Simon During | ‘Introduction’ to The Cultural Studies Reader
[Abridged Version of the Text with Subheadings
Added]
Culture
as Industry
As the old
working-class communal life fragmented, attention moved from locally
produced and often long-standing cultural forms (pub life, group-singing,
holidays at camps, and close-by seaside resorts etc.) to culture as
organized from afar – both by the state through its educational system, and by
what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “culture industry,” that is,
highly developed music, film, and broadcasting businesses.
Culture as Hegemony: Not Coercion but Consent
The old
notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult
to sustain. From the early 1970s, culture came to be regarded as a form of
“hegemony” – a word associated with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of
the 1920s and 1930s. “Hegemony” is a term to describe relations of domination
which are not visible as such. It involves not coercion but consent on
the part of the dominated (or “subaltern”).
Cultural Studies: As a Critique of Culture’s Hegemonic Effects
As culture was thought
about less as an expression of local communal lives and more as an apparatus
within a large system of domination, cultural studies offered critiques of
culture’s hegemonic effects.
Culture as ‘Signifying Practices’
At first
such critique leant heavily on forms of semiotic analysis. This meant in effect
that culture was broken down into discrete messages, “signifying practices” or
“discourses” which were distributed by particular institutions and media. To
take a rather simplified example: a semiotic analysis of cigarette-smoking
among workers would analyze smoking not as a life-practice, that is, in terms
of its importance as a rite of passage, its use in structuring the flow of time
and so on, but in terms of its being a signifier produced by images like the
“Marlboro Man,” which connote masculinity, freedom and transcendence of
work-a-day life.
Individuals as ‘Constructs of Ideology’
In the
1970s, a hard form of structuralism did emerge. For this theory, individuals
were constructs of ideology, where ideology means the set of discourses and
images which constitute the most widespread knowledge and values – “common
sense.” Ideology was required so that the state and capitalism can reproduce
themselves without the threat of revolution.
State’s Claim to Neutrality is False
Here, as for
Hoggart and Williams, the state’s claim to neutrality is false, but this time
for more classically Marxist reasons – because it protects the exploitative
“relations of production” (i.e., class differences) necessary to capitalism.
Dominant Ideology: Constructs an Imaginary Picture of Civil Life
For
Althusser, dominant ideology turned what was in fact political, partial and
open to change into something seemingly “natural,” universal and eternal.
However, dominant ideology is not limited to politics or economics. Its primary
role is to construct an imaginary picture of civil life, especially the nuclear
family as natural and, most of all, each individual as “unique” and “free.”
Dominant Social Values Internalised through Identification with Ideology
They
identify with ideology because they see themselves pictured as independent and
strong in it – as an adolescent boy (or, indeed, adult) might picture himself,
in a fantasy, as the Marlboro Man. Dominant social values are internalized
through this kind of identification.
The Three Influential Texts in Cultural Studies
The richness
of the research promoted by the CCCS during the 1970s makes that research
impossible adequately to represent here. But three particularly influential
texts – Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), David Morley’s The
“Nationwide” Audience (1980) and Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance
through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (1976) can
rewardingly be described.
Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: “Counter-school Culture”
First, Paul
Willis’s Learning to Labour. Willis used participant observer techniques
to describe a group of disaffected boys in a working-class school (the “lads”).
He showed how they create a “counter-school culture” in which they reject the
official logic which legitimizes their education.
David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience
David Morley’s The “Nationwide”
Audience is one of the first ethnographic studies of an audience - the audience
of Nationwide, a BBC news-magazine program widely watched through the late
1960s and 1970s, and which broadcasted mainly local stories, somewhat like a US
breakfast show. He organized open-ended group discussions between viewers, with
each group from a homogeneous class or gender or work background (trade
unionists, managers, students etc.). He had to go out into the field to
discover what people actually thought about its ideological orientation – that
“everyday life” view of the world presented to the audience. The program is
“structured in dominance” because it skews and restricts its audience’s
possibilities for interpreting the material it claims to present without bias.
Resistance through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Postwar Britain
The third, and earliest, book, Resistance
through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, is a collection of
essays, each by different authors, each of which comes to grips with the fragmentation
of traditional working-class culture in a different way. In general, the
authors accepted that the working class was being split: one section
being drawn into skilled jobs that would enable them to live like certain
elements of the middle classes, another into deskilled, low-status and
often service jobs. However, they argued that jobs of this latter kind were
especially taken by disadvantaged youth, who, inheriting neither a strong sense
of communal identity nor values transmitted across generations in families,
develop subcultures. These subcultures negotiate with, and hybridize certain
hegemonic cultural forms as modes of expression and opposition.
Influence of French Theorists on
Cultural Studies since the late 1970s
In the late 1970s things changed.
Cultural studies came increasingly under the influence of forms of thought
associated with French theorists, in particular Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de
Certeau and Michel Foucault.
Individuals Live in Institutions
[or] Fields
For French theory, individuals
live in a setting constituted by various institutions, or what we can call,
following Bourdieu, “fields” – families, work, peer groups, educational
apparatuses, political parties, and so on. Family life, for instance, depends
upon images of the perfect family (mum, dad and a newborn baby, say) and
members may feel pleasure when they reproduce that image, even if only for a
moment.
Hierarchical Fields: Have a Fixed
Purpose
Very hierarchical fields (like
schools and offices) are most disciplined and rationalized: in them all
activities are directed to a fixed purpose – education in a school, profit in a
business. Further, each field has characteristic signifying practices
more or less tightly attached to it: the same person may well talk, walk and
dress differently at school (or work) to the way they do in the family, and
differently again when socializing with their peers.
The Accelerated Globalizing of
Cultural Production
Cultural studies’ affirmation of
otherness and negation of meta-discourse must be understood also in terms of
the accelerated globalizing of cultural production and distribution from the
1970s on.
Cultural Populism
Conceiving of cultural studies as
the academic site for marginal or minority discourses had another, very
different but no less visible and globalizing consequence, one which took it
further from its original attack on mass culture. The discipline began to
celebrate commercial culture, in a move we can call, following Jim McGuigan,
“cultural populism”.
Transnational Cultural Studies
But perhaps the most profound
topical change in cultural studies has been its focusing on cultural flow.
Cultural studies’ objects are decreasingly restricted or delimited by distance
and locality at all. Cultural studies which addresses such cases is often
called “transnational cultural studies.” It’s eroding so-called
“postcolonialism,” first nurtured in literary studies, which was so important a
feature of the late 1980s and early 1990s intellectual landscape. Much
critiqued on the grounds that it prematurely celebrated the end of colonialist
relations of exploitation and dependency, postcolonialism increasingly has had
to come to terms with “globalization” – a word often heard, rarely clearly
understood. What’s globalization, then? Not simply, as it often seems,
Thatcherism writ large, globalization is best understood as the development of
global markets and capital so as to skew highly capitalized national economies
towards service, information, financial instruments, and other high value-added
products away from traditional primary commodities and massproduction
industries.
“Is globalization reducing global
cultural differences?”
This problem is not to be posed
in the traditional fashion, i.e. “is globalization reducing global cultural
differences?” – the answer to that being increasingly clearly “no, at least not
in any simple way” since globalization is articulating all cultures and
communities to one another in a process which also makes for new fragmentations
and mixes, new niche and local markets; new opportunities for self-expression
and alliance.
Engaged cultural studies
encourages and takes notice of culture’s capacity to express and invoke less
restricted (more “other,” counter-normative) ways of living.
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