Cultural Studies Turn

The "Cultural Studies Turn" names a specific historical and theoretical regression within film studies, identified in Kornbluh's argument as part of a broader retreat from the Marxist (especially Adornian) inheritance of film theory. This turn is defined by three interlocking features: (1) a shift toward reception aesthetics and the spectator as active, autonomous meaning-maker; (2) a privileging of particularism—attending to the singular, the local, the identity-specific—over structural and formal analysis; and (3) a subordination of mediation and critique to what Kornbluh diagnoses as medium transparency (the naturalization of film form so that its ideological operations disappear). The cultural studies orientation thus colludes with what Althusser and Adorno would recognize as ideology in its most seductive form: the illusion of consumer sovereignty that occludes the conditions of production and the determining force of form.

Kornbluh further situates this turn materially: the institutionalization of film studies within the academy as part of the cultural superstructure itself conditions the retreat from Marxism. This is not merely an intellectual history but a dialectical argument—the very success of film studies as a discipline created institutional incentives (careers, curricula, publishing logics) that rewarded particularizing, reception-oriented inquiry over the formally demanding, ideologically rigorous analysis that Adornian Marxism demanded. The Cultural Studies Turn is therefore doubly determined: by the internal logic of theoretical fashion (the swing toward agency and difference) and by the material-institutional conditions of knowledge production.

This concept appears once in anna-kornbluh-marxist-film-theory-and-fight-club-bloomsbury-academic-2019 (p. 88) as part of a polemical genealogy designed to clear space for a return to Marxist formalism. It sits at the intersection of several cross-referenced canonical concepts. Against the concept of Ideology, the Cultural Studies Turn represents exactly the move ideology-critique warns against: the displacement of structural analysis by the fantasy of spectatorial agency, which is itself an ideological effect—the illusion that reception autonomy bypasses the determining force of form and production. Against Dialectics, this turn abandons the dialectical insistence that film form and social content are mediated through each other, substituting instead a flat empiricism of audience response and a historicism of particular contexts (hence the "paving the way for New Historicism" formulation). The turn is also implicitly at odds with the Lacanian theory of the Gaze: where Lacan insists the gaze is not the viewer's sovereign act of looking but an object-cause that pre-structures the visual field, cultural studies reception theory restores the viewer's look to primacy, misrecognizing the gaze as the eye.

The cross-reference to Auteur Theory is also diagnostic: Kornbluh groups auteurism and cultural studies together as parallel defections from Marxism, both of which—despite their apparent opposition (director-centered vs. audience-centered)—share the same structurally ideological move of dissolving the formal-critical dimension into either biographical intentionality or consumer practice. Particularism, as cross-referenced, names the common defect: the refusal of the totalizing, mediating gesture that Adornian dialectics demands. The institutionalization argument further echoes the Marxist concept of the cultural superstructure, suggesting that Ideology here is not merely a set of beliefs but a materially reproduced discursive formation—consistent with the definition of ideology as constitutive of social reality rather than merely distorting it.

Marxist Film Theory and Fight ClubAnna Kornbluh · 2019 (p.88)

the other move away from the Marxist origins of film theory is the reception-oriented emphasis on film consumers and their independent meaning-making, an emphasis that paves the way for the particularizing impetus of New Historicism

The phrase "independent meaning-making" is theoretically loaded because it names the ideological fantasy of spectatorial sovereignty that Lacanian and Marxist analysis alike would identify as a misrecognition—the subject believing itself the origin of meaning while remaining structurally determined. The coupling of this fantasy with "the particularizing impetus of New Historicism" then identifies the political consequence: the retreat from universalizing critique into localized, context-bound readings that can no longer challenge the structural totality.