Doing Cultural Theory

David Walton

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780857024855, 9780857024848
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292396
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

"Will be a very useful tool for any student trying to make sense of the vast expanses of contemporary cultural theory and criticism. Well-written and admirably self-reflective, it combines rigorous explications and applications of many of the most influential concepts and theorists."
- Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina

"Accessible and insightful throughout; offering help to both experienced and inexperienced students of cultural theory. Highly recommended."
- John Storey, University of Sunderland

Doing Cultural Theory teaches more than just the basics of cultural theory. It unpacks its complexities with real-life examples, and shows readers how to link theory and practice. This book:

• Offers accessible introductions to how cultural studies has engaged with key theories in structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism
• Teaches straightforward ways of practising these theories so students learn to think for themselves
• Uses ?practice? boxes to show students how to apply cultural theory in the real world
• Guides students through the literature with carefully selected further reading recommendation.

Other textbooks only show how others have analyzed and interpreted the world. Doing Cultural Theory takes it a step further and teaches students step-by-step how to do cultural theory for themselves.

1

Introducing Cultural Studies

A Brief Contextual History

Learning goals To understand the difficulty of defining the term ‘culture’ and appreciate the multidisciplinary and complex character of cultural studies. To get a sense of the way cultural studies (using the British context) has been developed and consolidated in relation to the themes established by what have become a number of key writers and approaches. To see the way the different theories introduced and illustrated in this book reflect developing interests within cultural studies.

Concepts The key concepts introduced in this chapter are: cultural studies, culture, the culture and civilization tradition, minority culture, mass culture, popular culture, the Frankfurt School, the culture industry, ‘culturalism’, the uses of literacy, the making of the English working class, culture as a whole way of life, youth subcultures, hegemony and organic intellectuals.

Introduction

These opening sections reflect on how the book fits into the (mainly British) cultural studies tradition, providing a brief ‘refresher course’ for readers who are familiar with cultural studies and some vital contextualization (or a ‘kick start’) for those who are relatively new to the area. In very general terms I shall show how contemporary cultural analysis has grown out of (and beyond) approaches which tended to privilege ‘high’ culture over ‘popular’ or mass forms and indicate how the writers and theories relate to the general structure of the present book.

Cultural studies?

I want to begin this chapter with a number of questions. One, having sat down to write a book about theory and practice in cultural studies, can I say, beyond all doubt, that I know what culture is? Two, am I so sure about what cultural studies is that I can just start using it, without needing to reflect on it in any way? The answer to these questions is ‘yes and no’. The term ‘culture’ can be made to have specific, intelligible meanings and there are departments of cultural studies with common ways of understanding and analysing ‘culture’, so where are the problems?

The problems reside in the fact that the practitioners who think of themselves as working in cultural studies are not necessarily in agreement about the precise definition of culture or about exactly what constitutes the area in which they are working. I have just referred to cultural studies as ‘an area’; however (as I have suggested elsewhere, Walton, 2008: 291), it might be more effective to see it as a contested space in which a very diverse set of analytical practices take place. Cultural studies exists within educational institutions in many parts of the world and this means that what it ‘is’ is a product of a constant negotiation that takes place in the lecture room, in conference halls and publications. This means that books recommended for cultural studies will often be aimed at other areas like English Studies, Geography, Sociology, Social Studies, Communication, Film and Media Studies (and vice versa). This is because these areas share both thematic and theoretical legacies and these are all areas in which the meanings of culture are negotiated and deployed.

As Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler have observed, cultural studies has no particular methodology and ‘draws from whatever fields are necessary to produce the knowledge required for a particular project’ and is sometimes ‘agressively anti-disciplinary’. Furthermore, it is ‘pragmatic, strategic and self-reflexive’ (1992: 2). These factors complicate the identity of cultural studies, even while they create certain dominant ways of thinking about and understanding culture and producing knowledge about it. This is why John Frow has argued that even though cultural studies exists ‘in a state of productive uncertainty about its status as a discipline’ there has been sufficient institutional consolidation of the area for practitioners to identify themselves with one another (1995: 7). To sum this up we might say that cultural studies did not pre-exist theory and practice – it is a product of them (and one of the intentions of this book is to offer an idea of what some of the key theories entail).

