From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale
From the Ordinary to the Concrete: Cultural Studies and the Politics of Scale
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从平凡到具体：文化研究与规模政治
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发表时间：
2008
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通讯作者：
A. Mccarthy
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文献类型：
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作者：
A. Mccarthy
The word scale is a complex and highly abstract noun that expresses a number of different kinds of proportional relations, from the comparative size of physical phenomena to the mathematically calculable relationship between an object and its representation. Because the concept of scale is so abstract and far ranging, this essay violates some first principles of composition and begins with dictionary definitions, elaborating the history of scale’s usage in the human sciences. It will become apparent through this brief survey that although scale does not appear in Raymond Williams’s Keywords, it certainly qualifies for keyword status. The problems of its definition, in other words, are “inextricably bound up with” the problems it is trying to describe (1976: 13). Exploring this conceptual richness and ambiguity, the following essay asks what the concept of scale means for methodology in cultural studies. Although the word is not a common one in cultural studies research, I will propose that a politics of scale has historically motivated cultural studies’ interventions in the way knowledge is produced in the disciplines and spaces of higher education. As a political movement among intellectuals who are located within a variety of fields of inquiry, as well as in other institutions such as the arts and government, cultural studies has been defined by research agendas that vary widely from region to region as well as historically, in response to particular social conditions inside and outside the academy. However, it has consistently and persistently called attention to the
