Cultural Studies As Critical Theory

Ben Agger

• Publisher: Spon Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781134080175
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación general

Examines the field of cultural studies and argues for its relevance in addressing the enormous impact of popular culture and mass media today. Among the perspectives analysed are the Marxist sociology of culture and poststructural/postmodern analysis

Chapter 1 What is Cultural Studies?

DOI: 10.4324/9781315067438-1

American and British university campuses are alive with new forms of interdisciplinary research. Although these activities are diverse and have multiple foci, they can broadly be grouped under the general heading of cultural studies. A recent Chronicle of Higher Education article (‘Cultural Studies: Eclectic and Controversial Mix of Research Sparks a New Movement’, January 31, 1990) trumpets this increasingly high-profile interdisciplinary project, depicting it as an important trend in scholarship that will probably leave its mark for many years to come. A later article in the Chronicle (‘Protest at Cultural-Studies Meeting Sparked by Debate over New Field’, May 2, 1990) reports heated controversies aired at a major cultural studies conference. Whether carried out in English departments or sociology departments, cultural studies challenges traditional assumptions of disciplinary scholars who plow the fields of cultural research in relative isolation from one another. This book is about cultural studies, both describing its multiple valences and arguing for a version of it that fits a certain intellectual and political agenda.

I devote the first two chapters to a discussion of the multiple forms of cultural studies as well as of the historical and sociological reasons for the ascendance of cultural studies. In the next five chapters I examine various theoretical approaches to cultural studies including Marxist theories of culture, the Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, poststructuralism and postmodernism, and feminism. My three concluding chapters address the bifurcation between an essentially apolitical cultural studies and a cultural studies that is more directly engaged in the political contest over meaning and interpretive perspective. In arguing for the latter version of cultural studies, I integrate a variety of the aforementioned theoretical approaches that together comprise an interdisciplinary approach to culture.

Throughout this book I resist the tendency for ‘cultural studies’ to become another thoughtless slogan, even a whole new academic discipline. Although the institutionalization of critical insights and practices can often protect them, it also has the potential for defusing them. Although I consider myself to be a student of cultural studies, and my work in its various formulations contributes to a broad-gauged and politically relevant version of cultural studies, I am frustrated by the mounting tendency to turn cultural studies into a vacuous methodology for reading cultural texts that has no real political grounding. This is very much the fate of the poststructuralism methodologized into deconstruction in American literary departments. Indeed, the methodical version of cultural studies that I eschew owes a good deal to just this sort of Americanized poststructuralism. My frustration with this approach to cultural studies is intended to be nuanced enough that I can develop a more politically substantial approach to culture in my concluding chapter.

One of the central insights of cultural studies is that there is no single or singular version of it. In a certain sense, cultural studies resists programmatism — a definitive methodology and a discrete list of critical topics. Culture is found in every corner of late-capitalist society, undercutting the high-culture/popularculture distinction. Thus, cultural studies resists a canonization of cultural products on which it focuses its attention. There is no canon, only a heterogeneity of cultural gestures, from science to science fiction. This is one of its great strengths, helping to reverse the tendency for cultural studies to become a discipline cut off from all the others. Given its interdisciplinary nature as well as its resistance to canons, cultural studies work is found all over the publishing terrain — in books cited throughout this study as well as in cross-disciplinary journals like Cultural Studies, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Canadian Journal of Political and Social Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Representations, Discourse, Telos, New German Critique, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Salmagundi, Media, Culture and Society, Signs, Feminist Studies and many others.

If cultural studies is to be treated as a generic approach, one can talk about at least eleven common features, recognizing that this commonality contrasts with the diversity of ways in which actual cultural studies are carried out. It is also clear that there is no pregiven methodology of cultural studies; I reconstruct these eleven common assumptions from the interpretive practices in which writers actually engage. Indeed, it is somewhat foreign to the decentered, theoretically eclectic tradition of cultural studies to stipulate either underlying assumptions or a political agenda (see Denzin, 1991). That is a weakness this book attempts to remedy. I would argue emphatically that cultural studies should be explicit about its implicit theoretical, political and methodological investments, thus anticipating the charge that cultural studies is but a hybrid version of cultural interpretation with no rigorous justification. In some measure, then, my attempt to codify cultural studies is an attempt to provide it with intellectual legitimacy in the university, acknowledging that academization can fatally deflect cultural studies from political engagements.

