In this opening chapter I will outline the dominant concept of culture operating in cultural studies. My purpose here is to establish a theoretical framework which I can then use in later chapters to discuss the possibility of a politics of utopian fiction.
Culture as shared meanings
Cultural studies works with a very particular concept of culture. It defines it as a network of meanings that are made concrete in particular social practices with particular material objects. This definition derives from the work of Raymond Williams.1 In ‘The analysis of culture’, a founding text in cultural studies, Williams introduced three new ways of thinking about culture: first, the ‘anthropological’ position, which sees culture as ‘a description of a particular way of life’ (2019: 29); second, the proposition that culture ‘expresses certain meanings and values’ (ibid.); third, the claim that the work of cultural analysis should be the ‘clarification of the meanings and values implicit and explicit in a particular way of life, a particular culture’ (ibid.).
Williams’ new definition broadens what counts as culture: instead of it being defined as only the ‘elite’ texts and practices (ballet, opera, classical music, literature), it is redefined to include as culture, for example, pop music, television, cinema, advertising, going on holiday, utopian fiction, etc. However, another aspect of his definition has proved even more important for cultural studies: the connection he makes between culture and signification. The importance of a particular way of life is that it ‘expresses certain meanings and values’. Cultural analysis from the perspective of this definition ‘is the clarification of the meanings and values implicit in a particular way of life’ (Williams 2019: 29). Moreover, culture as a ‘realized signifying system’, as Williams (1981a) would later call it, is not reducible to ‘a particular way of life’; rather, it is fundamental to the shaping and holding together of all ways of life. This is not to reduce everything ‘upwards’ to culture as a realized signifying system, but it is to insist that culture, defined in this way, should be understood ‘as essentially involved in all forms of social activity’ (13). While there is more to life than signifying systems, it is nevertheless the case that ‘it would … be wrong to suppose that we can ever usefully discuss a social system without including, as a central part of its practice, its signifying systems, on which, as a system, it fundamentally depends’ (207). In other words, signification is fundamental to all human activities; it saturates the social. Nevertheless, while culture as a signifying system is ‘deeply present’ (209) in all human activities, it remains the case that ‘other quite different human needs and actions are substantially and irreducibly present’ (ibid.). Moreover, in certain social activities signification becomes ‘dissolved’ into what he calls ‘other needs and actions (ibid.). To dissolve can mean two quite different things: to disappear or to become liquid and form part of a solution. For example, if a parliament is dissolved it ceases to exist. However, when we dissolve sugar in tea, the sugar does not disappear; rather, it becomes an invisible but fundamental part of the drink. It is this second sense of dissolve which best captures Williams’s usage. Nevertheless, the ambiguity of the term has allowed some critics to suggest that signification is therefore absent in certain human activities. This is a claim made by Terry Eagleton, for example: ‘But if car-making falls outside this definition, so does sport, which like any human practice involves signification, but hardly in the same cultural category as Homeric epic and graffiti’ (2000: 34). Social activities do not have to signify in the same way to fall within Williams’ definition of culture. Industrial manufacture and the works of Homer are not the same, do not signify in the same way, but they do both depend on signification. It may be true that car-making and sport do not signify in ways equivalent to, say, a sonnet by William Shakespeare or a song by Shakespeare’s Sister, but signification is still a fundamental part of both sport and the making of cars. We acknowledge as much when we use phrases like the culture of sport or the culture of the work place. In other words, signification exists in all aspects of human existence. Sometimes it is the most important aspect of the activity, at other times it is overshadowed by more functional aspects. But it is never totally dissolved (that is, it never disappears); culture always marks a human presence in the world. In my view, the logic of Williams’ position is this: signification saturates the social, but at times it simply becomes less visible in certain human activities. Poetry is more obviously about signification in a way that, say, plumbing appears not to be. But we know that without signification plumbing would not be possible (there is a culture of plumbing). Moreover, we also know that plumbing, as a human activity, has a variable history of signifying different things: civilisation, modernity, westernisation, class difference, for example. Culture, therefore, as defined by Williams, is not something restricted to the arts or to different forms of intellectual production, it is an aspect of all human activities.