Despite the consolidation that Frow mentions, no book can place itself outside national borders and this volume cannot escape its geographical location or its social and intellectual allegiances (written by someone brought up in Britain, but who lives and works in Spain, and has been influenced by North American and other English-speaking cultures, but also by theories developed in other parts of the world). This means that this book comes from a broadly British cultural studies’ perspective, and this needs to be kept in mind. As Graeme Turner (a key figure in Australian cultural studies) has observed, alternative traditions of cultural studies tend to have to announce themselves as such, something which suggests a certain Anglo-centric tendency in English/British cultural studies (Turner, 1992: 642).

However, while accepting Turner’s point I would argue that there is a certain dialectical tension between the local and the general. For example, when John Frow and Meagan Morris wrote their introduction to Australian Cultural Studies (1993) they carefully defined culture within the context of the country in which they were writing. They claimed, for example, that ‘culture’ can be thought of as not only intimately connected to work and its organization but ‘with relations of power and gender in the workplace and the home; with the pleasures and the pressures of consumption; with the complex relations of class and kith and kin through which a sense of self is formed; and with the fantasies and desires through which social relations are carried and actively shaped’. Drawing on the work of Raymond Williams (see below), Frow and Morris suggest that ‘culture’ is a term that can define the ‘whole way of life’ of a social group as it is structured by forms of representation and power. Thus, it is not associated with efforts to claim for oneself social distinction and ‘good’ taste (see the section ‘The Culture and Civilization Tradition’ below). Within cultural studies it is ‘a network of representations – texts, images, talk, codes of behaviour, and the narrative structures organizing these – which shapes every aspect of social life’ (viii).

However, within this carefully localized definition something very interesting happens because this may be seen as a very good starting point for understanding cultural studies in a more general way. Thus, while we have to attend to the particularities of local cultures and recognize that what counts as cultural studies may differ from one geographical location to the next (and even be the object of differences within the same country or institution), there are (as Frow suggested) common (even dominant) approaches which enable some meaningful dialogue to take place between practitioners operating in different parts of the world.

It is important, then, to stress that the contextualizing material in this chapter is drawn (mainly) from the narrow, if highly influential, British cultural studies tradition. This narrative strategy has been adopted as a kind of shorthand to give an idea of how different theories have developed in relation to one another. But (to practise the self-reflexivity mentioned above) this shorthand has to be treated in a self-conscious and critical way. As Andrew Tudor has written, just like tribal societies, emergent disciplines are drawn to myths of origin, where stories ‘stabilize otherwise recalcitrant histories by identifying founding figures’ (1999: 19). Thus, the thumbnail sketch I offer below (with its founding and ‘semi-founding’ figures) must not be mistaken for some kind of seamless, trouble-free history of cultural studies: it is a convenience to give a sense of the area. It is partial and self-consciously metonymic: it is a part that stands for the whole but it is offered with the proviso that we should not confuse England with Britain, or British cultural studies with cultural studies as it is practised in the rest of the world (see Morley, 1992: 2–3; Turner, 1992: 640f.; Jordan, 2002: 147f.).

Having said this, the theories discussed in this and the following chapters have been drawn from different critics from many parts of the world and no one tradition of cultural studies can lay special claim to them. The theories I introduce and demonstrate make up the components of a kind of all-purpose toolbox, to be used, questioned, refined or discarded according to the work they are being required to perform. Furthermore, all the approaches I discuss have had a particularly important influence in cultural studies as a whole and I would argue that familiarity with them is to make oneself a member of a cultural studies ‘interpretive community’ (Fish, 1980). The hope is that this book will help toward realizing that goal.

