Cultural studies lacks "depth," and it wasn't worried about jettisoning this metaphor-with-methodological-consequences because it has been kept pretty busy with quite grounded descriptive work to do with expanding (surface) domains of popular culture, assisted by expanding technological and spatial horizons via new media, including the Net.

"Deep structure," for various disciplines influenced by 60s structuralism, included Chomsky's deep grammar, Levi-Strauss' kinship and myth structures, deep narrative grammars, etc. The strength of this analysis was that it was able to write generative underlying rules: if you can find the basic rules organising the structure of, say, a corpus of sentences in English, then you get a sense of how English works as a symbolic system, and even how language in general works. The promise was that some basic human capacity could be accounted for.

I won't rehearse the post-structuralist arguments about why this kind of deep or underlying rule concept was rejected.

What I am interested in is a different kind of deep, the unaccountable in culture which gives it power. Were things cultural (objects, events, relationships between beings and things) simply open to banal description (the history, design and use of the Sony Walkman, for instance), and linked for ethical purpose to some more general theoretical apparatus (e.g., social disadvantage, capitalism-induced economic disproportion, territorial imperialism), as they often are, then this risks becoming dogma in its very repetitiveness.

Cultural studies needs to move away from being an apparatus for the formation of opinion, and towards reenchantment as a magical, truly cultural, activity. The formation of opinion: creating forms of subjectivity and identity. The pseudo-argument for the truth of identity: articulation with a surface description of cultures.

Like Austin Powers in The Spy Who Shagged Me, cultural studies risks losing the mojo it might have had in the 60s. Fat Bastard is out to steal it. Why does he want Austin's mojo? Envy, of course, of shaggability, which is not just Austin's identity as a spunk, because he obviously isn't, but envy of a whole cultural thing, identified in the film with the 60s. The sixties was IT (nothing happened in the 70s and 80s, what did he say? A flight of seagulls?). In such a text, the 60s is not important as an historical period, it is a cultural unconscious, a pocket of primitivity where fuddled memories, idealised imaginings, ritual intersections of forces and signs, all coalesce as exercises in power. In the movie, the 60s becomes central in some sense to "western societies," it is the "implicit social knowledge" which Fat Bastard and Dr Evil, on the margins, know enough about to want to steal, without being part of it.

Dr. Evil could dominate the world anyway with his "laser gun," but he envies the power which is cultural, the mojo, the culturally reproductive power, the excesses of forces and meanings, the unaccountable side of that which can be described on the surface, the invisible at the heart of visibility.

It seems to me that the study of culture, then, is most interesting when it attends to magic, the ritual articulation of power, words resonant with surplus meanings, the generation of feelings, bodily effects, a highly structured event. Cultural studies can itself become magical in its poetics and performativity. Yet even in an everyday sense, our cultural identities are in some way centred, occasionally, in pockets of cultural unconscious: these are a cultural resources of power, but which are not self-reflexive. Cultural power is not generated by saying you have it (Fat Bastard saying, "I'm right sexy!"), but by some contingent, more subtly related, text or activity. And you can never draw on this power individually, because it is all tied up in the shared symbolic of communication and the bodily capacity to act ritually in concert for a social outcome. This is how I can finally retain the ethical/political (in another ritual conclusive gesture), because a given argument, in cultural studies, can convey a message (e.g., Austin has no doubt something should be done about evil, and its by-product, envy), but it won't work unless one's rhetoric has power, and where does that power come from, Austin?