Cultural Analysis

Jim McGuigan

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781847870209, 9781847870193
• eBook ISBN: 9781446242094
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

?Jim McGuigan has done it again. The complex cultural machinery hiding behind the apparently simple ?facts of life? still fresh in our collective memory, has been pulled out from its hiding, exposed, disassembled and put together again, and showed in action of shaping up its products; all that done to the benefit of us all - simultaneously producers and product of the life we share. Another great contribution to cultural studies; and to our understanding of the world notorious for defying/escaping understanding. This is exactly what we need ?cultural analysis? for? - Professor Zygmunt Bauman, Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of Leeds

?Jim McGuigan is one of cultural studies? leading practitioners. This volume is a generous and wide-reaching exploration of how to use cultural theory to explore a wide variety of topics, brought together under the sign of the struggle for a vigorous, participatory public sphere? - Toby Miller, University of California

This book represents a distinctive approach to cultural analysis, using multi-dimensional methods for addressing issues of public interest.

Stressing the impact of both neoliberalism and the formation of a ?cool capitalist culture? that has colonised everyday life around much of the globe, Jim McGuigan deploys his original concept of the ?cultural public sphere? within several carefully analysed case studies, including:

• celebrity death

• festivals and urban regeneration

• ?race? and multicultural controversy

• popular television

• social significance of the all purpose mobile communication device in a privatised and individualised way of life

• riskiness and uncertainty in the creative and media industries

This is a radical intervention in the research agendas and conceptual development of cultural policy studies, cultural sociology and, more generally, in the broad field known as ?cultural studies?. It offers challenging theoretical arguments that are substantiated with concrete evidence of cultural and social processes.

1	THE CULTURAL PUBLIC SPHERE

Introduction

The public sphere is both ideal and actual. The actuality is a good deal less perfect than the ideal of free and open debate that has policy consequences in a democratic polity.

Jürgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, originally published in 1962, identified the formation of a bourgeois public sphere in eighteenth-century Europe, especially in Britain and France. Prototypically, the London coffee houses were sites of disputation where everyone present – middle-class males, for once on a par with aristocrats – had their say, in principle, on the issues of the day. Thus, the bourgeoisie found its voice in the transition from feudalism to capitalism; and this was represented in the press and other forms of public communication, including the arts.

There was always a contradiction, of course, between the ideal and the actuality. Universalising claims were made for equality and freedom of expression that were not realised in practice. It was not self-evidently in the immediate interests of bourgeois men to extend disputatious citizenship to women and subordinate classes. As it turned out, however, from the emergence of capitalism and liberal democracy onwards, the demands of the working class, women and colonial subjects for citizenship and self-determination were framed to practical effect by that contradictory amalgam of the ideal and the actual. They claimed for themselves the same rights as bourgeois men. Such claims not only involved bitter struggle but were, in a sense, logical and, therefore, difficult to argue against with consistency: this is the force of the better argument.

Young Habermas (1989 [1962]) told a tragic story about the rise and fall of the bourgeois public sphere. Press freedom and open debate were, he argued, diluted and distorted by commercial considerations and public relations by the middle of the twentieth century. Moreover, radical demands had been incorporated, to an extent, by the welfare state. This resulted in a generalised quiescence, according to the disappointed Habermas. Grievances had been partly ameliorated, thereby neutralising conflict, politics had become detached from popular struggle and the masses were becoming amused consumers, indifferent to the great issues of the day and preoccupied with their own everyday lives. That is exactly the kind of elitist imaginary that cultural populists are inclined to contest. For them, the meaningful practices of mundane existence are not signs of alienation but, instead, empowerment and ‘resistance’. To what precisely I am not quite sure.

