|
||
|
|
|
Culture-Metaculture |
|
|
1 Pages 1-10 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.1 Page 1 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.2 Page 2 |
▲back to top |
CULTURE/METACULTURE
Culture passes into the twenty-first century as a key word in
contemporary critical thought. However, it continues to mean many
different things to many different people. Culture/Metaculture
introduces and analyses the changing definitions of this crucial term.
The author begins by examining the European tradition of Kulturkritik,
which, in the wake of the First World War, offered minority culture as
the antidote to ‘mass’ modernity. He then charts key challenges to
this conception of culture, beginning in the 1930s and culminating in
post-war theories of popular culture. This is followed by a detailed
analysis of the rise of Cultural Studies. While Kulturkritik had found its
version of culture in the literary canon, the discipline of Cultural Studies
grew up around discussions of the media, contemporary politics,
ethnicity and Marxism. The work concludes with a brilliant discussion
of ‘metaculture’, or the ways in which culture, however defined, speaks
of itself.
Francis Mulhern’s interdisciplinary study reveals fascinating links
between key political issues and the many definitions of culture. The
result is an unrivalled introduction to a concept at the very heart of the
new critical idiom.
Francis Mulhern is Professor of Critical Studies at Middlesex
University, UK. He is author of The Moment of Scrutiny (1979) and
The Present Lasts a Long Time (1998).
|
|
1.3 Page 3 |
▲back to top |
THE NEW CRITICAL IDIOM
SERIES EDITOR: JOHN DRAKAKIS, UNIVERSITY OF STIRLING
The New Critical Idiom is an invaluable series of introductory guides
to today’s critical terminology. Each book:
• provides a handy, explanatory guide to the use (and abuse)
• of the term
offers an original and distinctive overview by a leading literary
• and cultural critic
relates the term to the larger field of cultural representation.
With a strong emphasis on clarity, lively debate and the widest
possible breadth of examples, The New Critical Idiom is an
indispensable approach to key topics in literary studies.
Other books in this series:
Colonialism/Postcolonialism by Ania Loomba
Discourse by Sara Mills
Gothic by Fred Botting
Historicism by Paul Hamilton
Humanism by Tony Davies
Ideology by David Hawkes
Intertextuality by Graham Allen
Literature by Peter Widdowson
Metre, Rhythm and Verse Form by Philip Hobsbaum
Myth by Laurence Coupe
Pastoral by Terry Gifford
Romanticism by Aidan Day
Sexuality by Joseph Bristow
Stylistics by Richard Bradford
The Unconscious by Antony Easthope
|
|
1.4 Page 4 |
▲back to top |
CULTURE/
METACULTURE
Francis Mulhern
LONDON AND NEW YORK
|
|
1.5 Page 5 |
▲back to top |
First published 2000
by Routledge
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2001.
© 2000 Francis Mulhern
The right of Francis Mulhern to be identified as the Author of this Work has
been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or
utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now
known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in
any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Mulhern, Francis.
Culture/metaculture / Francis Mulhern.
p. cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Culture. I. Title.
HM621 .M85 2000
306–dc21 99-054750
ISBN 0-415-10229-4 (hbk)
ISBN 0-415-10230-8 (pbk)
ISBN 0-203-12982-2 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-203-17604-9 (Glassbook Format)
|
|
1.6 Page 6 |
▲back to top |
CONTENTS
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
ix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
xi
INTRODUCTION
xiii
PART I
KULTURKRITIK
1 Against mass civilization
3
The unpolitical Thomas Mann
4
Julien Benda, clerc
7
Karl Mannheim’s intellectuals
9
Ortega’s aristocratic vision
12
F.R. Leavis’s critical minority
14
The discourse of Kulturkritik
18
2 In the wars
22
Freud’s critique of Kultur
25
Woolf’s androgyny
28
Orwell’s English
35
Marxist incursions
43
Anti-fascist culture
46
3 Welfare?
49
Eliot’s whole way of life
51
Hoggart and the abuses of literacy
55
4 A reckoning
61
Raymond Williams: beyond culture-and-society
64
From paternalism to democracy
69
|
|
1.7 Page 7 |
▲back to top |
vi
CONTENTS
PART II
CULTURAL STUDIES
1 A theory
77
Williams: creation is ordinary
79
Marxism and cultural theory
83
2 A centre
93
Literature and Contemporary Cultural Studies
93
From Hoggart to Stuart Hall
97
Ten years of Cultural Studies
100
The new subject
104
3 A theatre of critical situations
107
Hall: beyond New Left ‘culturalism’
108
The structures of signification
111
New times for subjectivity
114
Identities in motion
119
Wrestling with Marxism
124
4 Towards popular culture?
132
Populism in Cultural Studies
134
Bimbos and fans
141
Organic intellectuals?
145
The ‘politics’ of metaculture
148
PART III
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
The desire called Cultural Studies
156
Between past and future
159
Metaculture and society
162
Cultural politics?
169
|
|
1.8 Page 8 |
▲back to top |
NOTES
GLOSSARY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
CONTENTS
vii
175
181
183
193
|
|
1.9 Page 9 |
▲back to top |
|
|
1.10 Page 10 |
▲back to top |
SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE
The New Critical Idiom is a series of introductory books which seeks to extend
the lexicon of literary terms, in order to address the radical changes which have
taken place in the study of literature during the last decades of the twentieth
century. The aim is to provide clear, well-illustrated accounts of the full range
of terminology currently in use, and to evolve histories of its changing usage.
The current state of the discipline of literary studies is one where there is
considerable debate concerning basic questions of terminology. This involves,
among other things, the boundaries which distinguish the literary from the
non- literary; the position of literature within the larger sphere of culture; the
relationship between literatures of different cultures; and questions concerning
the relation of literary to other cultural forms within the context of
interdisciplinary studies.
It is clear that the field of literary criticism and theory is a dynamic and
heterogeneous one. The present need is for individual volumes on terms which
combine clarity of exposition with an adventurousness of perspective and a
breadth of application. Each volume will contain as part of its apparatus some
indication of the direction in which the definition of particular terms is likely
to move, as well as expanding the disciplinary boundaries within which some
of these terms have been traditionally contained. This will involve some re-
situation of terms within the larger field of cultural representation, and will
introduce examples from the area of film and the modern media in addition to
examples from a variety of literary texts.
|
|
2 Pages 11-20 |
▲back to top |
|
|
2.1 Page 11 |
▲back to top |
|
|
2.2 Page 12 |
▲back to top |
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
John Drakakis generously invited me to write this book, and still more generously
bore with my tardiness in completing it; for this and for his critical encouragement
and advice, my warm thanks to him.
Some parts of the book, and versions of its general argument, were first
aired in seminar papers; for these opportunities I have to thank Mick Jardine,
Maria Elisa Cevasco and Tadhg Foley, and their respective colleagues at King
Alfred’s University College, Winchester, the University of São Paulo, and the
National University of Ireland, Galway.
Pilot versions of the general argument appeared in Travesia (now Journal
of Latin American Cultural Studies) and Monthly Review. I am grateful to the
editors of those journals, and particularly to John Kraniauskas and Ellen
Meiksins Wood. I have reiterated some of the material of ‘A welfare culture?’,
published in Radical Philosophy 77, May–June 1996, for which I thank the
editors.
Rachel Malik and Peter Osborne have been models of critical support: to
them, my special thanks.
|
|
2.3 Page 13 |
▲back to top |
|
|
2.4 Page 14 |
▲back to top |
INTRODUCTION
Culture has long been said to be a rare and a vulnerable thing, but no one could
speak likewise of the discussion it inspires, which, in contrast, has never been
more prolific or robust. Familiar modern understandings of the term persist,
more or less strongly: culture as a storehouse of essentially human or essentially
national values. But they persist now in more or less radical tension with the
newer understanding of culture as the ordinary social, historical world of
sense, of ‘symbolic’ or meaning-bearing activity in all its forms. ‘Culture’ in
that expanded, secular definition has imprinted itself on a whole range of
disciplines: history and sociology, for example, and literary studies, where the
older meanings have been fundamental, and above all Cultural Studies itself. It
follows that no one venturing to add a further volume to the library of
contemporary writing in the area should expect the hospitality once readily
accorded to travellers from faraway places. Readers will wish to know in what
this book differs from others near to hand. My subject is the discussion itself,
‘culture’ as a topic in twentieth-century debate, in Europe and particularly in
Britain.
A topic, in old, strict usage, is not merely what is spoken of – an object real
or imagined: it is an established object of discussion with established terms of
treatment. Thus, a topic is always already a convention, implying a settled
relationship between those who participate in it. The most successful topics
achieve the status of commonplaces, a metaphor we do well to take literally. In
the words of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, they are ‘those places in
discourse in which an entire group meets and recognizes itself (1993: 168).
The ‘place’ I wish to explore here is the one called culture: that is ‘culture’ as
the topic of some major intellectual traditions of the past century. My own
redescription of that topic, which I intend also as a critical displacement of it,
|
|
2.5 Page 15 |
▲back to top |
xiv INTRODUCTION
is metaculture, or metacultural discourse. The purpose of the following
paragraphs is to introduce these and other key elements in the conceptual
vocabulary of the book, and in this way to outline its argument.
Most varieties of discourse identified by the Greek prefix meta-(literally,
‘after’ or ‘with’) will have one and often two distinctive characteristics. They
will be concerned with the most general and fundamental problems in their
domain – thus, Freud reserved the term ‘metapsychology’ for his most
systematic theoretical accounts of mental life. And they will be more or less
strongly reflexive, being themselves a part of what they speak of – thus,
‘metafiction’ designates a kind of fiction about fiction. Metacultural discourse,
then, is that in which culture, however defined, speaks of itself. More precisely,
it is discourse in which culture addresses its own generality and conditions of
existence. All four terms in this formulation need emphasis. It is the generality
of sense-making activity that is in question, not merely one or another of its
many specific varieties, say, religious worship or window-shopping or poetry
or adult education. That generality is addressed in its social–historical conditions
of existence, which may be conceptualized, for example, as ‘industrialism’, or
‘capitalism’, or ‘modernity’. Metaculture is discourse in the strong sense of
that versatile term: a historically formed set of topics and procedures that both
drives and regulates the utterance of the individuals who inhabit it, and assigns
them definite positions in the field of meaning it delimits. The position of
seeing and speaking and writing in metacultural discourse, the kind of subject
any individual ‘becomes’ in practising it, is culture itself. There will be more to
say shortly. For now, let me stress that no one, to my knowledge, has ever
described themselves as a practitioner of ‘metacultural discourse’. The term
and the concept have emerged from the critical work of writing this book. If
any one term or reference or affiliation might be said to link all the writers
discussed here – and in bare truth there is none – it would be the more familiar
culture.
