In this lecture we shall summarize what we have learnt so far. Let us first recall the question which was posed in lecture 1: “ Have you ever asked yourselves why we live the kind of life that we live? ” This question we found was immensely important because if need to make an academic enquiry into why we do things, why we like and do not like certain things, why we have certain kinds of social arrangements and cultural practices, why there is inequality in this world etc. We saw that there are ways of framing this question in Cultural Studies, such as: “How are we produced as subjects?” We call a person in Cultural Studies a “subject” who feels, who is an agent, who has an inner life and an outer identity, one who holds certain values dear and those values go on to make him or her take decisions and undertake certain actions.

Richard Johnson in his essay “What is Cultural Studies anyway?” argues that “the ultimate object of Cultural Studies is not the text, but the social life of subjective forms at each moment of their circulation, including their textual embodiments.” In the lecture on the critique of Cultural Studies we have seen that textualism is one of the criticisms levied on Cultural Studies . But Johnson defends Cultural Studies by saying that it is not the text which is the central focus in this domain. In culture, forms are also seen as subjective because they after all are used by human beings at particular moments in history, at particular times and spaces. Every domain of knowledge including the sciences cannot be completely objective as long as we human beings are creating them.

What we look at is not the text but the social life of a text and how it is circulated, produced, distributed and how ultimately it is consumed. Secondly what are the texts that are in circulation, and we found out that the reason why certain texts are in circulation in first place in lieu of others is a matter of power and ideology.