as the reductive forcing of “complex conceptions into simple catchwords” and
the resultant trivialization of the approach to all and sundry. At an even
more extreme level of misappropriation, cultural studies is also oftentimes
used as an empty metaphor, a bland descriptor of any study focused on sport
as part of the cultural realm. Given such superficial and dubious appropria-
tions there is a very real danger that among sport scholars, cultural studies

Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 26, No. 1, February 2002, pp. 110-117
© 2002 Sage Publications
 COMING TO TERMS WITH CULTURAL STUDIES 111

is reduced to being a caricatured and banal intellectual practice. As a conse-

quence, this discussion seeks to encourage those interested parties within
the sociology of sport to reconsider the specificities of cultural studies. For to
preserve the integrity of the cultural studies project, it is important to recog-
nize “that not everything is cultural studies, that the field is not entirely
open” (Grossberg, 1997a, p. 344).
Without acknowledged boundaries, cultural studies is liable to lose its
political, empirical, and theoretical impetus, resulting in a slide into the
morass of intellectual incomprehensibility and disregard; discussions per-
taining to boundary recognition, let alone maintenance, thus being an abso-
lute necessity. In recent years, and in particular under the editorships of
Toby Miller and C. L. Cole, the Journal of Sport & Social Issues has emerged
as the leading forum for the dissemination of cultural studies informed
sporting analyses. As such, JSSI represents the most appropriate setting for
this abbreviated call to intellectual specificity, in response to the growing, if
somewhat nebulous, presence of cultural studies within the sociology of
sport. Therefore, within this discussion I hope to encourage the development
of an approach that more closely engages the primary tenets and practices of
the broader cultural studies project, while furthering the understanding of
contemporary sport culture. In positing a more rigid and exclusive under-
standing, I am, of course, inviting a response from adherents within the soci-
ology of sport who may view cultural studies very differently. This is entirely
intended, because until the cultural studies field engages in a vigorous dia-
logue—and hopefully comes to some common and coherent agreement—as
to its underlying principles and practice, it is highly likely that it will fall
foul of its numerous detractors, many of whom no doubt salivated at Rojek
and Turner’s (2000) recent description of cultural studies as little more than
a “decorative sociology.”
To be sure, the task of delineating cultural studies is a daunting one.
Cultural studies has never been dominated by a single theoretical or meth-
odological position, rather it’s growth can be described as a perpetual “unity-
in-difference” (Hall, 1992) characterized by multiple theoretical influences,
research methods, and sites of analysis. However, its celebrated multiplicity
should not preclude definitional efforts. Rather than delineating cultural
studies through the use of particular theories, research methods, or sub-
stantive foci, a more appropriate and effective strategy is to distinguish this
interpretive field through the employment of particular intellectual sensi-
bilities. In particular, although identifying its disciplined, interdisciplinary,
self-reflective, political, and theoretical proclivities, Grossberg (1997b)
located what he described as a “radical contextualism” as the definitional
core of the cultural studies project. He continued, “In fact, I would argue that
context is everything and everything is context for cultural studies; cultural
studies is perhaps best seen as a contextual theory of contexts as the lived
milieux of power” (pp. 7-8).
At the conceptual core of Grossberg’s radical contextualist under-
standing of cultural studies, and thereby providing the focus for this dis-
112 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / February 2002

cussion, is Stuart Hall’s (1996b) “Marxism without guarantees.” Although I

take odds with Rojek and Turner’s (2000, p. 630) heavy-handed caricaturing
of cultural studies, their acknowledgment of Stuart Hall’s pivotal influence
is worth restating:

But all of these traditions owe a great deal to the Birmingham School, and in
particular to Stuart Hall rather than Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart.
We submit that the output and intellectual culture developed in the Birming-
ham school between 1964 and 1979 was the decisive juncture in the formation
of Cultural Studies as an academic discipline. Further, Hall, as the embodi-
ment of the diasporic, hybrid, passionate, proselytizing, politically committed
intellectual, was the pivotal role model for students of Cultural Studies. (Rojek &
Turner, 2000, p. 630)