It is important to note that Habermas (1996 [1992]: 329–87) was later to revise his earlier pessimistic conclusions. His latter-day ‘sluice gate’ model of the public sphere awards primacy to social movements and campaigning organisations in forcing issues on to the public agenda that might not otherwise be there at all. Big business and big government would not of their own accord have addressed, for instance, environmental issues to anything like the current posture forced by public protest. Taking the argument further, the field of action for a social justice movement networked across the globe is the public sphere in its various forms and configurations, however much it is distorted by mainstream communications media and politics. Furthermore, inspired by Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1984 [1965]) celebration of the carnivalesque, Habermas (1992) came to appreciate popular cultural subversion of hierarchical relations and, in so doing, also registered his belated recognition of the feminist ‘personal is political’.

The theoretical value of the public sphere concept as a measure of democratic communications, then, is somewhat more complex than its use in the critique of news as propaganda (Herman and Chomsky, 1988). The news is indeed frequently, routinely and structurally propagandistic. This is undeniably so in many respects and must not be set aside by sophisticates as too familiar a problem to interrogate persistently. To take the most obvious contemporary example, the American and British news media’s role in obscuring the reasons for invading and occupying Iraq remains an issue.¹

Still, however, it would be grim indeed were there no space for dissent and disputation. Yet, because disputation is so often deflected on to questions of who said what to whom instead of addressing why something happened, it is vital to appreciate that argument alone is not evidence of an actualised public sphere in operation. Much of the time we are witnesses to what is rightly called a ‘pseudo’ public sphere, where politicians and docile journalists act out a travesty of democratic debate. No wonder, as Jean Baudrillard (1983) suggests, the masses are generally turned off by such ‘serious’ politics and turned on to something else that is much more entertaining. Nevertheless, it is necessary for ‘subaltern counter-publics’, as named by Nancy Fraser (1992: 109–42), to keep up the pressure. Otherwise the spin doctors will have it all to themselves and there is then a frighteningly fascistic closure of discourse.

Every now and again a really big issue does capture popular attention: famine, GM food, questionable reasons for pre-emptive war, global warming and so forth. It must be said, though, these are seldom the most compelling attractions for mass popular fascination. The ups and downs of a celebrity career, minor scandals of one kind or another, sporting success and failure – these are the kinds of topic that usually generate widespread passion and disputation. Such topics may, on the one hand, be viewed as trivial distractions from the great questions of the day or else perhaps, on the other hand, as representing deeper cultural concerns.

The literary public sphere

In Structural Transformation, Habermas distinguished between the literary public sphere and the political public sphere. Although not separate from one another, their functions diverged in a significant manner. Speech and writing went hand in hand, but certain kinds of writing and literary comment transcended fleeting topics of conversation. The Parisian salons, for instance, were important sites of the literary public sphere, somewhere that women were at least present and writers could try out their ideas before committing pen to paper.

Consider, for example, the Lisbon tsunami of 1755 in which in excess of 20,000 people lost their lives. This was news indeed, a conversation topic and the object of what we might now think of as disaster management. Voltaire, however, went further in reflecting on the reasons for such an event in his picaresque novella Candide, which was effectively an attack on both religion and uncritical rationalism. For the complacent ideologue Dr Pangloss, the earthquake was ‘a manifestation of the rightness of things, since if there is a volcano at Lisbon it could not be anywhere else’ (Voltaire, 1947 [1759]: 35). Candide was left none the wiser by this explanation.

Ruthless questioning of conventional wisdom, whether in the guise of theology or what would become public relations in a later period (in effect, ideology), was at the heart of the Enlightenment project and was more likely to be found in an eighteenth-century novel than in a newspaper. Moreover, disquisition on the social role of literature and philosophical reflection in the broadest sense, according to Habermas, prepared the ground for legitimate public controversy over current events. The very practice of criticism was literary before it was directly political (Eagleton, 1984).

The literary public sphere was not about transient news – the stuff of journalism – that is the usual focus of attention for the political public sphere. Complex reflection on chronic and persistent problems of life, meaning and representation – characteristic of art – typically works on a different timescale. Critics tend to have a better memory than the producers of distorted news events. Journalists are often agents of social amnesia, only interested in the latest thing. Old news is no news.

