The Practice of Cultural Studies

Richard Johnson, Deborah Chambers, Parvati Raghuram, Estella Tincknell

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2004
• Print ISBN: 9780761961000, 9780761960997
• eBook ISBN: 9781446230602
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

`This is a tour de force… It combines luminous discussion of the core conceptual issues of cultural studies, with a hard-headed, practical sense of how research in the field gets done. The result is a seriously smart, comprehensive survey of the whole terrain of cultural studies itself. This is a book on methods which readers will be able to make their own; and which -- uniquely in the genre -- will keep them buzzing? -

Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary University of London

?The Practice of Cultural Studies is an original introduction to the field. It offers a sophisticated "how-to" guide to doing research in cultural studies. From the difficulties of formulating a problem to the unique articulations of specific methodologies in cultural studies, students will find this book both useful and challenging? - Professor Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina

What is distinctive about cultural research? How does one do Cultural Studies? Unlike many other disciplines, cultural studies has not been explict about the nature of its practice. This book aims to redress the balance in favour of those who are studying culture by providing a comprehensive guide to researching and writing. Based on the methods course at Nottingham Trent and addressed to advanced undergraduates, Masters Level students and those just commencing a PhD, this book aims to provide an overview of specific research traditions in cultural studies, whilst also situating those traditions in their historical context.

The Practice of Cultural Studies:

· Identifies the main methods of researching culture

· Demonstrates how theory can inform and enable the practice of research

· Explores the ways in which research practices and methods both produce and are produced by knowledge

· Looks at the implications of the ?cultural turn? for disciplines other than cultural studies

The Practice of Cultural Studies will be an essential text for students of cultural studies and a useful guide to others studying culture in a range of disciplinary contexts across the humanities and social sciences.

Part I

GROUNDINGS

Introduction

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We have called the first part of this book Groundings because it lays out the basics of our approach to method and is the foundation on which the rest is built. Though we can say this in retrospect, we did not start out with a ready-made theory that we could apply to the rest of the book. Rather, Part I was an exploration, a challenge and a struggle involving successive rewriting of the whole book.

We felt that it was important, first, to answer the question still sometimes asked – ‘What is cultural studies?’ This is especially important for those readers who have not already had an introduction to the subject. In Chapter 1, we answer this question in two main ways. First, by identifying cultural studies, comparatively, as a specific tradition of research and education. Second, by placing it, as a generative presence, within a wider cross-disciplinary academic field of the study of culture.

Chapters 2 and 3 deal with the central tension in views of cultural studies as method. On the one hand, it is often seen as having many methods and being eclectic or pluralist. On the other hand it often seems methodologically distinctive – that is, with a method of its own. In Chapter 2, therefore, we explore the range of methods used in cultural studies, but we argue that they are typically combined. We use a strong notion of ‘combination’ that becomes a key theme of the book as a whole. This is that methods that are truly combined are also transformed in relation to each other. We explore the logic of combination in terms of the different (but related) objects that different methods recognize or construct.

In Chapter 3, we seek the basis of combined methods in a general methodological outlook or method in the larger sense. Here we draw – more extensively than in Chapter 2 – on two philosophical traditions: the tradition of humanistic philosophy known as hermeneutics and feminist debates about knowledge and ‘standpoint’. We end this chapter by showing how the expanded themes of reflexivity, dialogue and accountability, as well as the nature of cultural processes themselves, provide the basis for combining methods and theories.

Chapter 4 approaches the same themes but in a different way, via the detailed practices of research. In a way, this is our own first detailed testing of our general approach to method, though, of course, much real testing happened before this in the theory and practice of our own teaching. We asked, ‘What are the implications of our general principles for the advice we give to student researchers on all the main processes of researching, from defining a topic to writing for presentation?’ This is thus the most practical of all the chapters in this book, though there are similar passages in most later chapters.

One alternative way in which to read Part I of the book – especially for those unfamiliar with cultural studies in the narrower sense – would be to read Chapter 4 (which stands relatively independently) before Chapters 2 and 3 (which are quite complex in parts), but after the introduction to cultural studies in Chapter 1. This would mean starting with the practical applications, then unearthing their principles – a not uncommon method in cultural studies and a powerful one.

1	Cultural studies and the study of culture: disciplines and dialogues

Asking the cultural question – seven different agenda

Historical contexts of the culture agenda

Cultural studies and social movements

Dominant misrepresentations and popular agency

Finding a philosophy? Cultural studies, feminist philosophy and hermeneutics

Relations to other academic disciplines

Explaining transdisciplinarity: a story in four acts

Implications of transdisciplinarity for method

Transdisciplinary strategies

Conclusion

When teaching students across the humanities, practical arts and social sciences, and from many different countries, we are still sometimes asked, ‘What is cultural studies?’ In this chapter we respond afresh to this question by introducing cultural studies as a particular approach within a wider field of the study of culture.