Despite acknowledging his position of intellectual leadership within cul-

tural studies, according to Rojek and Turner, Hall’s weighty influence has
had a deleterious effect on contemporary sociological analysis through his
advancement of, among other things, an ahistorical approach to the analysis
of culture. This, in itself, is quite an astounding reading of Hall’s work,
because it is the importance he places on historical context that, I would con-
tend, provides the ontological, theoretical, and methodological basis of cul-
tural studies. In addition and despite the profundity of his oeuvre, within
the sociology of sport, Hall has been largely reduced to a highly visible, yet
somewhat opaque, embodied metaphor for cultural studies itself. Hence,
and as incredulous as it may seem, there is a pressing need to rescue the
intricacies of Hall’s work and influence from the vacuous black hole of aca-
demic populism in which, to many, it presently resides.
Among his most significant contributions, Hall identified the cultural
realm as a continually contested terrain: a “sort of constant battlefield”
between the constraining influence of the social structure and the creative
impulses of human agents (Hall, 1981, p. 233). In doing so, he advanced “a
different conception of ‘determinancy’ ” (Hall, 1996b, p. 44) to that circum-
vented both the economically deterministic perils of so-called vulgar Marx-
ism (which asserted a necessary correspondence between the various ele-
ments of society and the overbearing economic realm) and the romanticism
of cultural humanism (which asserted a necessarily no correspondence
between the various elements of society, thus providing the human agent
and cultural practices with a romanticized level of autonomy) (Hall, 1985).
As its name implies, within his “Marxism without guarantees” there exists
“no guarantee . . . there is no necessary correspondence . . . there is no neces-
sary non-correspondence” (Hall, 1985, p. 94) between one level of a social for-
mation and another, between the social structure and the human agent, or
between a cultural practice such as sport and the varied forces acting within
a social structure.
Despite Rojek and Turner’s (2000) accusation of ahistoricism, Hall’s
neo-Gramscian approach keys on the uniqueness of the historical moment
 COMING TO TERMS WITH CULTURAL STUDIES 113

or conjuncture in question, hence, Grossberg (1997a) described it as a

“conjuncturalism,” according to which

while there are no necessary correspondences (relations), there are always real
(effective) correspondences. The meaning, effects, and politics of particular
social events, texts, practices, and structures (what we in fact mean by their
“identity”) are never guaranteed, either causally (by their origins, however
deferred) or through inscription (as if they were self-determined). . . . The speci-
ficity of any conjuncture, at whatever level of abstraction, is always produced,
determinate. (p. 220-221)

Hall’s conjuncturalism is thus prefigured on the uniqueness of any histori-

cal moment, which has to be reconstructed in terms of the levels and trajec-
tories of determination that help to constitute the conjuncture and the expe-
rience thereof. So, determinate relations do exist, they just cannot be
guaranteed in advance:

Understanding “determinancy” in terms of setting of limits, the establishment

of parameters, the defining of the space of operations, the concrete conditions of
existence, the “givenness” of social practices, rather than in terms of the abso-
lute predictability of particular outcomes, is the only basis of a “marxism with-
out final guarantees”. It establishes the open horizon of marxist theorizing—
determinancy without guaranteed closures. The paradigm of perfectly closed,
perfectly predictable, systems of thought is religion or astrology, not science. It
would be preferable, from this perspective, to think of the “materialism” of
marxist theory in terms of “determination by the economic in the first
instance,” since marxism is surely correct, against all idealisms, to insist that
no social practice or set of relations floats free of the determinate effects of the
concrete relations in which they are located. (Hall, 1996b, p. 45)