One term, but hardly one meaning – the very phrase ‘culture itself’ seems
unwarrantable. ‘Culture’ has designated quite distinct and sometimes mutually
|
|
2.6 Page 16 |
▲back to top |
INTRODUCTION
xv
foreign fields of practice and inquiry, and has graced the banners of radically
opposed causes. The largely chronological sequencing of this book, from 1918
to the near-present, does not imply a simple narrative of progress (or decline).
Its main principle of organization is comparative, foregrounding two mutually
antagonistic traditions of discourse on culture – Kulturkritik and Cultural
Studies – terms that must themselves be clarified here. The first is much older.
The second took shape in conscious opposition to it. But my chief critical
interest lies in the evidence of continuity between them, in the conceptual
form they appear to have in common. Here is the sense in which the singular
‘culture itself’ is perhaps not so ambiguous after all.
The German term Kulturkritik passes literally into English as ‘cultural
criticism’. However, this simple translation creates conceptual confusion. The
English phrase is in widespread use as a general term denoting any kind of
formal discussion of any activity thought of as cultural: literary criticism, film
reviews, fashion commentaries of a certain kind, homilies on contemporary
sexual mores are so many instances of cultural criticism in this familiar, spacious
sense. However, the historical meaning of Kulturkritik is much narrower. For
that reason – for the sake of simplicity, in fact – I have preferred to import it
directly (and to print it, henceforward, without its foreignizing italics) as a
term that is both adequately general and properly restrictive, and thus critically
exact. Kulturkritik, in its classic European form, took shape in the later eighteenth
century as a critical, normally negative discourse on the emerging symbolic
universe of capitalism, democracy and enlightenment – on the values of a
condition and process of social life for which a recent French coinage furnished
the essential term: civilisation (Febvre 1973: 219–57). Germany was the
continental heartland of this discourse: it was in the philosophical histories of
Johann Gottfried von Herder that Zivilisation was first questioned in the name
of Kultur ([1774] 1969: 179–224). The second major European centre of
Kulturkritik was England, whose counterpart tradition is the subject of
Raymond Williams’s classic study, Culture and Society. ‘The basic element’ in
this discourse, Williams concluded there, ‘is its effort at total qualitative
|
|
2.7 Page 17 |
▲back to top |
xvi INTRODUCTION
assessment ... of the whole form of our common life’ ([1958] 1961: 285) – or
what I have termed the ‘generality’ of symbolic life and its historical ‘conditions
of existence’. The critical resources for that effort were confirmed by the poet
Matthew Arnold, in the 1680s, as ‘culture’. Culture, for Arnold, was a normative
value: it was ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’, ‘the
passion for sweetness and light’, ‘the study of perfection’, harmonious and
general; it was ‘right reason’ concerned to ‘know the object as in itself it really
is’ ([1869] 1932). Although developmental in character, culture was universal
in its moral scope and application, emerging from and directed towards what
was distinctively human in humanity, the ‘best self’ that might qualify and
even overrule the ‘ordinary selves’ of everyday class and other social interests.
It was the spiritual basis of a possible civil order, as binding in its sphere, and,
ideally, as commanding as the state itself.1 Culture, in this construction, is not
merely a repository of value: it is the principle of a good society. Arnold’s
statement of the cultural principle, as it can pointedly be called, became classic
in English-language Kulturkritik in the twentieth century.2 Yet his assumption
that the norms of culture were necessarily those of universal humanity is not
typical of the tradition more widely seen. Herder, too, valued Humanität and
its development, but the ‘culture’ that mediated that ‘human-ness’ was, for
him, always in reality plural and historically relative. Cultures were the symbolic
forms of life of human groups, shaped in diverse conditions and growing into
new shapes as they encountered new demands and opportunities. The civilizing
process could not, or should not, uproot these equally though differently
‘human’ cultures, whose most important emerging variety was the nation.
‘Human nature is not the vessel of an absolute, unchanging and independent
happiness, as defined by the philosopher. . . . Even the image of happiness
changes with each condition and climate. . . . each nation has its centre of
gravity within itself, just as every sphere has its centre of gravity’ (Herder
[1774] 1969: 185–6). Here, too, is the cultural principle. Of course, this
romantic counter-emphasis on culture-as- national-value, as the ‘traditional’
virtue of a people, seems incompatible with Arnold’s humanism. But intellectual
|
|
2.8 Page 18 |
▲back to top |
INTRODUCTION xvii
history does not follow the rules of logic textbooks, and, as we shall see,
twentieth-century Kulturkritik sustained both varieties of ‘culture’ and produced
hybrids of the two, all of them sharing a single discursive form.
The greater historical impact of Herder’s thought was registered elsewhere,
however, in the emergence of an array of discourses on ‘culture’ as what T.S.
Eliot would call ‘a whole way of life’. The world-transforming power of
nationalism, from the mid-nineteenth century into our continuing present, has
ensured the universal currency of ‘culture’ in this sense – as, in effect, ethnic
custom. In the field of formalized intellectual inquiry, its main sponsor, until
the later twentieth century, was anthropology. ‘Cultural’ or ‘social’
anthropology, the settled names for a pursuit first proposed as simple
‘culturology’, took shape as the putative science of the ‘superorganic’: of
learned rather than instinctive behaviour, or, more strictly, the ‘symboling’ life
of societies (White 1975). ‘Culture’ in this sense might indeed be valued
(according to the lights and purposes of the visiting anthropologist) but it was
not, in Arnold’s general sense, a normative value, a precious human endowment
of spiritual capital. It was the totality of symbolic life in a given social space.
Anthropology itself lies beyond the range of this study. However, Eliot’s
phrase is only one among many illustrations of its exemplary status in the
wider intellectual life of the past century, and, specifically, of the inspirational
value it was assigned in the formation of a new discourse on culture in mid-
century Britain – what came to be called cultural studies. That lineage of
cultural studies (which, in this book, I spell with initial capitals, except where
my intended reference is not only to the academic practice so named) emerged
in a complex process that was both a continuation and a displacement of
English Kulturkritik. The theoretical stakes in that process have a major part
in what follows here, and for now I will indicate only as much as may serve to
move these introductory remarks towards their conclusion. Cultural studies
has evolved more than once (Carey 1997; Frow and Morris 1993). It has more
or less established positions throughout the Englishspeaking world, and has
now extended its reach well beyond them. Its niche, it seems, is the planet. The
|
|
2.9 Page 19 |
▲back to top |
xviii INTRODUCTION
critical account I develop here is based on the British case, which, I know, is
not the beginning and end of all possible cultural studies. At the same time, that
variety has thus far enjoyed greater international currency than any other, and
even if it has no special claim to global authority, its record deserves particular
attention. For the same reason, the arguments advanced here have implications
reaching beyond the British setting.
Cultural Studies has favoured a radical expansion of the field of relevant
inquiry, and a strictly egalitarian ethic of attention within it. Any form or
practice of signification is in principle eligible, without any presumptive test
of ‘quality’. But these are studies with a mission that is not merely sociological
or anthropological. The justifying purpose of Cultural Studies has been to
revoke the historic privileges of ‘culture with a capital C’ (the sovereign value
of Kulturkritik) and vindicate the active meanings and values of the subordinate
majority (the so-called ‘masses’) as core elements of a possible alternative
order. ‘Power’ is indissociable from meaning, in this perspective, which is thus
necessarily ‘political’ (Hall 1997). My argument will be that Cultural Studies
is prone to misrecognize itself: that its predomi nant tendency has been to
negate the specific social values of Kulturkritik while retaining their deep
form, which it therefore repeats as the pattern of its own strategic imagination.
The coordinates of that form are culture, authority and politics.
In both versions, culture is the object but also, and crucially, the subject, the
ideal subject, of discourse. It is the cultural principle itself (be it elite or
popular) that furnishes the conditions of seeing and speaking, that determines
what I see and speak of, and as what ‘I’ do so. In keeping with this, the cultural
principle also sets the conditions of ethically valid intellectual practice:
metacultural discourse is normally, among other things, a reflection on the
meaning of intellectual vocation. The ultimate stake, in all cases, is social
authority. ‘Power’, in the indiscriminate sense that has been standard in Cultural
Studies, is a blunt instrument of scant theoretical value here. Injunctive social
practices – those of command and control in the broadest senses – take a
variety of forms, including the sanctions deriving from the ownership and
|
|
2.10 Page 20 |
▲back to top |
INTRODUCTION xix
control of property and, at the extreme, physical coercion, for which the term
‘power’ is perhaps best reserved. Cultural injunction is typically not of that
kind: its dominant mode is authority, which is itself predominantly cultural in
substance. Authority relations are those in which assent is secured on non-
coercive grounds. The mark of authority, as a form of injunction, is that it
normally appears as if granted by those who defer to it. Metacultural discourse
lodges a polemical authority claim of the most general kind, in respect of social
relations as a whole: the cultural principle is the basis of public virtue. The
socially contrasted ideal subjects of Kulturkritik and Cultural Studies are alike
in this: both urge ‘culture’ as the necessary, unregarded truth of society, whose
curse is the inadequacy of the prevailing form of general authority, the political.
It is politics as such that is fundamentally in question here: in declared principle,
in the case of Kulturkritik, or as a self-defeating final implication, in the case of
Cultural Studies. The latter’s ‘political’ assault on high- cultural privilege has
turned out to be, at the same time, a renewed attempt at a ‘cultural’ dissolution
of politics – a popular-leftist mutation of metacultural discourse.
The evidence for these bald claims, and the elaborated, more nuanced
arguments they depend upon, are the substance of this book. Part I begins
with a discussion of European Kulturkritik, in its diverse national sensibilities
and intellectual formats. The novelist Thomas Mann, the philosophers Julien
Benda and José Ortega y Gasset, the sociologist Karl Mannheim and the
literary critic F.R. Leavis are brought together as classic critics of ‘mass’
modernity between the First and Second World Wars. Sigmund Freud, Virginia
Woolf, George Orwell and assorted Marxisms then illustrate the stresses to
which the common assumptions of such criticism were subject in the 1930s.
T.S. Eliot and Richard Hoggart define the new terms of cultural reflection in
post-war Britain. The crucial work of Raymond Williams enables a critical
retrospect on the tradition of Kulturkritik and the break into a new way of
theorizing culture. Cultural studies, broadly understood, is the second major
tradition discussed here. Part II reconstructs the conceptual formation of
Cultural Studies, focusing particularly on the British tradition. Stuart Hall and
|
|
3 Pages 21-30 |
▲back to top |
|
|
3.1 Page 21 |
▲back to top |
xx INTRODUCTION
his collaborators at the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies come to the
fore here, in discussions of media analysis, contemporary politics, ethnicity,
Marxism and the controversy over ‘populism’ in the analysis of culture.
