Relocating Cultural Studies

Developments in Theory and Research

Valda Blundell, John Shepherd, Ian Taylor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9780415075480
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134904228
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Britain is no longer the sole organizing centre for cultural studies. The contributors to this volume demonstrate how cultural studies has diffused into other English-speaking countries and how its original concerns have been renegotiated and changed. The result is a landmark book which provides students with an unrivalled guide to the international phenomenon of cultural studies.

Part I
WARS OF POSITIONS

1
THE FORMATIONS OF CULTURAL STUDIES

An American in Birmingham¹

Lawrence Grossberg

Any observer of the academic scene in the United States will surely note that there has been a cultural studies ‘boom’ (Morris 1988a). As Allor (1987) notes, the term itself has become a cultural commodity, apparently free to circulate in the global economy of discourse, ideas, and cultural capital. Five years ago, the term functioned largely as a proper name, referring primarily to a specifically British tradition, extending from the work of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, through the contributions of the various members of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, to the increasingly dispersed and institutionalized sites of its contemporary practitioners. Additionally—and especially within the field of communication—the term also referenced a uniquely American tradition rooted in the social pragmatism of the Chicago School of Social Thought. However, ‘cultural studies’ is becoming one of the most ambiguous terms in contemporary theory as it is increasingly used to refer to the entire range and diversity of what had been previously thought of as ‘critical theory’ (i.e. a range of competing theories of the relation of society and culture, of ideology and art, largely derived from ‘high literary theory’ and anthropology, with communication and popular culture once again relegated to a secondary position) (Grossberg 1989).

While it is futile to protest against this appropriation of the term, it is important to point to a set of potential dangers: namely, that British cultural studies is reduced to a singular position or a linear history (thus, ignoring its differences) or dispersed into a set of unrelated differences (thus, ignoring its unity). This consequence is made all the more likely by the variety of different interests involved in the interrogations taking place with respect to cultural studies in the United States. Understanding the ‘unity in difference’ of the British tradition requires us to recognize that it has always responded to the particular conditions of its intellectual, political, social and historical contexts. The result is that within the tradition, theoretical positions have always been provisional takes, meant to give us a better purchase on the world and always implicated within ongoing intellectual and political struggles. Any ‘position’ is always engaged in and constituted by response to debates with other positions. Cultural studies has always been a contested terrain, and the contestation takes place both within and outside the tradition itself. In fact, if cultural studies is seen as an open-ended and ongoing theoretical struggle to understand and intervene into the existing organizations of active domination and subordination within the formations of culture, then the boundaries of the tradition are themselves unstable and changing, sites of contestation and debate (Grossberg et al. 1991).

Failing to recognize the history and practice of this unity-in-difference threatens to dehistoricize intellectual practices and avoids the more difficult task of rearticulating the insights and practices of cultural studies into the specific contexts of our own work. If there is no single cultural studies position, we have to understand the projects, the commitments and the vectors according to which it has continued to rearticulate itself, how it has constantly renegotiated its identity and repositioned itself within changing political and intellectual maps. Its history is a history of political engagements and of theoretical debates in response to which alternative positions are constantly being taken into account and new positions offered. In this process, the very questions at the heart of cultural studies—its problematic—are constantly being reshaped and reinflected.

I want to begin this project by looking at some of the complexly structured differences that constitute the tradition of British cultural studies. Specifically, I will isolate one set of vectors which construct a specific formation around the biographical figure of Stuart Hall and the intellectual and political commitments of marxism. It is important to remember that this was not the only formation within the Centre (or within British cultural studies) but it does largely define the uniqueness of the Centre; other formations and lines of thought had other institutional sites in addition to their location within the Centre. However, we must remember that this formation itself has always been full of contradictions and antagonisms, defined individually and socially, intellectually and politically.

Not surprisingly, a version of the history of this formation within cultural studies has already been established and put into place. Within this narrative, cultural studies is constituted by two lines of determination. First, it has constantly emerged out of a series of debates with its theoretical ‘others’, struggles within which cultural studies is often represented, in the end, as having taken the middle ground between theoretical extremes. Second, cultural studies has constantly rearticulated itself in direct response to overt historical events and demands. In this narrative, cultural studies is seen to offer a materialist theory of ideology and discourse. I want to argue not only that the narrative is too linear (and progressivist)—that it ignores the continuing vitality and influence of earlier moments in the narrative—but also that it fails to account for the continuing challenge from within the history of the formation of competing definitions of the project of cultural studies. The contestation within cultural studies was not merely around competing theories of the politics of culture, or the relationship of culture to power, but also around differing theories of the nature of cultural and historical specificity. That is, within cultural studies the question of its own problematic was itself constantly, if implicitly, called into question.