We have organized the chapter around two further questions, trying to offer something new for older readers too. Our first question concerns the reasons for an interest in culture in the first place: why does it become an object of critical study? In answering this question we approach cultural studies as one selective tradition that defines what is interesting about culture in a particular way. We take the idea of a selective tradition from Raymond Williams, who mainly uses it to criticize the ‘deliberately selective and connecting process which offers a historical and cultural ratification of a contemporary order’ (1977: 116). We use it here, however, as a means of critiquing our own tradition building and, therefore, for critical self-reflection and renewal. We view the cultural studies tradition alongside other approaches to the study of culture, other selective traditions, the complicated and contested history of which we can only evoke. This may be enough, however, to identify what has been distinctive about the cultural studies approach and set the scene for dialogues with others.

The second organizing question has to do with the relation with academic disciplines and disciplinarity more generally. If our research questions come from a larger, often political, concern with the cultural, our approaches and methods are drawn, initially at least, from adjacent disciplines. This is a familiar issue, but today it has some new features. What is cultural studies today when every discipline has made the cultural turn? What are the implications for our intellectual strategies of this transdisciplinarity of the study of culture?

Asking the cultural question – seven different agenda

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Despite the fact that we may all make such claims occasionally, objects of research are not really interesting in themselves. The intensity of our engagement, which such phrases express, comes, rather, from a relationship between ourselves and the topics we choose – or that choose us. The idea of ‘the question’ or ‘the research agenda’ are useful ways of describing the bridge between researcher and researched implied by any enquiry (this is an idea to which we will return in Chapter 3).

Culture and power

In a narrowly defined version of cultural studies, the typical questions have been about the production or organization of meaning as a site of power. Cultural processes are important and interesting because they are a medium within which powerful social relationships are played out and possibilities for social betterment are opened up or closed down. A typical way of posing power questions has been in terms of identity – especially where identity is seen as a problematic issue and individual and collective identities are understood as being always created under social pressures (for recent debates on identity, see Brah and Coombes, 2000; Hall and du Gay, 1996).

The cultural question can be asked differently. Implicit in the culture-as-power issue and the questions that arise from it is the idea that everyone participates, however unequally, in the cultural process of making meanings and fixing and shifting identities. Yet, the best-known definition of the cultural – and perhaps still the dominant one in everyday use – tends to narrow the cultural field down to specialized, often elite, high cultural practices and products that are distinguished from common culture and ‘owned’ by experts or privileged groups.

Culture as ‘value’

In this approach, it is the aesthetic or moral value of literature, music or art that is supposed to make them worth studying, not primarily their complicity in powerful inclusions and exclusions. This way of thinking about culture held sway in traditional humanities disciplines until quite recently and continues to be powerfully defended outside the academy. Indeed, conservative academicians still fight for it, often against the canon-breaking claims of cultural and other interdisciplinary approaches (Bloom, 1987). There remains a widespread incredulity, surfacing in attacks on media studies especially, that anyone could spend academic time – and therefore take seriously – studying pop star celebrities, television quiz shows or romantic fiction. It is important to note that, though we may be critical of excluding the popular in this way, researchers in the culture-as-power tradition have their own problems with issues of value.

Culture as policy

Culture is also conceptualized narrowly, though in a different way, when the question is about cultural policy. This discourse of cultural policy is selective in two ways.

First, it tends to address only the policies of large-scale institutions, especially those of governments. In the versions that have grown out of cultural studies, by debt and critique, the study of cultural policy is structured around a particular reading of Foucault. The key focus is on ‘governmentality’ or, in Tony Bennett’s words, ‘the governmental programs through which particular fields of conduct are organized and regulated’ (1998: 84; see also the series introduction in the same volume: ii–iv). ‘Governmentality’ is wider than ‘government’, as the stress on conduct implies. Yet, in practice, policy studies tend to return us to the needs of formal institutions, not least as a result of the funding of research.

Second, the discourse on cultural policy tends, in practice, to treat culture as limited to these particular fields of conduct. Although these fields transgress the older high/low divisions, they are limited to practices in which formal institutions have an interest – typically, sport, art and museums and heritage. To promote a primarily policy-orientation within cultural studies can therefore recapitulate some older reductions. As Raymond Williams argued, such usages involve a class or hierarchical appropriation of culture in its more general and positive root meanings, as cultivation, education or individual and social improvement (1983: 87–93). In the case of policy studies, they also reproduce the old identifications of cultural agency with state – or quasi-state – institutions or cultural elites and forms of official action. This can imply that some of the characteristic addressees of cultural studies – radical professionals, artistic practitioners, students, academics and social movements or indeed, ordinary citizens – do not have cultural policies or strategies for living of their own.