Throughout this discussion of Cultural Studies, my critical priority is to elicit
its discoverable relations with Kulturkritik, the tradition it has struggled against,
and to elucidate its opaque ambivalence towards the tradition of theory and
politics to which it owes its existence, namely Marxism. The unifying theme
of Parts I and II is the relationship between culture, in its conflicting senses,
and the idea of politics. The concluding part of the book is devoted to a general
analysis, both formal and historical, of the logic of metaculture – the utopian
impulse, common to the old cultural criticism and the new cul tural studies, to
resolve the tension of the relationship between culture and politics by dissolving
political reason itself.
Seen as a whole, then, the book is historical in procedure: metacultural
discourse is understood as an entity shaped and reshaped in determinate social
conditions. Its governing question is critical. What has been the form and logic
of that discourse and how far is it valid? The form of that question, which is
general, in turn dictates the thematic proportions of the book: the older and
newer preoccupations of Kulturkritik and Cultural Studies – the large issues of
markets, classes, gender, sexuality, race and post-coloniality, to name the most
salient ones – are present here, but not as independent headings of discussion.
There are many books that offer a tour of the syllabus in their field, but this is
not one of them. I emphasize this point, believing that there are few easier
paths into difficulty than the one paved with fixed expectations.
Two further remarks may prove helpful. Critical commentaries are as much
works in themselves as the texts they discuss – they may be worthless but
that is another question – and cannot seriously be offered, or safely be taken as
labour-saving substitutes for them. And when, as in this case, the individual
commentaries function as stages in a single, continuous argument, the order of
reading becomes crucial. The book has been written as a considered whole, and
asks to be read as such, in its given sequence – which, indeed, is the most
|
|
3.2 Page 22 |
▲back to top |
INTRODUCTION xxi
accessible way through it. In keeping with the developing scheme for the series
in which the book appears, I have appended a short glossary – not as a would-
be substitute for dictionaries and wider reading but as a convenient checklist
for readers who may be unfamiliar with some of the core terminology and
conceptual references of the text.
|
|
3.3 Page 23 |
▲back to top |
|
|
3.4 Page 24 |
▲back to top |
KULTURKRITIK
|
|
3.5 Page 25 |
▲back to top |
|
|
3.6 Page 26 |
▲back to top |
1
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION
Between the outbreak of the First World War in 1914 and the conclusion of
the Second World War in 1945, Europe underwent one of the most convulsive
general transformations in its history. The killing factories of the Great War
did not run on blood and money alone: they devoured constitutions, social
orders, traditions – whole ways of life. After thirty years of armed conflict in
and among the societies of the continent, fought amid economic disorder and
feverish cultural agitation, little remained of Europe’s long nineteenth
century. In the middle years of this long, complex sequence, it seemed evident
that something was nearing its end. The struggles to interpret and perhaps
affect that outcome form the cultural history of the time.
An adequate account would emphasize the incongruous experience of
inter-war capitalism, which saw brilliant developments in the repertoire of
production – the new world of automobiles, radio and cinema – but also chaos
in finance and trade; the impotence of liberal parliaments in the face of
domestic and international disorder; the challenge of organized labour and,
above all, its revolutionary communist left; and the march of fascism
(Hobsbawm 1994). In most interpretations, then and later, these political
|
|
3.7 Page 27 |
▲back to top |
4
KULTURKRITIK
manifestations illustrated the ultimate terms of choice. But in another
perspective, they were no more than variant instances of a single,
fundamentally coherent and probably irresistible historical tendency. For one
kind of intellectual, the practitioner of Kulturkritik, the historic stake was the
future of culture in the epoch of modernity, whose culminating feature, now
manifest, was the rise of the masses, the distinctive life-form of civilization.
Five classic statements define this high-minded rally against the new times.
Five distinguished writers – one German, one French, one Hungarian, one
Spanish, one English – embody its prophetic style: Thomas Mann, Julien
Benda, Karl Mannhein, José Ortega y Gasset and F.R. Leavis. Together, they
substantiate the underlying unity of Kulturkritik.
THE UNPOLITICAL THOMAS MANN
Thomas Mann’s Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, or ‘reflections of an
unpolitical man’, was written during the First World War, and appeared in its
last weeks.1 Mann is of course best known for his novels, and for his leading
part in the intellectual resistance to fascism. In the Reflections, however, he
expressed himself as a German patriot concerned to explain, as if in an
‘uninhibited ... private letter’, why his country must not submit to France and
Britain ([1918] 1983a: 7). Mann’s wartime nationalism is not, here and now,
the chief interest of his essay (though his casual racism is memorable, and, as
we will see, the theme of national–racial identity cannot be marginalized as
an unfortunate period extravagance). What is important is that he saw in
Germany’s war against the western allies the last stand of a traditionalist
order against the subversive spiritual forces of modernity,2 or in the terms that
were already classic in German idiom, of ‘culture’ against ‘civilization’.
The opposition between German Kultur and French civilization marked
every aspect of the two societies. For all its avowedly personal, essayistic
character, Mann’s discourse was regular to the point of schematism:
|
|
3.8 Page 28 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION
5
Germany
culture/Kultur
art (= poetry, music)
protestantism
burgher
national feeling
pessimism
life
irony
reverence
inwardness
people
aristocracy
ethics
France (and Britain)
civilization
literature (= prose)
universalism
bourgeois
humanitarianism
progressivism
society
radicalism
enlightenment
reason
‘class and mass’
democracy
politics
Mann’s text set these binaries in an abstract, quasi-musical play of
elaboration and variation, with the aim of showing the moral cohesion of each
of the two national sets, and the irreducible opposition between them. Thus,
he maintained, Kultur was intrinsically national, whereas civilization on the
French model was not a development of a national culture but the liquidation
of it. Civilization is ‘what all nations have in common’. Indeed it could not
even claim so much, for the nation, not some programmatic ‘humanity’, was
the true ‘bearer of the general, of the human quality’ (Mann 1983a: 179). It
would be misconceived to challenge French radicalism, with its commitment
to systematic programmes of social change, in the name of a political
alternative – ‘as if the political attitude were not always one and the same: the
democratic one’ (p. 15). Politics as such was the end of personal inwardness,
being ‘participation in the state, zeal and passion for the state’. Democracy
was ‘the state for novels’, or ‘literature’, which, as ‘linguistically articulated
intellect’, was the antithesis of Kultur (p. 218). Democracy was ‘finis
musicae, ... the end of music’ (pp. 23, 200).
|
|
3.9 Page 29 |
▲back to top |
6
KULTURKRITIK
France, then, did not merely represent a contrasting, and now hostile,
national culture: rather it most fully represented the historical tendencies that
would extinguish national feeling and Kultur as modes of existence. Across
the battle lines were ranged the forms of an alien future. Defeat would mean
‘conversion’ to civilization, the spiritual triumph not merely of the military
victors but of their internal collaborators, Germany’s ‘literary men’, with
their corrosive, ‘nihilistic’ enthusiasm for progress and democracy. (Mann’s
prototypical ‘literary man’ was his own brother, Heinrich, at the time the
more influential novelist of the two.) However, it might be that German irony
could moderate the radical probabilities of the future. Irony, in Mann’s
definition, was ‘the self-betrayal of the intellect in favour of life’ – in other
words, the opposite of the ‘radical’ belief in consistency at all costs. ‘Is truth
an argument’, he asked, ‘when life is at stake?’ (pp. 13, 49) And in that spirit,
turning to reflect on the prospect of universal suffrage, he suggested that such
a reform need not entail capitulation to ‘democracy’, that life might yet outwit
radical intellect. An ideal suffrage, answering to tradition, would be
‘aristocratic, ingeniously graduated’. If general voting rights must be
conceded, it was only because ‘in a sphere in which it is impossible to give
each his own, nothing else remains but to give everyone the same’ (p. 194).
Yet, the democratic effects of the reform, an egalitarian pretence fostering
‘the tumult of party campaigns’, might be tempered by another innovation
that seemed progressive but need not be: ‘the freest opportunity for
education’ would promote the formation of an aristocracy of merit such as
Nietzsche had urged. And the governing value of this education would be
‘reverence’ for the national character with its ‘inward’ sensibility, not
‘French’ enlightenment but German traditionalism (p. 187). Forming a type
quite opposed to ‘civilization’s literary man’ driven by the itch to reason and
reform, the authentically German intellectual would embody the
‘suprapolitical, powerfully ethical moment’ of Kultur, would be that
paradoxical representative figure, the 'unpolitical man'.3
|
|
3.10 Page 30 |
▲back to top |
JULIEN BENDA, CLERC
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION
7
The critic and philosopher Julien Benda appeared to confirm Mann’s
comparative geography of mind. He militantly opposed all forms of
romanticism in art and philosophy, deploring the loss of the eighteenth
century’s classical ethos. He abominated any appeal to patriotic affinity in
intellectual affairs – this was ‘essentially a German invention’ (Benda [1928]
1969). Indeed he went further, rejecting humanitarian and internationalist
programmes as mock-universal particularisms of the same kind. His
formative public experience had been the controversy over the trial and
imprisonment of a Jewish army officer on false charges of espionage, the
Dreyfus Affair of the 1890s, which pitted universal against nationalist values
in a mythic civil war of France’s intelligentsia. Kultur was the epitome of
everything he fought against. ‘Irony’ is not a word that will occur to any
reader in connection with his writing, which on the contrary was ‘radical’ and
‘dogmatic’ in its assertion of objective, perennial values. He was, in a single,
sufficient word, ‘French’.
For Benda, the crisis of modernity was that of the ethics of intellectual life.
Betrayal – treachery or treason – was the charge that he laid against the
intellectuals of the new century in his famous polemic of 1928, La Trahison
des clercs. He might more pointedly have chosen ‘heresy’ as the term of
indictment, for in setting aside the modern noun intellectuel in favour of the
anachronistic clerc, or man in holy orders, he committed a whole social
category to an imprescriptible code of belief and conduct, whose model was
medieval priesthood.4 Benda's clercs formed 'a corporation whose only
religion is that of justice and of truth’ (Benda [1928] 1969: 57, translation
amended). For most of 2,000 years, intellect and learning had served ‘the
ideal’, renouncing all individual or group self-assertion (p. 37) – the
contrasting ‘realism’ of ordinary existence. Where intellectuals entered
public controversy, it was as Emile Zola had intervened in the Dreyfus affair
crying J’Accuse!, to defend ‘eternal’, ‘disinterested or metaphysical’ values
|
|
4 Pages 31-40 |
▲back to top |
|
|
4.1 Page 31 |
▲back to top |
8
KULTURKRITIK
against worldly degradation. Increasingly over the past century, however,
their conduct had deteriorated. No longer aloof from social ‘passions’, they
not only responded to their temptations but sought even to inflame them. The
language of eternity now ‘divinized’ the basest desires of everyday life.