Following this definition, cultural studies has come to define culture as the production, circulation and consumption of meanings. As Stuart Hall further elaborates, ‘Culture … is not so much a set of things – novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics – as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and exchange of meanings – the giving and taking of meaning’ (1997: 2). According to this definition, cultures do not so much consist of, say, books; cultures are the shifting networks of signification in which, say, books are made to signify as meaningful objects. For example, if I pass a name card to someone in China, the polite way to do it is with two hands. If I pass it with one hand I may cause offence. This is clearly a matter of culture. However, the culture is not simply in the social act, nor is it just in the materiality of the card; it is in the realized meaning of both act and card. In other words, there is nothing essentially polite about using two hands; using two hands has been made to signify politeness. Nevertheless, signification has become realized in a material practice, which may, in turn, produce material effects. Similarly, as Marx observed, ‘one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the contrary, imagine that they are subjects because he is king’ (1976: 149). This relationship works because they share a culture in which such relations are meaningful. Outside such a culture this relationship would seem meaningless. Being a king, therefore, is not a gift of nature but something constructed in culture. It is culture and not nature that gives the relationship meaning. According to Williams, ‘Signification, the social creation of meanings … is … a practical material activity’ (1977: 34). It is a social practice that requires human agency and human interaction. It is not something abstract; it is always something realized in human action and interaction. Culture, understood in this way, consists of the shared meanings that give our social worlds stability and coherence. To share a culture, therefore, is to interpret the world – make it meaningful and experience it as meaningful – in recognizably similar ways. So-called ‘culture shock’ happens when we encounter radically different networks of meaning: when our ‘natural’ or our ‘common sense’ is confronted by someone else’s ‘natural’ or ‘common sense’.
Culture as shared and contested meanings
So far I have focused on culture as a system of shared meanings. This is more or less how culture tends to be presented in Williams’ early work. Although I started with a quotation from The Long Revolution (1965; originally 1961), the idea of culture as a realized signifying system is in fact first suggested in his 1958 essay ‘Culture is Ordinary’. The formulation is quite similar to that found in The Long Revolution, ‘A culture is common meanings, the product of a whole people’ (1989: 8). Ten years after ‘Culture is Ordinary’, in ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ (1968), he is even more explicit about the ordinariness of the making of meanings: ‘culture is ordinary … there is not a special class, or group of men, who are involved in the creation of meanings and values, either in a general sense or in specific art and belief’ (1989: 34). When Williams said that ‘culture is ordinary’, he was drawing attention to the fact that meaning-making is not the privileged activity of the few, but something in which we are all involved. However, this does not of course mean that we are all involved in it in quite the same way; meaning-making, like all other social activities, is always entangled in relations of power. While we may all be involved in the making of meanings, it is also the case that some meanings and the people who make them have more power than other people and other meanings. Having said this, Williams’ early work is not totally unaware that power features in the articulating and social embedding of meanings. For example, in ‘The Idea of a Common Culture’ he observes,
If it is at all true that the creation of meanings is an activity which engages all men, then one is bound to be shocked by any society which, in its most explicit culture, either suppresses the meanings and values of whole groups, or which fails to extend to these groups the possibility of articulating and communicating those meanings.
(1989: 35)
In fact it would be very unfair to Williams to suggest that even in this early work he is simply unaware of power. His ‘Communications and Community’ essay, written in 1961, makes this absolutely clear:
For in fact all of us, as individuals, grow up within a society, within the rules of a society, and these rules cut very deep, and include certain ways of seeing the world, certain ways of talking about the world. All the time people are being born into a society, shown what to see, shown how to talk about it.
(1989: 21–2)
What is the case, however, is that he had not yet found a fully adequate way of articulating the relations between signification and power. In The Long Revolution, for example, he is still able to claim that culture is ‘the sharing of common meanings … [in] which meanings that are valued by the community are shared and made active’ (1965: 55). To put it very simply, most meanings are not of our own making, they are generated by dominant groups and dominant institutions. Moreover, these meanings tend to operate in the interests of dominant groups and dominant institutions. It is not until ‘Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory’ (1980; originally 1973), Marxism and Literature (1977) and Culture (1981) that Williams really insists that signifying systems consist of both shared and contested meanings. Culture is where we share and contest meanings of ourselves, of each other and of the social worlds in which we live. It is when he embraces Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that he changes how he understands culture as a realized signifying system. After the introduction of hegemony into his work in the 1970s, culture as a realized signifying system is always understood as consisting of both shared and contested meanings. Moreover, it is when he embraces Gramsci’s concept of hegemony that he locates culture and power as the object of study in cultural studies (see Storey 2010a).
