All bingo, Barbie and Barthes?

We are all amateur students of culture. It is a subject, like politics, for which we have been revising for most of our lives. We are born into it, we help make it and it, in turn, helps make us. It makes no sense, therefore, to question the possibility, or desirability, of the study of culture; we do not, in a profound sense, have any choice in the matter.

What we do have a choice in is the issue of the professional study of culture. Should we study culture professionally, and, if so, how should we study it? It would surely be perverse for those academics with a professional interest in any aspect of the non-academic world to ignore completely the significance of culture; the way people think, feel, behave and communicate, the hopes and fears they have, the values they live by - none can be understood adequately without some appreciation of the culture in which they find their expression.

We can, in short, all learn something from culture. Anthropologists, geographers, sociologists, psychologists, political theorists, philosophers, historians, economists and, of course, literary critics can and do accommodate the study of culture within their inquiries. Few choose to ignore culture entirely, but some choose to go so far as to study it as a separate subject, capitalising on its distinct appeal as something called "cultural studies".

If we are all amateur students of culture, and if we all take a professional interest in certain aspects of it within our various academic disciplines, do we really need the peculiar professional discipline of cultural studies? The answer depends on what one believes the aims of the enterprise to be.

Some attack cultural studies for its sheer intellectual greediness, its hungry, undiscriminating and sometimes knowingly impolite appropriation of just about everything and anything. Having trodden down hard on all the traditional disciplinary toes, cultural studies then adds insult to injury by promoting a shamelessly frivolous pluralism. T. S. Eliot - rather unwittingly - encouraged such bold and catholic tastes when he listed such things as Derby Day, the cup final, Wensleydale cheese, 19th-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar as part of his view of culture and, ominously, invited his readers to make their own lists. Cultural studies, as a discipline, took the advice to heart: Madonna is now in bed with Mozart, Carmen with Crossroads, opera with Oprah, Baudelaire with Blur - anything goes, but nothing seems to go anywhere in particular.

It is, in spite of the angry complaints from its elderly academic neighbours, rather proud of its demotic disposition. Clifford Geertz described culture as "the ensemble of stories we tell ourselves about ourselves". Cultural studies, therefore, feels some justification in taking an active interest in the full range of these stories. The material is simply inexhaustible; there appears to be no time for the researcher to try to sift the good from the bad. What, wonders the observer, do they know of culture who only culture know?

There is some truth in this criticism. Some work produced under the banner of cultural studies appears unhealthily insular, cravenly ambivalent and, on occasion, arrogantly pointless. True, Orwell did write about such things as the art of making a good cup of tea and the importance of roasting potatoes under the joint, but he also wrote about poverty, fascism and the future of socialism - he tried to keep a proper sense of perspective. Cultural studies rarely shows such concern. It can seem so open, so chronically impressionable, as to exasperate those who expect or demand a clear sense of purpose from an academic discipline.

It is certainly true that the quality of some of the work leaves a great deal to be desired. This is not, however, a problem peculiar to cultural studies. Most of what all of us do leaves a great deal to be desired. We write too much, teach too much, talk too much. No academic subject is immune to the irresponsible, the unimaginative and the opportunistic. Evidence of mediocrity is not, however, in itself, sufficient grounds for the abolition of a discipline, although it certainly is cause for concern. We can - and should - all do better.

We might be puzzled or alarmed or frustrated by the state of cultural studies, but we have no serious intellectual reason to demand its abolition. We would, however, have more cause to criticise it authoritatively if we, in other disciplines, were ourselves prepared to do culture more justice. We may study it, gingerly, with no small measure of embarrassment, but, so far, we do not study it very well.

Perhaps we feel so uneasy, so irritated, by cultural studies because its persistence - and its popularity - reminds us of our own shortcomings. Cultural studies was established out of a conviction that most of the academic disciplines which now surround it had forsaken some of their own intellectual responsibilities. It continues to exist because they continue to ignore them.

Cultural studies has been given, by default, too much to contemplate. Its current problems are not entirely its own, but also, if only we had the honesty and maturity to acknowledge it, ours too. Far from damning the discipline, we should do our best to help it. The study of culture is indeed too important to be left exclusively to the proponents of cultural studies. It is high time that we acted as though we appreciated it.

Graham McCann is a sociologist and fellow of King's College, Cambridge.