Returning to the Marx of the Grundrisse, Hall asserted an understanding

that acknowledges that cultural forms (practices, products, institutions,
organizations, etc.) represent and comprise “a rich aggregate of many deter-
minations and relations” (Marx, as cited in McLellan, 1977, p. 351) but
reminded us that the nature and direction of these correspondences cannot
be guaranteed in advance: They are, in a dialectic sense, contingent on the
specificities of the conjuncture which they help to constitute. In other words,
a cultural entity cannot “be defined independently of its existence within the
context. An event or practice . . . does not exist apart from the forces of the
context that constitute it as what it is” (Grossberg, 1997a, p. 255).
At this juncture, it is important to consider the methods used to
operationalize (to use a distinctly un-cultural studies verb) this approach. In
other words, how do we do radically contextual cultural studies? Grossberg
(1997a) described articulation as the “methodological face of a radically
contextualist theory” and indicated the mutually constitutive relation
between theory and method within contextual cultural studies (p. 260). For,
as Gee (1999) noted,
114 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / February 2002

any method always goes with a theory. Method and theory cannot be separated,
despite the fact that methods are often taught as if they could stand
alone. . . . There can be no sensible method to study a domain, unless one also
has a theory of what the domain is. (p. 5)

Similarly, within cultural studies, the articulatory theory and method are
indivisible. Articulation constitutes the conceptual core of Hall’s “Marxism
without guarantees,” because it is based on a theoretical understanding of
the social context being “a structured field, a configuration of practices; each
practice is located in a specific place as a set of relations, close to some prac-
tices, more distant from others” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 60). According to Hall
(1996a),

an articulation is thus the form of the connection that can make a unity of two
different elements, under certain conditions. It is the linkage which is not nec-
essary, determined, absolute and essential for all time. You have to ask, under
what circumstances can a connection be forged or made? (p. 141)

Unearthing the socially and historically contingent matrix of social, eco-

nomic, political, and technological articulations represents the primary
method of contextual cultural studies. Moreover, it is the theory and method
of articulation that “transforms cultural studies from a model of communi-
cation (production-text-consumption; encoding-decoding) to a theory of con-
texts” (Grossberg, 1997a, p. 347).
Cultural studies’ conjunctural theory-method engages society as a
concrete, historically produced, fractured totality made up of different types
of social relations, practices, and experiences. Each form of cultural practice
has its own relatively autonomous field of effects. Yet, the meaning and
effects of any concrete practice—its conjunctural identity—are always over-
determined by the network of relations with which it is articulated (Hall,
1986a, 1986b). Identifying the conjuncturally contingent points of articula-
tion involves “drawing lines or connections which are the productive links
between points, events or practices . . . within a multidimensional and multi-
directional field. These lines map out reality in terms of the productive rela-
tions between events” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 50). This production of contexts
should not infer that the method involves inserting a cultural practice into a
pre-existing context, out of which it generates its identity and effects. For, it
is important to stress that context is “not something out there, within which
practices occur or which influence the development of practices. Rather, iden-
tities, practices, and effects generally, constitute the very context within which
they are practices, identities or effects” (Slack, 1996, p. 125). Articulation,
then, involves a method reconstructing a cultural practice’s conjunctural
relations, identity, and effects to produce a contextually specific map of the
social formation. As Hall (1998) sardonically opined, “My work, therefore, is
in the very unfashionable mode of salvage work, of deconstruction/recon-
struction—a dangerous enterprise in the age of deconstruction” (p. 73).
 COMING TO TERMS WITH CULTURAL STUDIES 115

To operate within a contextual cultural studies strategy means recog-

nizing that sport forms (practices, products, institutions, etc.) can only be
understood by the way that they are articulated into a particular set of com-
plex social, economic, political, and technological relationships that compose
the social context, recognizing that “there are no necessary correspondences
in history, but history is always the production of such connections or corre-
spondences” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 53). Moreover, whereas cultural practices,
such as sport, are produced from specific social and historic contexts, they
are also actively engaged in the ongoing constitution of the conditions out of
which they emerge. The structure, identity, and effect of any sport form is
thus

given, in part, by the social field into which it is incorporated, the practices with
which it articulates and is made to resonate. What matters is not the intrinsic
or historically fixed objects of culture, but the state of play in cultural relations.
(Hall, 1981, p. 235)