Social-scientific research must address treatment of the event while also putting it in the context of patterns of representation over time as a necessary corrective. Such research, however, is largely confined to cognitive matters and is neglectful of affective matters. It is concerned with the political agenda, selection of information and the framing of issues. The aesthetic and emotional aspects of life may be used to distort the news, but otherwise they are of little concern to critical social scientists. This is unfortunate as public culture is not just cognitive; it is also affective.

Should you wish to understand the culture and society of Victorian Britain, would you be best advised to read its newspapers, such as The Times, or its literary fiction, such as George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–1872) and Anthony Trollope’s The Way We Live Now (1875)? Admittedly, this is a rhetorical question. The great realist novels of the nineteenth century display sociological insight and enduring appeal unmatched by any Times editorial. It would be difficult to make the same claim for novels in the early twenty-first century. Again, however, Times editorials are unlikely to provide better insight. In any case, the value of affective communications is not confined to great literature. Perhaps television soaps are the most reliable documents of our era. Affective communications are not only valuable, however, as historical evidence; they are themselves sites of disputation, an idea to which the history of the arts in general would attest.

Art and politics

Plato wanted to banish poets from the republic whereas Shelley claimed that they were the unacknowledged legislators. So, the overpoliticisation of art goes back a long way in the European tradition, not only on the Left but also on the Right.

Since twentieth-century cultural politics is normally recalled as left wing, it is important to remember that it figured on the right wing of modern struggle as well. Indeed, in the 1930s, Nazism promoted the Aryan ideal in Germany, especially in its bodily form, and attacked ‘degenerate art’. Adolf Hitler, himself a failed artist, hated modernism and sought to establish an eternal classicism modelled on Hellenic culture as the official art of the Third Reich (Grosshans, 1983). Artists were bullied into compliance, sacked from their teaching jobs and forced into exile. The 1937 Exhibition of Degenerate Art (Entartete Kunst) in Munich held modern and Leftist art up to ridicule. After the exhibition had toured the country, ‘degenerate’ pieces of art were sold off at international market prices, including major works by ‘Auslanders’ such as Pablo Picasso, as well as exiles such as Paul Klee.

It is particularly striking how successful the Nazis were at co-opting intellectuals to enact their cultural policies and organise and justify a massive theft of visual art works for the greater glory of Germany (Petropoulis, 2000). Curators, dealers, critics and artists themselves were in the main prepared to do the Nazis’ bidding. It was not only Josef Goebbels’s media propaganda in news, documentary and fiction film, denouncing Jews and others in the name of German purification, that convinced many ordinary Germans of Nazism’s ideological superiority. The Nazis also believed that Germany had the right to actually appropriate and possess the great European heritage of art since the Third Reich represented the pinnacle of civilisation.

In Walter Benjamin’s (1970 [1955]) estimation, the Nazis had aestheticised politics with their showy displays and affective appeal. In this they left a lasting legacy, as anyone who saw Bill Clinton’s rock star presentation on television at the Democratic convention that adopted the hapless Al Gore as his successor might have recognised; and which ironically may have been a minor contribution to the election of George W. Bush. As they say in politics these days, presentation is everything.

For Benjamin, the point of oppositional art was to reverse the process, to politicise aesthetics. There is a bad history of that project on the Left, culminating in Stalin’s socialist realism and a suppression of experimental art and artists comparable to that of the Nazis. Yet, there was also an unorthodox – indeed heterodox – tradition of Western Marxism (Anderson, 1976), preoccupied with cultural questions and a quite different trajectory to orthodox Marxism-Leninism. It was much more open to new ideas and remains to this day residually influential.² Debates in the 1930s about form and media of communication, subject matter and political stance, historical contexts and institutional settings were to inform the resurgence of left-wing cultural politics from the 1960s and 1970s.