An Expanded Notion of Culture

Proponents and practitioners of cultural studies imply or suggest explicitly that ‘culture’ is not equivalent to the received high culture of various literary and philosophical canons. Rather, culture in the broad anthropological sense is any expressive activity contributing to social learning. The expansion of the notion of culture by students of cultural studies affects the ways in which popular culture is now conceptualized as a broad ensemble of everyday discursive practices that may well fall outside the traditional parameters of official culture, narrowly defined, and the ways that science is conceptualized as cultural discourse itself. Cultural studies both renders science self-reflexively discursive in post-positivist fashion and at the same time engages in a kind of meta-canonization (or, better, a deconstruction of canon) that opens cultural analysis to all sorts of interpretive possibilities, all the way from conversation analysis (see Mehan and Wood, 1975) to film and television criticism (e.g., Ryan and Kellner, 1988; Miller, 1988; Kellner, 1990).

A good deal of the momentum of cultural studies is provided by the poststructural turn in anthropology (e.g., Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Marcus, 1988), with its reflexive attention to the impact of anthropological discourse on the topics and people studied by anthropologists as well as to the ways in which culture is constituted from the ground up. Within sociology, this tendency, albeit not fertilized by poststructuralism, stems from Harold Garfinkel’s (1967) ethnomethodological version of social phenomenology, with his stress on the communicative constitution of meaning in everyday life. Since the American translation of poststructuralism, sociology has also begun to metabolize post-structural insights into the ways that science itself both frames and reflects sociological data, thus leading to a deeper, more methodical self-reflection (e.g., Lemert, 1979; Brown, 1987, 1989; Agger, 1989b) than the kind originally recommended by Gouldner (1970) and Friedrichs (1970).

It is also clear that much of the impetus behind the expansion of the notion of culture, and thus the enhancement of the relevance of culture, comes from the sweeping transformations in information technology after World War Two especially as these have influenced the huge baby-boom generation, both as cultural producers and consumers. The television generation received its cultural formation from situation comedies, variety shows and the coverage of political disasters, as I pursue further in Chapter 9. The ascendance of television, movies and rock music as formative influences is in contrast to the decline of the influence of the traditional patriarchal family on children’s values and behavior (for better and worse). Popular culture matters like never before (see Ross, 1989). Vestiges of traditional high culture like classical music are either dying out because people under 40 do not regularly attend or are being turned into ‘pops’ programs.

More things ‘count’ as culture than ever before because electronic media have turned the globe into McLuhan’s (1989) putative ‘global village’. Although the technological-determinist and modernist implications of this line of argument must be resisted (and they usually are not, whether in McLuhan (1967, 1968) or Bell (1973)), the televisionization of public life (Luke, 1989) cannot be ignored as a crucial political factor in late capitalism. The sheer explosion of culture (e.g., 50,000 books published per year in the US) is matched by what Habermas (1984, 1987b) calls its increasing colonization of the lifeworld as well as psyche of global citizens. Elite culture is being undermined not least by the ‘mechanical reproduction’ that Walter Benjamin (1969) hoped could function to promote political education and hence liberation. I believe that Benjamin was wrong to conflate the mechanical reproduction of culture in general with the liberating potential of particular types of culture — whether The Communist Manifesto or the painting Guernica. Nevertheless, we cannot somehow bypass the extensive terrain of electrified popular culture in theorizing about and intervening to change the present social world.

The Legitimacy of Popular Culture

As I just noted, poststructural reflexivity is responsible for a good deal of the broadening of cultural analysis to include topics and approaches heretofore ignored by more traditional aesthetic theorists. Another factor in the broadening of cultural analysis is the growing legitimacy of popular culture itself as a venue of critical activity and intervention. Of course, this is a chicken-and-egg phenomenon: the growing legitimacy of popular culture as a thematic topic is redoubled by the influences of cultural analysts willing to entertain a broad critical agenda. The rise of journalistic television criticism is only one relevant example here. Pauline Kael’s film criticism in The New Yorker has singularly expanded the cultural canon and elevated the status of the film critic herself.