Despite these weaknesses, it is useful to begin by summarizing this taken-for-granted, ‘standard’ history (Hall et al. forthcoming). I will do this by presenting the two interrelated but analytically separable lines of determination (political and intellectual). Then I will offer a different, more contentious reading of this formation of cultural studies, a reading partly determined by my own history and situation (an American who studied at the CCCS at a particular moment and who has maintained close ties with it), and partly determined by my own cultural and political contexts. I will no doubt continue to romanticize many aspects of the work of the Centre, but I do not mean to ignore its very real problems and failures. There were significant structured absences, questions that remain unaddressed, political struggles that remained ‘outside’ the cultural. Its ability to reflexively analyse its own practice was too often too limited. Forms of collective work were celebrated without analysing the ways in which they could disempower as well as empower individuals and groups. Class, gender and race relations institutionalized within the academy remained sites of silence for too long and, despite a real concern for popular culture, the intellectual distanciation from the popular characteristic of the traditional intellectual also remained in place for too long (Fry 1988). Nevertheless, I believe that the Centre (and the formation of cultural studies I am describing) is important, not only intellectually, but also as a model of interdisciplinary, collective and politically engaged research. Finally, I want at least to acknowledge the fact that this formation of cultural studies was produced in the social interactions of real individuals with their own agendas and biographies. A part of the history of the Centre—a part that I will not discuss here—involves the changing histories and relations of those working at the Centre and in cultural studies. Like C.Wright Mills, cultural studies has always embraced the passion of intellectual and political work (even if it rarely theorized passion in its objects of study). Such work is always determined partly by the very real—and in the case of the Centre, enduring—relationships and communities (both positive and negative) that such work produces, even if only through imaginary and retrospective identifications. And the unity-in-difference of cultural studies is partly the result of these very real social and emotional relationships.

A NORMATIVE HISTORY OF CULTURAL STUDIES

Political contexts

Cultural studies emerged in the 1950s at the intersection of a number of complex historical experiences. Sometimes the focus was on ‘the Americanization of Britain’ and other times on the new forms which modernization was taking after the Second World War. Both descriptions pointed to the appearance of a ‘mass culture’ made possible through the rationalization, capitalization and technologization of the mass media. Within this new cultural space, for the first time, the vast majority of the population was incorporated into a common audience for cultural products. Of course, the concern for ‘mass culture’ predated the Second World War. But the obviously central role of American culture and capital to these changes and their increasing reach into British society through popular cultural and communicative forms seemed to make the threat they posed more substantial and specific. This threat was aimed neither at communities nor elites, but rather at class cultures and the possibilities of a democratic cultural formation.²

A second historical development was the emergence of the New Left³—which counted among its members many of the founding figures of cultural studies—in response, at least in part, to the failure of the traditional marxist left to confront, in both theoretical and political terms, the beginnings of late capitalism, the new forms of economic and political colonialism and imperialism, the existence of racism within the so-called democratic world, the place of culture and ideology in relations of power, and the effects of consumer capitalism upon the working classes and their cultures.

In the 1960s, other concerns impinged upon cultural studies, and while they did not totally displace the earlier concerns, they often gave them new inflections. Here again one can point to two exemplary developments: first, the growing importance of the mass media, not only as forms of entertainment but, inseparably, as what Althusser called ‘ideological state apparatuses’. There was in fact, quite explicitly, a significant focus during the 1960s (and through much of the 1970s) on the more overt ideological functions of the media—in the news and documentary programming—where one could see a direct connection to the political sphere. This narrowing of focus was contradicted to some extent by the second development which engaged cultural studies in the 1960s: the emergence of various subcultures which seemed, in various ways, to resist at least some aspects of the dominant structures of power. Yet these subcultures were organized around non-traditional political issues, contradictions, and social positions, and struggled in the uncommon terrain of popular culture. Obviously the rise of various working-class youth cultures and the sustained organization of a middle-class oppositional subculture had an enormous impact on the work of cultural studies.

