THE CULTURAS STUDIES READER. Simon Deuring (ed) London Routlegde, 1994
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• INTRODUCTION – Simon During
Cultural Studies is the study of contemporary culture, which can be analyzed in many ways: sociologically, for instance, describing institutions, systems, or critically, celebrating literature or literary images/texts.
Two features describe early cultural studies: 1) Subjectivity as inaugurated by R. Hoggart’s book The Uses of Literacy (1957) foregrounding one’s life-practice as a constituent of a larger network of life-practices. 2) Engaged form of analysis, focusing on political questions and arguing that culture/society are indissociably entwined. Social inequality stems at individual level.
• A Brief History of Cultural Studies
It stems out of Leavisism (F.R. Leavis) trying to disseminate ‘cultural capital’ (Bourdieu’s expression) in the educational system. However, it focused only in a restricted canon, disregarding modern works. This ‘great tradition’ put forth by Leavisism was directed to high art and disregarded the sense of pleasure offered by mass culture.
The works of Hoggart and Williams develop Leavisism into Cultural Studies. Although they accepted culture should be measured in terms of its capacities to deepen and widen our experiences, they thought Leavinism was detached from the communal experience forms of life.
Britain’s employment was on the rise and the social gap was getting shorter. The working class communal life was fragmenting.
Cultural Studies then developed in two ways. 1) Old notion of culture (pub life, dancing, singing, etc.) was giving way to culture organized from afar (educational system, government and culture industry). This meant that less people identified themselves with workers, culture was becoming a set apart from politics, and the proletarian identity was fading.
In this context, Cultural Studies theorists began to explore culture’s political function, from the early 70s culture was analyzed through the concept of hegemony (Gramsei). Trying to explain why was Fascism so popular if it toiled liberty, he came up with the idea that hegemonic forces are in constant adaptation, so the counter-hegemonic strategies should be constantly revised. Foucault calls it governmentality, a mean of producing docile citizens through the educational system.
Culture was seen less as an expression of communal lives and more as an apparatus of a larger system of domination. Cultural Studies offered a critique of culture’s hegemonic effects. Largely represented by Stuart Hall’s and James Clifford’s semiotic analysis, culture was seen as broken down into messages/practices/discourses which were distributed by media. Ex.: Cigarette as a rite of passage/masculinity/freedom and transcendence of workday life. Semiotics remained as an analysis of ‘coding’ or ‘recordings’, not uses (life practices) or feeling, although Hall proposes the concept of ‘decoding’ in his essay.
70s Cultural Studies was divided into ‘culturalists’ (forms of life) and structuralists (semiotics). L. Althusser, backed up by Lacan’s psychoanalytic notions, came up with a harder form of structuralism. Individuals as constructs of ideology (set of images/discourses that stand for widespread values – commonsense). Using ideology the state and capitalism avoid revolution. For Althusser dominant ideology turns the political, partial into universal, natural and eternal. False idea of freedom, autonomy hides the real picture because ideology helps to make sense of the world. Promise to a full’I-ness’ which can only exist where ‘I am not’.
Politico Psychoanalytical Structuralism never made much headway in Cultural Studies as it did in Film Studies. It did not give much space for the individual to act on the world in its own terms. It offered truths, which took little account of the differences, did not concentrate on individual politics. Semiotic thought would enter culturalism with the concept of polysemy (a signifier with more than one meaning). Ex.: Malboro Man = toughness = cancer.
Polysemy finds its limits in the individual signs/units. Yet through the concept of polysemy we can reach ‘hybridization’ and ‘negotiation’ of meaning. Malboro Man can be transferred to a tacky cd cover, furnish a poor bar in Lagos as symbol of Western Liberty and affluence, decorate a flat in Manhattan in a postmodern touch (basically displacement).
The French model breaks down the earlier form of Cultural Studies by stating it less centered around a ‘dominant’ set of institutions or ideology. The reason for this is the ascension of the new right, Regan (1981) and Thatcher (1979). The student body changed and Cultural Studies change focus for more fragmented models. Cultural Studies became genuinely global after embracing themes of ethnic, sexual preferences, feminists discourses rather than class and nation. Thatcher apothegm “There’s no such thing as society”. Analysis of racism, sexism and the culture industry possessed more appeal than the British working class. This reflects an anti-statist, decentered view of social organization. How to conceive of relations between these de-centered communities? 1) Cross-identification (new rainbow alliances). 2) Dialogic (concept in which the otherness of each participant remains intact). Celebration of the other (alterity) become the powerful opposition to monoculturalism and gender models of nation. Cultural Studies becomes the voice of the other from the 70s on.
Cultural Studies began to celebrate commercial culture/mass culture in a move called ‘cultural populism’. Popular products have quasi-political effects independently of educational and critical discourse.
Two incommensurable perspectives. 1) One sees media, TV, cinema as instruments of economic, ethnic, gender domination. Owned by large corporation it assists the reproduction of social system by allowing certain ideas/images to get audience. Media generated by the top of the social hierarchy and seek reproduction. 2) One sees culture from the bottom up, focusing on forms (music) at odds with capitalist social order (by deferment of gratification, for example). Although it might be appropriated by mainstream and used in conservative ways also represents a possibility of eruption, dissonance and alternative imagination of reality.