Of course, like any writer, I have had to take decisions about what aspects of an approach to include or exclude, what to emphasize or leave in the margins, and make choices about how to structure and interpret the concepts and approaches. Even my thumbnail sketch of founding figures in the British cultural studies tradition may be questioned. Chris Jenks has pointed out that there are many neglected antecedents to British cultural studies in the shape of writers like Charles Dickens, George Orwell and Jack London (to name only a few) (Jenks, 1993: 156–157). Many more names might be added, particularly women writers who could be said to be ‘founding mothers’ like Mary Wollstonecraft, George Eliot and, as I have argued elsewhere (Walton, 2008), Virginia Woolf (to choose only three women from three centuries of possibilities).

Culture?

If this book cannot hope to encompass the full extent of cultural studies, then neither can it exhaust the possibilities for the definition of culture, which are enormous – many books having been written about the institutional fortunes of the concept (see particularly Jenks, 1993; Tudor; 1999; Barker, 2000; Hartley, 2003; Turner, 2003). Approaches associated with fully institutionalized cultural studies do not start with a particular or narrow definition of culture but are generally interested in an exceptionally broad range of cultural products and practices. If, as will be seen below, this has not always been the case, there is now wide agreement with Raymond Williams’s observation that culture ‘is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’. Despite this complexity, Williams helped his readers get some kind of grip on the word by tracing its etymology back to the idea of cultivating crops or rearing animals. This provided the basis for its metaphorical use from around the sixteenth century to signify ‘a process of human development’, including the cultivation of refined behaviour, the mind and society in general (1983a: 87f.). This is often the starting point for modern definitions.

The basic notion of culture that commonly informs dictionary definitions reflects this etymology and often draws on Edward Burnett Tylor’s anthropological view of culture as ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits’ acquired by members of a given society (Tylor, 1871/1958: 1). This complex whole (so important to Williams’s approach) also includes ideas, values and the shared traditions that comprise the common bases of social (inter)action which are transmitted, reinforced, refined or replaced by members of a group. However, while these lists of possibilities are very useful at a more general and abstract level, any attempt to limit the definition at the level of particular objects of analysis is futile because as the world changes new possibilities (or domains of interest) for the understanding of cultures are constantly appearing.

For example, when Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler compiled a cultural studies’ reader in 1992 they mapped the area by listing some of its major categories, which included: gender, sexuality, nationhood and national identity, colonialism and post-colonialism, race and ethnicity, popular culture, identity politics, cultural institutions and global culture. They concluded by saying that cultural studies ‘can only partially and uneasily be identified by such domains of interest, since no list can constrain the topics cultural studies may address in the future’ (Grossberg et al., 1992: 1). Of course, since 1992 much has changed and the domains of interest have expanded greatly and new areas of interest present a challenge to contemporary ways of defining and thinking about culture. Not only this, but new theories are constantly being developed and tested to try to do justice to these new phenomena.

This means that cultural analysis has to keep itself open to new possibilities and approaches. In order to show one of the ways in which cultural studies has worked towards this position I shall now review a series of writers who comprise some of the key figures of Tudor’s founding myth of cultural studies. I shall begin with the idea of culture wedded to the notion of civilization in order to understand how cultural studies (at least in the British context) could be said to have been born out of an antagonistic struggle against certain narrow ways of conceiving the cultural terrain. The first approach I will discuss is what is known as the ‘culture and civilization tradition’.

The culture and civilization tradition: Matthew Arnold and the Leavises

The culture and civilization tradition can be seen to be reflected by the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold, and later by F. R. and Queenie Leavis (who began to have an influence on English Studies in the years between the First and Second World Wars). What tends to unite them (despite the historical distance that separated them) is their writing against what they believed were the worst excesses of the Industrial Revolution and their belief that great cultural traditions could, at least to some degree, counterbalance these effects and provide a way forward for society. The title of one of Arnold’s most important books, Culture and Anarchy (1869/1970), is illustrative of this approach. In this book Arnold pitted his idea of culture against those anarchistic forces that threatened what he believed were the very bases of civilized life.