‘Passion’, Benda’s word, had also been Mann’s, and for all their
differences of intellectual genealogy and affinity, the object of his criticism
was the same. Mann would not have seconded Benda’s indiscriminate
equation of race, nation and class as objects of love or loathing, but he had
already traced the threat to Kultur to the phenomenon that Benda now
identified as the enemy of intellectual virtue. Modernity was ‘essentially the
age of politics’, and the specific treachery of the modern clerc was to have
adapted to it, not restraining but ‘perfecting’ that ‘passion’, in ‘the age of the
intellectual organization of political hatreds’ (Benda [1928] 1969: 27). The
favouring conditions of this modern development were economic and
constitutional. The relative easing of material conditions encouraged fuller
exploration of social possibilities, with material gain itself now established
as a key index of human value. With the weakening of aristocratic
prerogatives came a new style of political rule, in which popular sentiment
exerted an unprecedented force. These tendencies came together in the
commercial press, and conspired to fashion a new intellectual ethos whose
epitome was ‘the cheap daily political newspaper’. The clercs, sustained at
one time by ‘enlightened patronage’, now depended on the market in print;
they wrote not for ‘peers’ but for ‘the masses’, ‘the crowds’: thus it was that
‘no one writes with impunity in a democracy’ (pp. 9–10, 112). The
cumulative effect of these developments, Benda charged, was the overthrow
of the humanly proper order of social authority. Plato, in Antiquity, had
assumed the primacy of morality over politics. For Machiavelli, on the cusp
of early modernity, these were separate realms. The clercs of the twentieth
century made philosophy out of circumstance, rewriting virtue as
expediency, morality as a gloss on political interest. Benda’s personal
political choices, when he felt obliged to make them, were liberal; and he was
|
|
4.2 Page 32 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION
9
later to conclude that democracy was the only political principle that was
compatible with the values of the true clerc (Benda 1975: 81). But the logic
of his general position was ascetic and reclusive: in a world governed by the
‘realistic’ urges of majorities, authority resided anywhere except in the
timeless truth of the mind, the ideal zone that was his equivalent of the
homeland of Kulturkritik.
KARL MANNHEIM’S INTELLECTUALS
Karl Mannheim shared Benda’s conviction that the crux of modern culture
lay in the disordering of a consensual role for intellectuals, specifically in
their relationship with politics. The themes of intellectual fanaticism and
cynicism that drove Benda’s polemic returned in the sociological argument
of his Ideology and Utopia (Mannheim 1936). Again like Benda, and also like
his adoptive compatriot Thomas Mann, Mannheim saw the crisis as
historical, as the upshot of the disintegration of a traditional society
characterized by hierarchy and limited mobility, and sustaining forms of
political and cultural authority that owed nothing to the goodwill of voters or
markets. However, in a perspective like Mannheim’s, both men were
vulnerable to charges of dogmatism: Benda for his adherence to ‘static’
ideals, which were, as his own medievalizing idiom attested, abstracted relics
of the feudal order, with its ‘closed and thoroughly organized stratum of
intellectuals’ (1936: 10), Mann for his traditionalist commitment to an
essentially ‘German’ collective sensibility. Historically relativistic in a way
that was anathema to Benda, and rationalistic in a style quite foreign to
Mann, Mannheim affirmed the possibility of a progressive political–cultural
outcome. His specific purpose was to elucidate the conditions and objects of
a public role for intellectuals that would be coherent, principled and practical,
with benign social potential. Writing from Weimar Germany, where he had
gone after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1919, and from a
|
|
4.3 Page 33 |
▲back to top |
10 KULTURKRITIK
disciplinary base in the sociology of knowledge, of which he was a leading
practitioner, Mannheim proposed a distinctive strategic function for
intellectuals as such, in a ‘scientific politics’.
Intensifying class consciousness was the hallmark of the present,
Mannheim believed, and political culture was more and more fully organized
according to the priorities of mutually antagonistic ‘party schools’. Against
these partisan schemes of social value, he set the possibility of a ‘forum’ that
would ‘safeguard ... the perspective of and the interest in the whole’ (p. 144).
In Mannheim’s reasoning, this appeal to an overarching general interest –
‘the whole’ as a possible and desirable intellectual allegiance – did not
presuppose a ‘static’ realm of objective truths beyond history (as it did for
Benda) and did not imply only a preference for social compromise. The
principle of his sociology was that all knowledge, and especially political
knowledge, was ‘interest-bound’, and that the major social classes – workers
and bourgeoisie alike – ‘have their outlooks and activities directly and
exclusively determined by their specific social situations’ (p. 140). But in the
case of the intelligentsia, the effects of this determinism were paradoxical. As
a stratum, intellectuals were mixed in class provenance and situation. Their
only social common denominator was education, the site on which all the
rival interests and ideologies of society confronted one another. The
education system (specifically, universities and specialized institutions of
higher learning) was an everyday constituent assembly of the mind, so to say,
in which competing social knowledges might enter a process of ‘dynamic
mediation’ and ‘synthesis’, for the common good. And in this lay the
appropriate political function of the intelligentsia, the possibility of fulfilling
‘their mission as the predestined advocate of the intellectual interests of the
whole’, and thus resolving the cultural crisis of modernity (p. 140).
This prophetic idiom of ‘mission’ and ‘destiny’, which sounds odd in a
would-be scientific discourse, suggests an activist version of Benda: a clerisy
indeed, but in this case positively committed to public affairs. However, the
flow of Mannheim’s reasoning was disturbed by a cross-current of
|
|
4.4 Page 34 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 11
pessimism. Claiming to deduce the politics of the intelligentsia from the
objective tendencies of the modern social order, and, above all, the logic of
its education system, he nevertheless conceded that its implementation ‘in an
epoch like our own’ was ‘scarcely ... possible’. The missionaries would
probably be destined for altogether more desperate duties, as ‘watchmen in
what otherwise would be a pitch-black night’ (p. 143). This is the
understandable rhetoric of a liberal in the later days of the Weimar Republic,
but its logic is that of a wider discursive context. Mannheim’s sociology was
relativist, seeing ‘ideas’ as translations of ‘interests’ – fundamentally, class
interests – whose power of cultural determination was, for most cases,
unqualified. At the same time, he canvassed a politics whose defining value
was an attainable reconciliation of interests, a ‘predestined’ discovery, not
merely of a structured totality of relationships but of a deep wholeness. The
educational practice of intellectuals furnished the warrant and the means of
this mission. Yet Mannheim emphasized that intellectuals were neither a
class nor a supra-class stratum. They formed a mixed-class entity united only
by educational values. And in nominating them as a potentially decisive
political agency, he was entrusting the work of ‘synthesis’ to a possibility that
his general theory appeared to discount in principle: an idea whose
motivating social interest was itself an idea. In this basic respect,
Mannheim’s sociological reasoning ran parallel with Benda’s philosophical
dualism of ideal’ and ‘real’ values, and was bound by direct discursive
affiliation to Mann’s Kulturkritik – on the one hand a driven world of
material interests and their validating ideologies, civilization sightless in the
dark or blinded by artificial lights; on the other, Kultur, the essential, now
homeless values of the human spirit.
Mannheim’s greater confidence in a habitable future only testified the
more strongly to his kinship with Benda and Mann. In his vision of a
specifically intellectual politics of the whole, he reanimated, for the twentieth
century, the figure of a medieval clerisy, which was the ground of Benda's
thought.5 The proposed ascent from the party schools to the forum of
|
|
4.5 Page 35 |
▲back to top |
12 KULTURKRITIK
mediation was not so much a form of engagement in ordinary political space
as an attempt to supervene over it, from a higher plane of social judgement.
The activist intellectual mediator was a version, now improbably powerful,
of the unpolitical man.
ORTEGA’S ARISTOCRATIC VISION
José Ortega y Gasset offered a characteristically more truculent summary of
the contemporary peril. In the phrase that his book of 1930 made famous, it
was ‘the revolt of the masses’. Ortega was prepared to concede that the
historical prospect remained undecided: ‘in itself it contains the twin
potencies of triumph or death’ (1932: 59). Recent decades had seen an
unprecedented ‘rise in the historic level’ of human potentiality. Liberal
democracy and ‘technicism’ (that is, industry plus experimental science) had
dramatically extended the scope of material, mental and moral life, tripling
Europe’s population in less than a century, promoting the idea of ‘rights’ as
the key term of social intercourse and political participation, and, above all,
filling the world with ‘things’ of every kind. These trends represented an
undeniable ‘quantitative advance’, and might indeed support ‘the transition
to some new, unexampled organization of humanity’ (pp. 15, 29–33, 39). But
the sea rises also, and furnishes the metaphor of rising level as deluge; the
ascent of the masses ‘may also be a catastrophe of human destiny’ (pp. 18,
59). Ortega was resigned to the darker probability. The great phenomenon of
the time, for him, was ‘the accession of the masses to complete social power’,
and there was no doubt where their spontaneous inclinations would lead them
(p. 9).
Ortega’s sardonic, worldly manner, contrasting with Mann’s inwardness,
Mannheim’s scientific mien and Benda’s rhetoric of detachment, was that of
a writer who was not only a philosopher but a journalist and, for a time, a
parliamentarian; and the urgency of his polemic owed something to the
|
|
4.6 Page 36 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 13
deepening crisis in his own country, Spain. But he insisted that his purpose
was more than merely political, indeed that it was ‘neutral’, breathing ‘an air
much ampler than that of politics and its dissensions’ (p. 73). The coming of
the masses was not merely a quantitative phenomenon, though as that it was
certainly impressive. It did not consist only in the increasing significance of
popular mobilization in contemporary politics – though anarchist trade-
unions and fascism were objects of particular loathing here. The real novelty
and danger lay in the sheer presence of ‘the multitude’ in social spaces
‘hitherto reserved’, and the consequent transformation of collective
mentality. ‘There are no longer protagonists; there is only the chorus’ (p. 10).
By ‘masses’, Ortega insisted, he did not merely mean the labouring classes.
The ‘dynamic unity’ of mass and minority defined all social classes.
Traditionally, minorities had exercised disproportionate influence in the
higher classes, but there too, now, the masses were growing stronger. ‘Mass-
man’ was simply ‘the average man’, one in whom singularity was absent or
decaying, and who in any case depreciated that quality. The masses were
‘indifferent’ twice over: interchangeable, and unconcerned that they should
be so. Inertia, passivity, indiscipline, narcissism and ingratitude were now
proliferating in ‘an overwhelming and violent moral upheaval’, a ‘tragic’
process inspiring ‘terror’ and threatening a reversion to ‘barbarism’ (pp. 17,
40).
Ortega sponsored a ‘radically aristocratic interpretation of history’.
Society was essentially aristocratic, that is to say, the continuing achievement
of minority effort, and in ceasing to be that, ceased to be anything at all (p.
16). It was in this sense that he defended the ‘old democracy’ against the new.