In the 1970s, we might again identify two significant developments, both of which had immediate and powerful effects on cultural studies. First, the renewed appearance of political and theoretical work around relations of gender and sexual difference. The response to feminism was mediate and sustained, if not always completely sympathetic or adequate. Nevertheless, I think it is fair to say that there is no cultural studies which is not ‘post-feminist’, not in the sense of having moved beyond it but rather in the sense of having opened itself to the radical critique and implications of feminist theory and politics. The second development was equally powerful, disturbing cultural studies’ too-easy identification and celebration of resistance (which rested upon a taken-for-granted analysis of domination and subordination). I am referring to the rise of the New Right as a powerful political and ideological force in Britain (as well as in other advanced capitalist democratic countries), often constructed on top of explicitly racist themes. Additionally, the fortunes of the neoconservatives seemed to be inversely related to the fragmentation, if not the apparent collapse, of organized opposition from the left. As new political agencies and positions emerged on the right, the traditional left seemed incapable of offering coherent strategies and responses.

In the 1980s and early 1990s many of these problems continue to assert themselves, albeit in different and in some cases even more pressing forms. Moreover, there is a return of many of the more apocalyptic concerns that had emerged in the immediate postwar period (global threats to the future and epochal experiences of irrationality, terror and meaninglessness) which appear with great force in both popular media and intellectual discourses. Equally important is the increasing self-consciousness of our own insertion into the construction of domination in our relations to the production of intellectual work and to students and our complex relations to political differences at all levels of the social formation. And finally, the fact that the victory of the right has been secured (at least enough to have allowed Thatcher to undermine significantly the social infrastructure of Britain) can be measured in the left’s apparent distance from the majority of the population (not only that between academics and their students) and the inability of the left to secure a new ground from which to organize opposition.

Theoretical development

These political and historical concerns were organized by, responded to with, and mapped onto, a series of theoretical debates and challenges. Sometimes these debates placed cultural studies on one side (e.g. when it firmly opposed what it saw as the abandoning of the materialist problematic by post-structuralist and psychoanalytic discourse theorists). More often, cultural studies places itself between the two extremes, as in Stuart Hall’s (1980b) description of the need to locate a space for cultural studies between structuralism and culturalism. In fact, cultural studies seems to slide, almost inevitably, from the former argument to the latter (e.g. Hall [forthcoming] wherein cultural studies is located not in opposition to psychoanalysis but rather in between its extreme reductionist forms and those who would either deny its truth or water down its radical insights). Opposing alternative positions enables it to maintain its own identity and that of its specific problematic and commitments. But mediation allows it to take into account its own inadequacies and the insights which reinflect its problematic and commitments into new historical contexts. Thus, one of the most common rhetorical figures in cultural studies is that which positions its intellectual antagonist as having rightly attempted to avoid one extreme position but having mistakenly gone ‘right through to the other extreme’. Within these debates, which often took place within the Centre as well as between the Centre and other institutionalized sites of intellectual activity, we should not be surprised to find that each side necessarily misreads and misrepresents the other side in order to reconstitute its own position.⁴

The beginning of cultural studies is usually located in the debate between the socialist humanism of Williams, Thompson and Hoggart (despite the significant political differences among them) and traditional marxist, literary and historical approaches to contemporary life and politics. The former, including the original New Left group, challenged the economic reductionism of the marxists, arguing for the importance of the creative human actor, of human experience, and of the determining power of cultural production itself. They similarly rejected (to varying degrees) the elitism which was used to justify the erasure of working-class people and culture from the study of history. Such ‘culturalists’, in their first attempts to define cultural studies, argued that culture was not only the site of struggle but its source and measure as well. Culture was the intersection of textuality and experience, and the task of criticism was to examine how the former represented and misrepresented the latter. They rejected both a theory of dominance (which denied the reality of cultural struggle) and a theory of reflection (which radically separated culture and society, reading society off the meanings of culture even as it was located outside them).

But cultural studies emerges as a disciplinary formation and intellectual position in the confrontation (initially it was often silent) between this humanistic marxism (which Hall calls ‘culturalism’) and the anti-humanism of Althusser’s structural marxism. The latter pointed to the former’s reductionist assumption of a series of necessary correspondences between cultural forms, experience and class position. Althusser challenged any appeal to either the subject or experience as the source or measure of history since neither existed outside the processes of historical (and specifically ideological) determination. At the same time, he recognized the power and relative autonomy of the cultural realm. By distancing the ‘real’ as the determining moment of history (in either the first or last instance), Althuss...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on the contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ Introduction
• Part I. Wars of Positions
• Part II. Power and Empowerment
• Part III. Cultural Studies and the Local
• Name Index
• Subject Index