The decanonization of bourgeois high culture might well be viewed as a kind of deconstruction, the inevitable result of a certain tendency for high culture, by virtue of its very ‘height’, to come unhinged from the lifeworlds by comparison to which it has historically been seen as an elevation. It might well be argued that earlier Romantic concepts of high culture were bound to erode under siege by the tendencies of what Walter Benjamin called mechanical reproduction in the realm of culture. And these tendencies (which Benjamin, unlike Adorno, lauded for their emancipatory potential) had to do with the rise of the ‘culture industry’, as Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) called it (see Chapter 4). According to them, the rise of popular culture both reflects and reproduces the rise of capitalism; the popularization of culture sedates large groups of people against their own alienation and at the same time helps check the tendencies of the rate of profit to fall by priming cultural production and consumption. The television, video and movie businesses are massive in their own right (Schiller, 1989).

Unlike some of the members of the original Frankfurt School like Horkheimer and Adorno, most proponents of cultural studies refuse to devalue the realm of popular culture as inherently inferior by comparison to earlier forms of high culture, notably modernism (see Huyssen, 1986). They insist that popular culture is a legitimate subject of academic inquiry because culture matters; it is serious business (see Chapter 2) and thus should be taken seriously. There is a certain populism in this insistence, a refusal to vouchsafe mandarin high culture in the fashion of the original Frankfurt School. One of the recurring themes in this book is the interplay between the cultural criticism offered by Frankfurt School theorists like Adorno and Marcuse, on the one hand, and the cultural studies approaches of post-Frankfurt theorists and students of culture, on the other. The Frankfurt sociology of culture is enormously relevant in that it represents the first significant revision of the Marxist theory of culture, via Lukács. One can periodize left-wing cultural theories this way: first, Marx, and his more or less derivative model of culture as an epiphenomenon of the economic system; second, the Frankfurt School theorists (through Lukács) who accorded culture a kind of relative autonomy largely unforeseen by Marx; third, the current generation of proponents of cultural studies who push the Frankfurt theory of culture one step further in order to encompass a larger terrain, and thus tolerance, of popular culture as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry as well as political intervention.

To some extent this periodization oversimplifies a blurry past. Marx held a more dialectical theory of culture than is commonly presumed by both orthodox economistic Marxists and post-Marxist poststructuralists (e.g., see Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). As well, the Frankfurt thinkers, especially Marcuse (1968, 1969), were less impervious to the redemptive possibilities of popular culture than meets the eye. Adorno’s modernist perspective in his Philosophy of Modern Music (1973c) is somewhat offset by his brilliant essays on radio (1945), television (1954) and journalism (1974b) composed during and after World War Two. Finally, certain approaches to cultural studies retain the sense of continuity between modernism and postmodernism, refusing to jettison Marxism altogether (e.g., Eagleton, 1976, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1990a, 1990b; Huyssen, 1986; Ryan, 1989). As always, periodization simplifies a nuanced reality in order to generalize conveniently.

My main argument in this book is that cultural studies today splits into a conformist, comfortable version notable for its methodological approach to cultural reading (see Chapter 8) and a more critical version that can be traced directly to the inspiration of the Frankfurt School, albeit fertilized with insights from less mandarin perspectives on culture, especially that of the Birmingham School (see Chapters 9 and 10). A conformist cultural studies remains atheoretical and apolitical. The more critical version recognizes that cultural reception, including cultural studies itself, must become a form of dehierarchized cultural production in a new society. I argue for a cultural studies that locates its analytical activity in an everyday life structured by the dominant discourses of the quotidian preaching adjustment, acquiescence, accommodation (see Lefebvre, 1971; Brown, 1973). I conceive of cultural studies in its best sense as an activity of critical theory that directly decodes the hegemonizing messages of the culture industry permeating every nook and cranny of lived experience, from entertainment to education. In this sense, like Jacoby (1987) in different terms, I want to deacademize cultural studies, refusing its disciplining into yet another set of courses, methodologies, journals and conferences utterly cut off from the political reality that they purport to address.

In this sense, then, the stress on the legitimacy of popular culture as a relevant realm of academic investigation helps legitimate a peculiarly apolitical version of cultural studies. That is no surprise where we recognize that...