The former had been ‘liberal’ in respecting the rights and, more important,
the prerogatives of minorities. Universal suffrage had functioned once as a
means whereby the majority chose between ‘minority programmes’ for
‘collective life’ (p. 36). Now it served as the rationale for ‘hyperdemocracy’,
the ignorant, lawless appetite of mass-man in the public domain. Liberal rule
had depended on ‘public opinion’, but this had implied an educated sense of
|
|
4.7 Page 37 |
▲back to top |
14 KULTURKRITIK
priorities that was foreign to the habits of mass self-assertion (p. 97). The
proliferation of human material had overwhelmed the ‘traditional’ controls
(p. 39). Intellectuals could no longer expect to instruct, but must submit to the
presumptuous judgement of ‘the commonplace mind’ (p. 14). Indeed the
intellectual function itself had been compromised by the accelerated
development of scientific knowledge. The modern figure of the technician –
‘actual scientific man’ – furnished the prototype of mass-man. Specialization
favoured the rise of the ‘learned ignoramus’ at the expense of the ‘cultured’
intellectual who, having access to the idea of the whole, could hope to
formulate a unifying social vision. Thwarted at every turn by the automatic
impulses of mass-man, ‘the normal exercise of authority’ in culture and
politics had become impossible (pp. 86, 97).
The possibility of a renewed authority flickered in Ortega’s prose, but was
instantly quenched: ‘the masses are incapable of submitting to direction of
any kind’ – could not submit, even if ‘for a moment’ they mustered ‘good
will’ enough to make the effort. Indeed, it appeared unclear to what spiritual
authority they might be urged to submit. For Ortega’s parting words
disarmingly reframed the argumentation leading up to them. His intuitions of
truth were probably not Benda’s, but who could confidently say? Deeper than
politics, even deeper, it seemed, than ‘culture’ itself, after more than one
hundred pages of acrid cultural diagnosis, the ‘great question’ concerning
modern Europe had not yet been posed.
F.R. LEAVIS’S CRITICAL MINORITY
The blind material impetus of modernity, the increasing scale and
indifference of social life, the weakening of traditional values in the face of
commonplace enlightenment, the lapse of intellectual standards at the
beckoning of worldly advantage, the prospect of a historic loss of the past:
this cluster of themes, familiar now from Germany, France and Spain,
|
|
4.8 Page 38 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 15
recurred in the work of England’s most compelling cultural critic of the
middle century, F.R. Leavis. For Leavis, the modern crisis was that of
‘minority culture’ in the corrosive environment of ‘mass civilization’ (these
were the titular terms of his pamphlet of 1930, the year of Ortega's Revolt of
the Masses).6The stake was the survival of moral memory – or, for it was the
same thing, the health of the English language.
Leavis was an anti-systematic thinker, with a fixed distrust of
programmatic statement; there is no convenient epitome to excerpt from his
collected works. Yet his critical practice was as systematic as any, and
perhaps more programmatic than most. Its conceptual frame was a specific
interpretation of the process of modernity, rendered as a narrative of English
social history since the seventeenth century. In the two centuries-odd after
1600, a society deserving the name of ‘community’ had been weakened,
disorganized and then irreparably torn apart by the logic of economic change.
The defining mentality of community was one in which individual and
collective interests were organized by common codes of understanding and
valuation; in which the hierarchy of social classes was a binding, not a
divisive condition of life, favouring a beneficial cross-fertilization of refined
and popular practices; in which custom might alter without convulsion; and
in which, therefore, there was a spontaneous tendency towards balance and
unity in psychic life and a corresponding ‘impersonality’ in spoken and
written idiom. The sustaining condition of this human order was its
agricultural economy, whose typical rate of technical change was never such
as to disrupt the practical and symbolic continuities of kinship, place and
work, and the codes of value associated with them. The mid-century
revolution disrupted this old order and released the social forces that would
eventually dissipate its moral reserves. Commercial activity intensified, in a
process that led to industrialization, and the extinction of ‘community’ as a
general condition of existence. The social order of meaning and value was
henceforward structured by the discrepant, increasingly antagonistic
relationship between culture – the realm of qualities, moral values, ends – and
|
|
4.9 Page 39 |
▲back to top |
16 KULTURKRITIK
civilization – the domain of quantities and means. This was an unequal
relationship, whose necessary course ran contrary to the interests of culture.
For civilization was forwarded by an automatic technical dynamic; it was the
spontaneous moral sensibility of the industrial economy. Culture, on the
other hand, must now subsist in conditions where it could not take root and
flourish; it was, by virtue of its commitment to a ‘human norm’, an exposed
survivor, the memory of a common life that had gone forever.
Industrialization, with its new forms of work, consumption and
recreation, severed one after another line of cultural continuity, in a process
that Leavis summarized as ‘standardization’ and ‘levelling-down’ (1933a:
18). Religious sanctions had weakened. Increased mobility and expanding
communications had disrupted traditional affiliations. Newspaper and book
publishing, joined now by cinema and radio, observed the inflexible demands
of the market, and wooed mass urban-industrial audiences with various
mixtures of quack enlightenment, stock opinion and formulaic gratification.
There remained only one living survivor from a better past – the language in
its most developed form, ‘the living subtlety of the finest idiom’ (p. 40) – and
it too was now imperilled.
Leavis’s Marxist contemporaries would object that analysis of this kind
mistook the cause of the symptoms it deplored, attributing to a technical
system, industrial production, what should properly be seen as the working
of a specific form of society based on a distinctive form of private property,
namely capitalism. Leavis replied that, in the perspective of culture, the
difference between capitalism and socialism was ‘inessential’ (1933a: 1–12,
160–6). Concepts of property had no place in Leavis’s understanding of
social relations. Common ownership of the means of production, which for
Marxists would fundamentally distinguish socialism as a human order, was,
for him, a dubious or empty gain, in an epoch whose driving-force was ‘the
machine’. And in so far as socialism promoted still further industrial
development, it would merely accentuate the destructive tendencies of the
society it replaced. ‘The Marxian future’, he wrote, seems ‘vacuous, Wellsian
|
|
4.10 Page 40 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 17
and bourgeois’ (1933b: 322). Leavis’s rejection of socialism, and of
Communism as its militant vanguard, was part of a fundamental alienation
from politics as such. The dominant tendencies of mass, mechanical
civilization were fixed and mutually supporting. Their logic precluded the
emergence of a counter-force sufficient to halt or redirect them. An adequate
‘political’ intervention must be specifically cultural in interest and mode, a
mobilization of critical intelligence – of Kulturkritik – for the vindication of
tradition’, the precious touch-stones by which contemporary standards of
judgement might be authenticated and, where possible, deployed to ‘check
and control’ the stupefying development of ‘the machine’ and its life-forms.
Leavisian cultural politics was minoritarian, for it was self-contradictory
to assume that mass civilization could ever incur majority disapproval. Its
favoured instrument was journalism, a mobile, interventionist style of
activity consistent with Leavis’s sense of principled, ‘outlaw’ opportunism.
Its strategic theatre was education, that space where training for the modern
‘machine’ had not yet wholly supplanted older traditions of humane learning.
Its defining practice was literary criticism. The sectarian brilliance of
Leavis’s practice as a teacher and critic, and, for two decades after the
publication of Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, as editor of the
quarterly journal Scrutiny, became a legend (Mulhern 1979; MacKillop
1995). By the 1960s, he was spoken for and against with vehement conviction
in education and literary circles, not only in Britain but throughout the
English-speaking world and beyond. The stories go on being told. What must
be stressed here, then, against all other considerations, “is that Leavis’s
practice, which has often been trivialized as the expression of a personality,
followed with the force of logical deduction from his reading of the modern
historical process. Literature, as language in its finest use, was what chiefly
remained of a common ‘art of living’. But where social spontaneity had once
fostered that use of language, it now threatened to stunt it. The mechanized,
standardized idioms of mass civilization, the cynical enthusiasms of the
publicity apparatus and the genteel or populist tipsters of the book clubs and
|
|
5 Pages 41-50 |
▲back to top |
|
|
5.1 Page 41 |
▲back to top |
18 KULTURKRITIK
reviews pages would co-operate to erase literary culture as memory and
possibility, and in doing so condemn a mock-literate humanity to a deathly
moral amnesia. The future of literature as a living, fertilizing social presence
depended on a reassertion of critical standards: on an unsparing effort of
discrimination that would revalue the heterogeneous accumulation of the
literary past, so as more surely to distinguish the authentic from the
fraudulent or merely conventional in the present. This was the special
responsibility of literary criticism and the ground of its special authority. For
in knowing literature truly, the ‘critical minority’ knew mass civilization as
it could never know itself. Criticism might seem the least powerful of
political offices, but none could match its spiritual authority.
THE DISCOURSE OF KULTURKRITIK
A German novelist, a Hungarian emigré sociologist, two philosophers, one
French, the other Spanish, and an English literary critic: the differences are
manifest, and irreducible. Yet these contrasts recall attention to the more
interesting evidence of a common identity. Indeed the grounds of affinity are
in four of the five cases genealogical: Mann and Mannheim both descend in
the direct line of German romanticism; Leavis in the collateral English line
traceable back through Arnold to Coleridge; Ortega belongs to this kinship
group by adoption, having received his philosophical education in Germany.
Benda’s intellectual formation is unambiguously distinct, but it is the more
striking, then, that this anti-romantic rationalist should bear a marked
resemblance to the others. Only a little biographical licence is needed to
advance the historical claim that in this variegated cluster of writings we have
so many instances of a single discursive formation, best and most
conveniently known as Kulturkritik. The thematic affinities of the group are
self-evident: modernity as degeneration, as the valorization of the mass, as
the paradoxical hyperactivity of essentially inert forces (the ‘revolt’ of the
|
|
5.2 Page 42 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 19
‘passive’ multitude), as the decay or contamination of traditional, normally
minoritarian values, as the disintegrative advance of high and vulgar
enlightenment. These are their fixed perceptions, their standard narratives,
their shared citations of ‘the obvious’ – in a phrase, their common sense.
Further comparative analysis reveals strict formal identities in their terms of
explanation and judgement, and the patterns of their ethico-political desire.
In every case, the object of reflection is a more or less inexorable and co-
ordinated historical process. Ortega’s name for it is ‘capitalism’, though his
reading stresses its technical rather than its specifically social characteristics.
Mannheim’s version of ‘modern society’ acknowledges class conflict (and in
this registers an old debt to Marx), but only as a destructive deadlock, a
chronic dysfunction without developmental value. Benda offers no
articulated account. Mann describes the rise of ‘Roman’, now French,
universalism, with its anti-national norms of humanitarianism, reason and
democracy. For Leavis, the most rigorous determinist of them all, the
essential process is that of self-propelled technological advance and its
necessary effects, which he summarizes, as does Mann, in the canonical term
‘civilization’. Against this modern world of meanings, in it but not of it and
barely able to withstand its pressures, are set the antithetical values of spirit.