There was a very pessimistic side to that Western Marxist engagement with art, culture and politics articulated by Habermas’s own mentors, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (1979 [1944]). The great refusal of authentic art was eclipsed by the mid-twentieth century’s burgeoning culture industry and mass standardisation, according to the Frankfurt School pessimists. In so arguing, they set themselves up as the perpetually elitist fall guys for populist cultural studies. Their insights, however, inaugurated lines of enquiry into the relations between culture and business that are vital to understanding the operations of the cultural field now.³ One of the distinctive features of recent development is not so much the marginalisation of the artistic refusal but its incorporation. Just think of the appropriation of surrealism and other avant-garde art into contemporary advertising, not to mention the commercial nous and profit-making patronage of ‘Young British Art’.⁴

The commercialisation of art is not, however, a novel phenomenon. Since religious, monarchical and aristocratic patronage were superseded by the art and literary markets – one of the salient features of ‘modernity’ – much of the great work of that comparatively recent past was produced in a commercial context. This is quite a different matter from the observation made by Raymond Williams (1980 [1960/1969]: 184) as long ago as 1960 that advertising had become ‘the official art of modern capitalist society’.

Despite the incorporation of art into advertising, it did seem as though everything was still up for grabs during the hegemony of social democracy in Britain; and not only on the counter-cultural margins. Public service broadcasting, for instance, as represented by the BBC in the 1960s and 1970s, provided some space for experimentation and critical argument. This was particularly so in the ‘progressive’ drama of The Wednesday Play and Play for Today. Williams (1977: 61–74) himself commented on one such production: Jim Allen, Tony Garnett and Ken Loach’s The Big Flame of 1969, which imagined a Liverpool dock strike turning into a political occupation.

With the lurch to the Right in the 1980s and 1990s, such exceptional work was considered outdated, the remains of a failed Leftism, and became increasingly rare. Already it had been argued that radical interventions from the Left were less significant than what was going on in the very heartland of television. An exemplary statement of this kind was Richard Dyer, Terry Lovell and Jean McCrindle’s (1997 [1977]: 35–41) paper ‘Women and soap opera’, originally delivered at the Edinburgh Television Festival of 1977, where both Williams and Dennis Potter also delivered papers.

Williams and Potter, in their different ways, wanted a further radicalisation of television drama in the single play slot. Alternatively, Dyer and his colleagues wanted appreciation of the actually existing television serial from a feminist perspective. The most popular programme on British television, the archetypal British soap opera Coronation Street, made by the commercial company Granada, put into the foreground the problems and capacities of women in everyday life. Was this a site of the cultural public sphere?

The cultural public sphere

Soap opera is a melodramatic genre. It deals with personal crises and the complexity of everyday relationships. In the form of a continuous serial of overlapping and fragmented narratives, it artfully corresponds to the haphazard flow of events and messy irresolution in lived reality. The genre offers multiple subject positions for men as well as women to identify with.

In order to amass huge and heterogeneous audiences, there is usually something on offer for everyone. Viewing may be a casual distraction from domestic labour or of passionate intensity, a special and sacred moment. You can keep up without paying much attention. Alternatively, the current episode may be the highpoint of the day in some households. Above all, for the lonely, physically or mentally isolated viewer – such as single parents, widowed elders and anguished teenagers – soap opera produces a vicarious sense of urban community, a mundane albeit degraded utopia (the rural setting of Yorkshire TV’s Emmerdale is a comparatively rare exception to the general rule). This is especially notable in the leading and long-running British soaps – Coronation Street (1960–) and EastEnders (1985–) – ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction: cultural analysis
• 1 The cultural public sphere
• 2 British identity and the people’s princess
• 3 The social construction of a cultural disaster
• 4 A community of communities
• 5 Identity and the crisis of community
• 6 Sociology of the mobile phone
• 7 Risky culture
• 8 Neoliberalism, urban regeneration and cultural policy
• 9 Apprentices to cool capitalism
• 10 Cultural studies and cool capitalism
• References
• Index