The primary method implicit within Hall’s articulated conjuncturalism con-

cerns reconstructing a context within which a sporting practice, product, or
institution becomes understandable. It is an aggressively non-reductionist
(the multiplicity of forces and effects deny the possibility of reducing causal-
ity to one factor, i.e., the economic), yet contingently determinate (it
acknowledges the notion of determinacy but stresses its multidirectionality,
fluidity, and uncertainty), theory-method, which implores the researcher to
actively create context by “forging connections between practices and
effects” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 54).
The secondary research method used as part of any contextualizing
practice is contingent on that which is under scrutiny. As Grossberg noted:

I believe that one can and should use any and every kind of empirical method,
whatever seems useful to the particular project. Use them as rigorously and as
suspiciously as you can...I do not think that ethnography, or any other method-
ology, has a privileged status in cultural studies. Nor do I think that any one
methodology has a greater claim to being somehow more empirical than
another. Use anything, including surveys and statistics, if it seems useful, but
consider how they are themselves rearticulated (and their practice changed) by
the theoretical and political commitments of cultural studies and of one¹s own
project. I am in favor of anything that helps you gather more and better infor-
mation, descriptions, resources, and interpretations. (Wright, 2001, p. 145)

As well as requiring an expansive and flexible methodological arsenal, expo-

nents of a contextual cultural studies are also expected to nurture a broad-
ranging interpretive vocabulary, in terms of being able to theorize the social,
cultural, economic, political, technological, and ideological relations within
contemporary existence.
However, as always, there is a catch. In cultural studies, theories are
not mobilized uncritically and in toto, thereby letting the researcher off the
 116 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / February 2002

interpretation hook by “providing answers which are always known in

advance” (Grossberg, 1992, p. 113). The search for an “exact theoretical fit” is
futile (Slack, 1996, p. 113). Rather, as Hall (1992) outlined,

I want to suggest a different metaphor for theoretical work: the metaphor of

struggle, of wrestling with the angels. The only theory worth having is that
which you have to fight off, not that which you speak with profound fluency.
(p. 280)

Differently put, contextual cultural studies requires a critical engagement

with theory; a grappling with theory to see what is useful and appropriate
within a particular empirical context, and discarding/reworking that which
is not.
Instead of engaging sport as a foundational, originary, or essential
category—or what Derrida (1978, p. 146) termed transcendental signified (a
position that propels researchers into definitional efforts as a precursor to
more specifically focused research or lulls them into a false sense of concep-
tual security)—it is important that an explicitly contingent understanding
of sport should emerge as an outgrowth of contextually grounded and sensi-
tive research practice. According to this approach, sport is engaged and
interpreted as a fluid, dynamic category, whose definition and composition is
contingent on the specificities of the context (both synchronic and
diachronic) in question: Sport has meant, and continues to mean, different
things in different cultural and temporal contexts. The structure and influ-
ence of sport in any given conjuncture is a product of intersecting, multidi-
rectional lines of articulation between the forces and practices that compose
the social context. The very uniqueness of the historical moment, or conjunc-
ture, means there is a condition of no necessary correspondence, or indeed
noncorrespondence, between sport and particular forces (i.e., the economic):
Forces do determine the givenness of sporting practices, their determinacy
just cannot be guaranteed in advance. So, sport-oriented research demands
a truly contextual sensibility premised on, and seeking to excavate and theo-
rize, the contingent relations, structure, and effects that link sport forms
with prevailing determinate forces: In effect, what I am suggesting is the
mobilization of a sport without guarantees.

AUTHOR
David L. Andrews is an associate professor of sport and cultural stud-
ies in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland and a
senior visiting research fellow at De Montfort University, United Kingdom.
He has published on a variety of topics related to the critical, theoretically
based analysis of sport as an aspect of contemporary commercial culture. He
recently edited two anthologies, Michael Jordan, Inc.: Corporate Sport,
Media Culture, and Late Modern America (SUNY Press, 2001) and Sport
Stars: The Cultural Politics of Sporting Celebrity (with Steven J. Jackson,
Routledge, 2001).
 COMING TO TERMS WITH CULTURAL STUDIES 117

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Greg Duquette, Sara Elliott, Mike Friedman,
Andy Grainger, Eunha Koh, and Josh Newman for prompting and informing
this discussion. Thanks also to Ben Carrington for showing me the way.

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