For Benda, these are the perennial, unqualifiable intellectual goods, Justice
and Truth. For Mann, in a perfect reversal of sensibility, Kultur is identical
with German tradition. Mannheim’s vision of ‘synthesis’ invokes the feudal
past while postulating a material grounding in the future. Ortega’s ‘culture’,
unlike Mann’s, is European rather than national. Leavis’s is both, playing its
critical part in a theory of industrialism in general but also, and with ever-
strengthening emphasis, signifying the greatness and the vulnerability of a
specifically English moral heritage (Mulhern [1990] 1998: 133–46).
These constellations of counter-historical value – culture or spirit – are not
merely objects of contemplation in this intellectual tradition. They define the
subject of Kulturkritik as a discourse. That is, they constitute the position
from which the modern social process is seen, and furnish the terms in which
|
|
5.3 Page 43 |
▲back to top |
20 KULTURKRITIK
it must be evaluated, and may perhaps be resisted. In every case, general
contemplation of modernity sustains a more or less trenchant ethical
discourse on the practice of intellectuals. Each of these writers insists upon a
binary characterology of his own social kind. On the one hand they deplore,
with greater or lesser passion, the works of ‘party schools’, or the rabble-
rousing laïques (the ‘lay’ intellectual counterparts of the clerisy), or ‘the
specialist’, or the enlightened ‘literary man’, or the academic and
metropolitan racketeer. On the other hand, they insist upon the duties of the
self-consistent ‘intellectual’, or le clerc, or ‘the man of culture’, or the inward
German artist, or ‘the critical minority’.
These professions of faith were in all cases minoritarian. The course of
history seemed irresistible. Pessimism was the characteristic feeling of the
texts – not excluding the relatively sanguine Mannheim’s – as they surveyed
the repellent evidences of mass society. Yet only Benda counselled
withdrawal as a normal response to contemporary disorder, and, even in
arguing so, he appealed to assumptions that united him with his most activist
counterparts. All five writers concurred in their revulsion from contemporary
politics, and in terms that were not themselves politically partisan in any
ordinary sense. What Benda stated at the uttermost limit of idealism, the
contrastingly worldly Ortega also averred. Modern politics must be rejected
not, or not only, because of its current repertoire of options and practices, but
because it was intrinsically deficient as a mode of social authority. In Mann’s
formulation, it was self-contradictory to offer political resistance to
civilization, which was, precisely, the triumph of the political mentality as
such. As Leavis judged, even the most drastic challenge to the prevailing
order – social revolution – was at best ‘inessential’. But this repudiation did
not entail the abandonment of minority claims to authority. Culture, be it
eternal or simply traditional, was an imprescriptible moral reality which
might regain at least something of its rightful authority. The images of
aristocracy and priesthood that recur in these texts are figures of loss but also
of desire – a desire that discovered definite programmatic forms in
|
|
5.4 Page 44 |
▲back to top |
AGAINST MASS CIVILIZATION 21
Mannheim and Leavis, with their parallel visions of an intellectual
corporation capable of controlling the blinkered factions that clashed in
everyday life. Common topics, common forms of argument, a shared position
of vision and address, a single path of ethico-political desire – these are the
marks of a strong discursive formation, whose exemplary instance is the
discourse of Kulturkritik.
|
|
5.5 Page 45 |
▲back to top |
2
IN THE WARS
The will, which Kulturkritik made manifest, to assert the cultural principle as
a sovereign social authority, drove successive attempts to move from
diagnosis to policy, from witness to action. The earliest and grandest of these
was fully official: a League of Nations in culture. In 1922, the League’s
Council established its Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and, three
years later, the Sub-Committee on Arts and Letters – a body including, among
others, Thomas Mann. From Paul Valéry, the French representative and poet
laureate of European intellectuality between the wars, came the proposal for
‘an exchange for literary values’, a means whereby the underlying condition
of all politics, an idea of ‘man and man’s duty’, could be elucidated by those
who specialized in ‘values’, the intellectuals (Valéry 1963: 69–113). The
committee, which was now confirmed as ‘permanent’, began its work in
1931, organizing an international series of conferences (called
conversations) and publishing commissioned dialogues on the grave matters
of the day (called correspondances). Successive conferences probed the
future of ‘culture’ (1933) and ‘the European mind’ (also 1933), or projected
|
|
5.6 Page 46 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 23
‘a new humanism’ (1936). The correspondances series included, among
other things, an exchange of letters between Sigmund Freud and Albert
Einstein, Why War? (published in 1932, Freud 1985: 341–62).
Ortega’s initiative was more confined in scale, but, if anything, more
practical in intent. In 1931, he entered the parliament of the new Spanish
republic as part of the Agrupación al Servício de la República, the collective
‘man of culture’ in political form (Preston 1987: 89). Mannheim, thwarted by
the triumph of German fascism, fled to Britain and there, in the later 1930s,
launched a second attempt to nurture his ‘forum’ into practical being. In
1938, the Church of England’s Christian Council on Faith and the Common
Life created the Moot, something like a national version of Valéry’s
‘exchange’, involving intellectuals in seminars and publishing ventures
designed to bring their corporate wisdom to bear on the modern crisis, to
saturate politics with thought (Kojecký 1971: 163–97; Steele 1997: 98–117).
For as long as the Moot existed, Mannheim was at the centre of its work,
elaborating his vision of a planned society led by educated elites. Among the
participants in Moot events were collaborators in Leavis’s Scrutiny, which
made its own contribution to this group of initiatives by calling for a
‘movement in education’. Propagating the journal’s diagnosis of mass
civilization in the classroom, and equipping a new generation with the
intellectual means to resist the machine in society at large, this movement
would constitute the distinctive ‘politics’ of English Kulturkritik (Mulhern
1979: 107f).
None of these initiatives proved sustainable, let alone effective. Valéry’s
exchange did not outlive its equally abstracted sponsoring body; the last
conference gathered in Nice in 1938 to ‘plan’ a future that was already being
settled by military force. The conversations and correspondances were aptly
styled – genres of personal intercourse, not public engagement. The short life
of the Agrupación (1931–3) cast doubt on the ability of the cultural interest
to turn shared intuition into cohesive political practice. Ortega, who had been
|
|
5.7 Page 47 |
▲back to top |
24 KULTURKRITIK
elected with socialist support, employed himself in stock anti-socialist
tirades in the Madrid parliament. His fellow-men of culture dispersed to
various political quarters, becoming Radicals, independent centrists or
activists in the protofascist Frente Español. The Moot, rather farther removed
from presumptions of influence and from the centres of political crisis,
survived beyond the Second World War, but was so little fuelled by collective
passion that it died with its inspirational figure. A ‘forum’ indeed, the Moot
was always politically miscellaneous, placid in the manner of its Anglican
sponsor, embracing several varieties of conservative, liberal and socialist. Of
its literary remains, the best known is T.S. Eliot’s Notes Towards the
Definition of Culture ([1948] 1962), a work which, ironically, dedicated itself
to refuting Mannheimian and kindred visions of culture and society. Leavis’s
‘movement in education’ was, in its way, more successful than any of its
cognates. His practical scheme for the institutional ascendancy of English
literary studies, although coming to nothing as policy, served as a pattern of
individual mission for a generation of teachers. But that was the limit of
achievement. This was a self-styled movement without organization or
instruments, in which the banner of ‘politics’ was raised as a sign of culture’s
practical intent, but not much more.
Endeavours such as these were the means by which Kulturkritik thought
to defend its intuitions of continuity, order, wholeness and humanity, and so
far as possible, to discover an authoritative social role for itself in the anarchic
conditions of modernity. The resistance they faced was, of course, that of the
social order itself, in its typical, spontaneous manifestations: the blind
momentum of industrial economies, the clamour of hustings and markets, the
presumption of the masses and the cynicism of their mockintellectual
flatterers. It was after all in naming such menaces that Kulturkritik identified
and justified the corporate function of intelligence, its special role in the life
of the social ‘body’. However, challenges of another kind came from within
that putative corporation, in the writings of theorists and critics for whom the
|
|
5.8 Page 48 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 25
high tradition of culture, with its familiar repertoire of questions and answers,
was not the self-validating ground of right judgement but a curiosity in itself.
FREUD’S CRITIQUE OF KULTUR
Sigmund Freud’s official contribution to the intellectuals’ politics of inter-
war Europe was as one great thinker in dialogue with another concerning the
phenomenon of human aggression – an exercise he privately thought
tiresome and pointless (Freud 1985: 344). His independently-motivated
intervention in this arena – for Civilization and Its Discontents, together with
its companionpiece, The Future of an Illusion (dating from 1930 and 1927,
respectively), may be seen as such – was, in its basic principle, a rejection of
such high-minded pieties. Citing the canonical opposition of ‘culture’ and
‘civilization’, Freud declared: ‘I scorn to distinguish between [them]’ (1985:
184). This was in one respect a moral gesture, resonant in its time and place.
Thomas Mann was one of many to have invoked those terms in affirming
Germanic spiritual uniqueness – and indeed Freud’s original title referenced
the crucial Kultur, and not ‘civilization’, which, perhaps in the same
irreverent spirit, he recommended for the English translation (p. 182). The
gesture was justified also on theoretical grounds, depending as it did on the
thesis by which psychoanalysis asserted its explanatory claims in the field of
the social sciences. Freud proposed a monist interpretation of all mental life.
Call it culture or call it civilization, learned social behaviour formed a single
complex shaped by the necessities of the human constitution. Culture–
civilization was the mode in which human animals adapted their instincts for
the purposes of coexistence. The practices and institutions so characterized
might be valued as progressive developments from a natural state, or, in an
older tradition, as manifestations of another, contrastingly spiritual order of
being. In fact, they were functional modifications of a changeless human
|
|
5.9 Page 49 |
▲back to top |
26 KULTURKRITIK
condition. ‘Repression’ and ‘sublimation’ were the constitutive processes
through which society’s sanctioned meanings and values were constituted.
The erotic and aggressive drives must be inhibited as, for example, in legal
and ethical codes, or, in a complementary process, rendered ‘sublime’,
directed towards substitute, idealized satisfactions in the ‘higher’ pursuits of
truth and beauty. The work of culture–civilization was thus both controlling
and formative. Its means included, as well as dictates and prohibitions, the
canonized arts of mind and body – philosophy, poetry, music, dance. Yet
culture remained an activity of restless animals, not a privileged realm apart.
Contrary to a whole tradition of aesthetic education, it was not a means to an
attainable human completeness and fulfilment, but the creation of self-
division, frustration and guilt – a promise of happiness, perhaps, but,
inevitably, a false one.