Arnold coined the term ‘sweetness and light’ to describe the essence of culture, which he associated with the ‘moral and social passion for doing good’ (1869/1970: 205) and the ‘endless growth in wisdom and beauty’. This was dependent on making ‘the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere’ (226) and included the idea of the disinterested pursuit of knowledge and the broadening of judgement through reading, observing and thinking (226). What makes this so important is linked to Arnold’s belief that the pursuit of perfection was about the cultivation of the inner self, which involved the disavowal of ‘external’ forms of culture that satisfied base desires associated with material possessions, unhindered competition and the amassing of huge industrial fortunes.

However, while believing in the necessity of educating all members of society, if the ideals of his version of culture were to prevail it was necessary to rely on a few enlightened minds. The idea of culture being defined in this way has been of great interest to cultural critics because it restricts the notion to what is associated with ‘high’ or exclusive forms of culture chosen by a self-appointed social elite. But this model has attracted much criticism because of Arnold’s conception, and the social basis, of ‘anarchy’. This is because, while criticizing the shortcomings of all classes, Arnold was particularly hard on those he named the ‘populace’, complaining that by the 1860s the common people had lost their ‘strong feudal habits of subordination and deference’ and had come out of their poverty and squalor to assert themselves by demanding social and political rights, ‘marching’, ‘meeting’ and ‘bawling’ where they liked (231 and 254).

Thus, Arnold was against working-class demands for rights and equalities, which he saw as creating social unrest and thereby threatening anarchy. Consequently, Arnold embraced the power of the state that was to guarantee ‘right reason’ over personal liberty, and which would effectively smother popular political movements and disturbances through ‘the principle of authority’ (236). For this reason Arnold’s notion of culture is not only linked to elitist attempts to confine it to the narrow tastes and interests of a self-elected minority but to reactionary anti-democratic thinking that actively resists political reforms.

The inheritance of Arnold’s ideas about culture can be detected in the work of F. R. and Queenie Leavis who were instrumental in helping to establish the importance of English Studies at Cambridge University in the years following the First World War (see Inglis, 1993; Strinati, 1995; Storey, 2009a). Their emphasis on the cultural importance of establishing canons of great literature, the need for developing the critical tools necessary for an adequate analysis of it, and the belief in the positive transformative role of high literary culture place them firmly in the Arnoldian culture and civilization tradition. The affinity between their work and Arnold’s is also brought out by F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson’s insistence on the importance of the minority to preserve ‘the finest human experience of the past’ in order to maintain the ‘implicit standards that order the finer living of an age’ (Leavis and Thompson, 1933/1977: 5). Again, this maintenance of cultural standards was something of a gladiatorial task carried out against what they saw as the debilitating effects of modernity.

For these writers part of the task of teaching English Literature involved the training of ‘critical awareness’ that would teach students to develop informed judgements and discriminate between great literary works (minority culture) and the trivial, debased and dehumanizing products of mass culture. The problem for the Leavises was that mass culture (or popular culture like popular fiction, music and films imported from North America) const...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Table
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: How to Use This Book
• 1 Introducing Cultural Studies: A Brief Contextual History
• 2 Structuralism and the Linguistic Turn: Ferdinand de Saussure
• 3 Semiotics: Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Stuart Hall
• 4 Ideology: Marxism and Louis Althusser
• 5 Poststructuralism: Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida
• 6 Doing Deconstruction: Techniques for Practice
• 7 Psychoanalysis: Jacques Lacan
• 8 Applying Lacan: Techniques for Feminist and other forms of Cultural Analysis
• 9 Discourse and Power: Michel Foucault
• 10 Gender and Sexuality: Judith Butler
• 11 The Postmodern Condition: Daniel Bell, Jean-François Lyotard and Jürgen Habermas
• 12 Identity and Consumption: Jean Baudrillard
• 13 Postmodernism Unplugged: Fredric Jameson
• 14 Practising Cultural Studies: Hegemony and Cognitive Mapping
• 15 Where to Go from Here: Cognitive Mapping and the Critical Project of Cultural Studies
• Glossary
• References
• Index