Culture as cohesion

The policy agenda has often been associated with another, potentially more inclusive, agenda – culture as a source of social cohesion and belonging. In this framework, consensus, community or core values are opposed to individualistic or anomic states – typically the social disorder or fragmentation sometimes held to characterize modernity. A classic statement of this framework can be found in Emile Durkheim’s Suicide, itself a response to what Stephen Lukes calls ‘the theme of social dissolution’ widespread among nineteenth-century French intellectuals. (Durkheim, 1952; Lukes, 1973)

Within this agenda, the pressure is to conceive of cultures as shared, homogeneous and tightly bound. This may still be the case even where such unities are viewed as constructed or imagined (for example, Anderson, 1991; Gellner, 1983). Such conceptualizations do not rule out difference and power, but they are assigned to the relations between whole cultures, not within them. Cultures, in their internal relations, according to this account, are (or should be) conflict-free zones. Difference within these zones thus become signs of social pathology.

This type of cultural agenda is politically alive today despite extensive intellectual critiques. It is especially associated with the racialization of politics and national identity in Western European states and neo-conservative movements. Stressing the essential unity of the (white) nation goes along with identifying the (black, immigrant, asylum seeker or ausländer) other as the source of social disorder. Thus, the racialization of street crime as mugging was a key theme in one of the first studies of Thatcherism as a law and order politics in the late 1970s (Hall et al, 1978), while later analysis argued that a particular cultural theory – a new racism or ethnic absolutism – was central to New Right politics more generally. (Gilroy, 1987; A.M. Smith, 1994).

Another example of conservative cultural theory today can be seen in post-Cold War international relations, where cultural difference may be understood as the clash of civilizations when whole value systems collide. In liberal multicultural discourse, too, diversity is sometimes grasped as the peaceful coexistence of whole, discretely bounded cultures, not as the living out of power-laden differences or basis for border crossing and cultural syncreticism (Donald and Rattansi, 1992).

Historically, however, this combination of racism and conservative cultural theory is neither so new, nor so exclusively right wing. There is a long history in Europe of the construction of national identities as a result of the idea of a people, or volk, with some essential characteristics. This essence has often been racialized and assigned typical cultural expressions. Such a combination was a powerful feature of Nazi philosophy and underpinned its racist and genocidal practice, but, as recent studies in the Netherlands have shown, these volkisch versions of ‘the people’ and national identity were a standard feature of European academic work on history and popular culture – and in the human sciences more generally – both before and after World War II, as well as informing popular politics. They also underpinned many different kinds of political stance, including, for instance, an anti-Nazi patriotism (Eickhoff, Henkes and van Vree, 2000).

It is important to understand the continuity of racialized thinking within academic disciplines in Europe for two main reasons. First, as racism was so often associated with essentialist thinking – the reduction of cultures or societies to a central core or feature – the growth of systematically anti-essentialist thinking in cultural and social theory, especially from the 1970s, acquires a new significance (see Chapter 3).

Second, it is important to recognize that cultural studies, as a tradition, has not been exempt from this version of cultural conservatism. Because of its association with Englishness, it has often worn, in Paul Gilroy’s phrase, ‘an ethnic garb’ (1992: 187). It has also been complicit in the tendency to conflate culture, nation and ‘race’ – that is, whiteness – a tendency made manifest by the struggle to get black British cultural traditions, themselves hybrid ‘Atlantic’ formations, fully recognized within cultural research. Moreover, Gilroy, among many other anti-essentialist writers, observes that other collectivities – including class cultures, but also communities or political identities such as ‘women’, ‘gay’ and, indeed ‘black’ – have been conceptualized according to a similar essentialist model. (1992, 1993b).

As we will argue in Chapter 2, one of the key theoretical movements within cultural studies has involved the critique of the model of cultures as pure, bounded, whole or entire. Indeed, cultural studies has been forced to question ‘culture’ itself, its own key category.

Culture as standardization

A different question about culture has focused attention on standardization or convergence. Uniformities can arise from mass culture – the capitalist commercialization or commodification of forms of popular culture – or globalization or bureaucratic or instrumental rationality, work discipline or other forms of social control.

Standardization or regulation are often seen as accompaniments of modernity and have been a pervasive preoccupation of sociological theory from Max Weber onwards. Such concern has a Marxist variant in the cultural and aesthetic critique of mass culture among some Frankfurt School theorists (Held, 1980; Horkheimer and Adorno, 1972). Indeed, some versions of globalization theory and studies of international communication paint this picture large on a worldwide scale, while, in many ways, standardization remains the cultural thesis of sociological theory. This form of abstract and generalizing social description tends to ce...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I Groundings
• Part II Settings
• Part III Readings
• Part IV Meetings
• In conclusion
• References
• Index