As psychoanalysis, Civilization and Its Discontents (Freud [1930] 1985)
set out a mordant commentary on the spiritual pretensions of culture and its
intellectual representatives. The pronounced iconoclasm of tone (which
illustrated Freud’s theory, suggesting something of the sadistic gratifications
of critical thought) signified deliberate polemical intent. Indeed, it would
have been possible to press further, to interpret the characteristic social
phobias of Kulturkritik as cases of projection, symptoms of the unavowable
knowledge that ‘civilization’ is one and the same as the ‘culture’ that fends it
off. As Theodor Adorno observed, some twenty years later, in an
unmistakable allusion to Freud, ‘the cultural critic is not happy with
civilization, to which alone he owes his discontent. ... Yet he is necessarily of
the same essence as that to which he fancies himself superior’ (Adorno
[1955] 1981: 19). However, psychoanalytic reason did not operate alone in
Freud’s anthropology. In extending his core theory into the field of collective
life, he took two risks. In one movement of thought, he constructed human
history as a great biography, refiguring the entire species as a collective
individual. At the same time, he as similated, as if by default, the dominant
|
|
5.10 Page 50 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 27
social discourse of his day, simply rewriting it in the language of
psychoanalysis.
Freud’s title, Civilization and Its Discontents, was something of a
misnomer. His grounding conceptual distinction is between the individual
and the social, and there is no real parity between them ([1930] 1985: 284–5).
The literal individual, the organic singularity, is explored with all the
accumulated theoretical resources of psychoanalysis, which at the same time
sustain the metaphor of the species–individual. But, except in this
questionable extrapolation, the category of ‘civilization’, the social, remains
unspecified. For Freud, as for the liberal tradition, the individual was the full
category, the source of energy, desire and purposes. Society is its supplement,
the mere framework of protection and restraint. A few perfunctory references
to work, technology, science and law, abstracted from the historical systems
of production and power that organize them, serve as an account of the social
order. His passing comments on communism and socialism were measured
in a way that suggested educated politeness rather than critical openness (pp.
303, 305–6). Proffered in the name of unblinking scientific realism, his major
social-anthropological claims rehearsed a commonplace mock-aristocratic
pessimism. ‘The common man’ and ‘individuals of the leader type’,
‘weaklings’ and ‘stronger natures’ marked the poles of his social imagination
(pp. 261, 294–5, 307). ‘Masses are lazy and unintelligent’, he wrote in The
Future of an Illusion, ‘they have no love for instinctual renunciation, and they
are not to be convinced by argument of its inevitability; and the individuals
composing them support one another in giving free rein to their indiscipline’
(Freud [1927] 1985: 186).
Progress in renunciation was conceivable, Freud allowed, though it would
be limited and vulnerable. The ‘superior, unswerving, disinterested’
minority could scarcely hope to win general authority for their insights by
education alone, but would have to deploy ‘means to power’, ‘a certain
degree of coercion’, in the pursuit of civilized unhappiness for all. Or in the
|
|
6 Pages 51-60 |
▲back to top |
|
|
6.1 Page 51 |
▲back to top |
28 KULTURKRITIK
watchword of Matthew Arnold, the lawgiver of English liberal education,
who affirmed that culture might hope to tame anarchy but must not in any case
tolerate it: ‘force till right is ready’ (Arnold [1864] 1964: 16).
Freud’s theoretical renunciation of Kulturkritik, his ‘scorn’ for the
pretensions of cultural spirituality, entailed its own kind of self-destruction.
It was, in a strict sense, tragic. He demonstrated, from his own theoretical
premisses, the substantial unity of ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’, and thereby
undermined the rationale of ‘the man of culture’. However, lacking any
comparable access to critical concepts of specifically social-historical
reference, he was unable to account for the prevailing social order of culture.
Acting on his radical insights into the nature of the human animal, yet held in
the conventions of a traditional, pre-democratic authoritarian liberalism, he
saw in contemporary social relations only the probably inescapable forms
and predicaments of a second nature. A few superior, unswerving,
disinterested beings, and, swarming around them, the lazy, unintelligent
masses. This was the world according to Kulturkritik.
WOOLF’S ANDROGYNY
For any who cared to inspect the less anxious varieties of this discourse – not
so much Kulturkritik as a display of cultivated self-regard – there was no need
to look beyond the environs of Freud’s English publisher, the Hogarth Press,
in the central London district called Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf was
Hogarth’s principal author and, with her husband, Leonard, its proprietor.
Their home was a venue for one of the most remarkable formations of the
earlier twentieth century in England – a circle including the novelist E.M.
Forster, Virginia’s sister, the painter Vanessa Bell, and the economist John
Maynard Keynes. The Bloomsbury Group, as it came to be called,
characteristically disclaimed the strong common identity this given name
|
|
6.2 Page 52 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 29
implied. They were simply a network of ‘friends’. Yet in Civilization (Bell
1928), Vanessa’s husband Clive offered something like a manifesto. The
vestige of a much larger work, now abandoned, to have been called The New
Renaissance, Bell’s essay yielded none of its morale in the face of this
evidence of blockage. Civilization, the general condition favouring the
experience of ‘good states of mind’, was the work of the civilized and
civilizing few, he maintained. It depended on the existence of a leisured class,
and, supporting that, a labouring population secure enough to benefit from
the civilizing process. The class struggle between capital and labour was a
contention of philistines, and could not, in any of its outcomes, establish this
necessary social foundation. A co-ordinated strategy of economic and
demographic development, including technological innovation and, for the
unassimilable labour surplus, policies of selective breeding and planned
emigration were the means by which a civilized future would come about. It
is as well to say at this point that ‘civilization’, in Bloomsbury parlance, was
a positive value.
Bell’s book opened with a dedicatory letter to Virginia Woolf, who, in an
essay written perhaps not much later, refigured her brother-in-law’s happy
sociology in the standard phrenological metaphor of the day, the intellectual
hierarchy of ‘brows’ (Bell 1928: v–viii; Woolf 1942).1 Woolf's purpose was
to affirm the integrity and mutuality of ‘highbrow’ and ‘lowbrow’ as cultural
types, in the face of an intruding third type, the ‘middlebrow’. A highbrow
like herself was ‘the man or woman of thoroughbred intelligence who rides
his mind at a gallop across country in pursuit of an idea’ (Woolf 1942: 147).
A lowbrow, ‘of course’, was someone of ‘thoroughbred vitality who rides his
body in pursuit of a living at a gallop across life’. Highbrows ‘needed’ and
‘honoured’ lowbrows, each group finding in the other the indispensable
complement of their own genius, which was for ‘life’, or for reflection upon
it, but never both. Woolf pointedly distinguished her cultural taxonomy from
|
|
6.3 Page 53 |
▲back to top |
30 KULTURKRITIK
the existing order of social classes – a standard disclaimer in this discursive
tradition – and, although that unwelcome association returned in the
opposition of ‘country’, the real property across which the highbrow rides,
and ‘life’, the notional acreage of one’s own person, which was the lowbrow’s
allotted space, there was indeed something not merely social in its
construction. It was, as her phrenological and pastoral imagery confirmed,
the natural, fecund order of things. But the middlebrows would not
understand this. Seeking to represent themselves as the cultural equals of
highbrows, they achieved only the deathly mannerism of good taste. Seeking
to redeem lowbrows from the neglect of precious elites, ‘to teach them
culture’, they patronized them and subjected their spontaneous beauty of
expression to jejune schemes of improvement (p. 152). In what some might
think of as education, Woolf saw the making of monsters. These ‘go-
betweens’, these ‘busybodies’, were sterile hybrids, Woolf declared,
offences against cultural nature. Their ambitions were hardly less absurd than
the fantasy of transcending ‘husbands and wives’ and creating ‘a middle sex’
(p. 154).
This essay showed Woolf in her most complacent aspect, devising, as if
for a weekend entertainment, a peculiarly fatalistic variation on the topic of
minority culture, its natural privileges and the unnatural latter-day
encroachments upon them. However, Woolf’s writing was discursively
complex, here assuming one perspective and voice, elsewhere seeing and
speaking quite otherwise. She proved capable on another occasion – in her
‘Memories of a Working Women’s Guild’ – of a far more self-critical
appreciation of initiatives in popular self-education (1967: 134–48); and she
was capable also of the most searching critique of her highbrow cultural
inheritance. Freud, in Civilization and Its Discontents, demystified the
spiritualizing self-consciousness of Kultur, elucidating the psycho-
biological drives that shaped and powered it. Yet in as much as a strong
concept of human nature remained central to his account, although now in a
|
|
6.4 Page 54 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 31
materialist form, he spared the humanistic claim to general validity and
authority. In A Room of One’s Own ([1929] 1977), Woolf deployed a
specifically social materialism against traditional notions of cultural unity
and universality.
This short book famously, controversially, availed itself of ‘all the
liberties and licences of a novelist’ (p. 6). Yet, however much or little fictional
play may have gone into them, the reminiscences and conjectures of the first
three chapters supported a single polemical thesis: culture, supposedly a
general, inclusively human good, has been formed under ‘the rule of a
patriarchy’. The foundations of this rule are ‘grossly material’. Woolf
described the real and also symbolic limitations on women’s access to the
means of learning and thought. She identified the old male usurpation of
women’s rights in property and income as the enabling condition of women’s
intellectual and artistic marginality, and went on to show how, even in
reformed circumstances, that hereditary impoverishment must limit
women’s efforts on their own behalf. Culture, as actually formed, was not
merely characterized by the unequal appropriation of common values. On the
contrary, the dominant values were themselves gendered in their deep
constitution. This was an order of representation in which women were
compulsively, often angrily discoursed upon by men, more, it would seem,
than any other ‘animal in the universe’ (p. 27); one in which habitual
symbolic elevation transfigured the realities of subordination and
marginality. Even where this male-centred culture enabled specific
innovations on women’s part, it left them awkward and alone before a
repertoire of styles and topics that was common, and thus authoritative, yet
not common at all, having taken shape in a world dominated by men and
largely reserved to them. Tested against the reality of such practical and
psychic confinement, the idea of irrepressible genius was an illusion. Judith
Shakespeare, had she lived and followed her brother’s path, could only have
died wretchedly.
|
|
6.5 Page 55 |
▲back to top |
32 KULTURKRITIK
What, then, might be the conditions of women’s deliverance from this
objective and subjective system of oppression? Woolf proposed a means and
a goal. In keeping with her insistent materialism – which, in striking contrast
with the habit of Kulturkritik, emphasized property and attendant
inequalities rather than the supposedly degraded equality of the market place
– she maintained that for women, as for any social category, the prerequisites
of creativity were strictly practical in kind. The historical pattern of women’s
artistic creativity confirmed so much, showing more strongly in areas where
the means of production were cheap and unobtrusive (say, pen and paper) but
little or not at all where more costly and imposing instruments were called for.
Material access and control were the conditions of women’s emergence as
autonomous cultural producers – or, in the famous synecdoche, ‘money and
a room of her own’ (p. 6). These basic gains would enable women writers to
commence a long, collective journey towards emancipation from an
oppressively gendered culture. Woolf refused to accept that progress in this
could be measured against fixed evaluative norms. Prevailing intuitions of
quality and capacity were stylizations of a history of ignorance and
oppression, and to defer to them would be ‘abject treachery’. She envisioned
a process both radical and awkward, that would change all the familiar terms
of writing and representation, and whose deepest sense would be a release
into free and full subjective life. The prevailing order of gender was not
simply discriminatory. It denied the innate bisexuality of the human psyche,
and confined all subjectivity to a narrow binary scheme of dispositions and
performances – the stereotyped routines of masculinity-or-femininity.
Women and men were all, in truth, ‘woman–manly’ and ‘man–womanly’ in
varying degrees, and the leitmotiv of an emancipated culture would be
uninhibited embrace of this reality, in the moral-stylistic value of
'androgyny'.2
|
|
6.6 Page 56 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 33
This is the leading tendency in the reasoning of A Room of One’s Own, and,
in a strict feminist sense (though Woolf held that appellation at a distance), it
is revolutionary. But it progresses in the face of a counter-tendency, whose
effects contribute equally to the pattern of the text, revealing a bifocal vision
of culture, a doubleness of discursive position. The crux of the book, as has
often been said, is ‘anger’. Woolf condemned the defensive chauvinist anger
of a patriarchal culture, and found reason in the angers of the women it
subordinated, her own included. Yet, she insisted that anger had no place in
art, whose highest achievements, indeed, were distinguished by the
transcendence of such ‘alien’ feeling. She deplored the effects of its intrusion
into a work such as Jane Eyre. Commenting on Charlotte Brontë’s novel, she
wrote:
the woman who wrote those pages had more genius in her than
Jane Austen; but if one reads them over and marks that jerk in
them, that indignation, one sees that she will never get her genius
expressed whole and entire. She will write in a rage where she
should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write
wisely. ... She is at war with her lot.
(Woolf [1929] 1977: 66–7)
This is a perplexing turn in a work of feminist criticism, and a paradoxical
judgement from the woman who could muster the rhetorical force of those
sentences: here, as Woolf wrote of Brontë, ‘the continuity is disturbed’. The
female ‘sex-consciousness’ without which there could not have been A Room
of One’s Own emerges as the enemy of women’s creative fulfilment.
Matters of tactics and personal disposition played a part in the shaping of
this crux, but to dwell upon them is merely to displace the problem, which is
fundamental, amounting to self-contradiction. This logical difficulty marks
a fault-line in the discursive constitution of Woolf’s reasoning, and finds a
|
|
6.7 Page 57 |
▲back to top |
34 KULTURKRITIK
revealing parallel in the historical perspectives she adopts. In fact, A Room of
One’s Own proposes two discrepant historical narratives. One is long,
continuous and unfinished, that of an oppression traced back through the
centuries of English literature into an unmeasured past. The other is short,
coextensive with Woolf’s lifetime, and is broken in two. The signature of the
later and darker phase was the intensified ‘sex-consciousness’ of both
women and men, in whom, Woolf believed, there existed a masculinist state
of emergency provoked ‘no doubt’ by the campaign for women’s suffrage.
Against her observations of this phase, she set the reverie of a lighter, more
youthful and various style of inter-sexual exchange, which she gave as a
memory of Oxbridge before the war (pp. 13–16) – the kind of memory which,
as it happened, Clive Bell had already suggested to her in the dedicatory
address of his Civilization (Bell 1928: v). These rival histories belong to rival
discourses. The first and more powerful of the two is plainly feminist, defined
by the opposition between a patriarchal order and women’s resistance to it. In
the second, that opposition is displaced by another, between art, and the
civilizing relations it nourishes, and politics, the racking, disfiguring
antagonisms of a divided society.
Viewed in this light, the notion of androgyny served not one purpose but
two. It is the equivocal image that assuages the discursive self-division of
Woolf’s text. In one of its meanings, androgyny is utopian, the defining
quality of a future liberation from oppressive gender relations. But that
condition, for Woolf, has less to do with variousness than with plenitude. Its
glosses are unity, wholeness, integration and resolution, which are, as Woolf
believed, the proper attributes of art and literature as such.3Utopian
imagining commonly draws its inspiration from the past. But here is a utopia
whose foreshadowings were already official monuments. It was Coleridge
who formulated the notion of creative androgyny. Shakespeare and Austen
were its exemplary incarnations. Even the tragic Judith, who figures the
|
|
6.8 Page 58 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 35
damage of the past but also the promise of a better day, was not just anyone’s
sister. Elaborated in this way, androgyny discloses its second, not at all
subversive, aspect. In this meaning, which neutralizes the critical charge of
the first, the notion of androgyny works to redeem the received canon of
cultural value from patriarchal deformation and to reinstate it as a judgement
on the present and a norm for the future.4 Here, Woolf discloses her spiritual
kinship with Matthew Arnold. Arnold’s cultural criticism, which Leavis
directly continued, entailed a strategic distinction between the ‘best self’, in
which a whole and ‘disinterested’ humanity was present and active, and the
‘ordinary self’, in which particular and therefore antagonistic social interests
predominated (Arnold [1869] 1932). Woolfian androgyny differs from the
disinterested best self in its sensuous psychic texturing, but its parallel critical
function, recognizable from Leavis’s Kulturkritik, is to validate a
superordinate cultural wholeness, an authority fit to regulate the blind
factionalism of mere politics, including ‘sex consciousness’. Thus, the figure
of androgyny both crowned Woolf’s feminism and capped it. She exposed the
false, patriarchal universalism of the dominant culture and, in the same
rhetorical gesture, exonerated it, reimagining custom, the custom of her own
class fraction, as liberation.5
ORWELL’S ENGLISH
In the earliest of Bloomsbury’s studies in cultural sociology – this one a
novel, Howards End (1910) – E.M. Forster entertained the contrast between
the ‘civilized’, free-thinking Schlegels and the philistine Wilcoxes, but then
displaced it, showing how English leisure-class cultivation, the life of the
mind, depended upon the entrepreneurs and administrators of the Imperial
economy, whose profits sustained the miracle of civilization. He also showed
how these two bourgeois types, for all the conventional antipathy between
|
|
6.9 Page 59 |
▲back to top |
36 KULTURKRITIK
them, had far more disturbing social others in common: the aspirational
middlebrow Bast, his coarse wife, Jackie, and, in the darkness below them,
the unrepresentable proletariat for whom they did symbolic service. Eric
Blair grew into the role of a lesser Wilcox, but then remade himself as a writer,
George Orwell, who would enter the moral and symbolic world of those
social others, and discover in it a judgement on the Schlegels of his own day.
In this sense, his work constituted a polemical inversion of the perceptual and
evaluative scheme of Kulturkritik.
‘What is strange about these people is their invisibility.’ Orwell was
writing on this occasion about the labouring poor of Marrakesh, and more
generally about ‘people with brown skins’ (Orwell 1961: 391–2). In another
context – his long essay on Charles Dickens – he extended his observation to
include the English working class, though now with the crucial suggestion
that this ‘strangeness’ was conventional: not a variety of being but the effect
of prevailing norms of literary representation and the social valuations they
confirmed. The motif of travel and discovery that dominates so much of
Orwell’s work is, then, ethical and political in function. The will to revelation
is also a commitment to exposure and rebuke. His writing does not merely
report a certain state of affairs: its characteristic purpose is to specify and
correct or attack the cultural conditions that make reporting necessary, the
conditions of obscurity. In keeping with this, his writing on literature and
other cultural forms, though always emphasizing political values, is formalist
and sociological in its procedures. It is a deliberate and self-conscious mode
of inquiry rather than another variety of moral exertion. Thus, Orwell reads
Dickens’s narratives as instances of a quite regular cosmology of Victorian
capitalism: a specific construction and evaluation of its system of classes and
a determinate array of probable and desirable outcomes. The forms of the
fiction, here as in any case, are in and of themselves its politics, and may
appropriately be judged in such terms. The pleasures they afford or inhibit
|
|
6.10 Page 60 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 37
are, by the same token, a mode of moral experience, and can be explored as
evidence of the dispositions of their readers (1961: 413–60).
‘Charles Dickens’ remained, if only by virtue of its subject, a study in
literary criticism. In ‘Boys’ Weeklies’ and ‘The Art of Donald McGill’, two
essays written in the same phase of his career, Orwell left home yet again,
entering the other world of popular pleasure and the uncreated discourse of
cultural studies. Both essays opened, appropriately, with the gesture of
introduction: they would deal not with familiar matters of educated interest
but with the obscure or despised objects of majority pleasure. Moreover, they
would study these objects – comic magazines and postcards – to discover
their meaning, not to confirm the lack of it. Orwell gave detailed descriptions
of his materials, sorting them by genre, convention and topic. The
representations of nationality, race and class, in the darkening conditions of
the thirties, dominated the analysis of comics. The imagery of sexuality,
gender and marriage was the inevitable issue in the study of McGill’s bawdy
narrative cartoons. In both cases, the ultimate goal of understanding lay
beyond the texts themselves, in their popular audiences.
Periodical papers offered a fine gauge of popular inclinations, Orwell
maintained, because unlike cinema and radio programmes, they were in some
meaningful degree chosen by their users. The local newsagent’s display gave
‘the best available indication’ of what ‘the mass of the English people really
feels and thinks’ (1961: 461). The sheer ubiquity of McGill’s postcards
seemed proof of their interpretive value. No practitioner of Kulturkritik
would have disagreed, but Orwell’s evaluative presumption, unthinkable in
that tradition, was that popular culture might educate the educators. In boys’
weeklies he discerned, amid all the reactionary celebrations of the British
Imperial homeland, a ‘family’ patriotism that would not be denied. In
McGill’s cards, with their fearsome wives, big-bosomed temptresses and
puny, luckless men, Orwell traced the stoical sexual imagination of the
popular classes – the narratives of desire and frustration they expect as
|
|
7 Pages 61-70 |
▲back to top |
|
|
7.1 Page 61 |
▲back to top |
38 KULTURKRITIK
naturally theirs – but also the signs of an inexhaustible spirit of defiance.
These cards were part of that ‘chorus of raspberries’ with which ‘the millions
of common men’ responded to the ‘high sentiments’ of official England.
‘Like the music halls, they are a sort of saturnalia, a harmless rebellion against
virtue’ (Orwell 1970a: 194).
The popular culture Orwell explored was that of an exploitative class
order. His evaluation of it was grounded in his position on the left. However,
his understanding of that order and his relationship with such politics were
radically ambivalent. Writing in 1941, he declared flatly that war had
exposed the bankruptcy of capitalism, and argued that only socialist
revolution could secure the conditions of a successful military effort. Yet in
the same text, The Lion and the Unicorn, he dismissed the ‘doctrine of the
class war’ as an ‘out-of-date gospel’, and characterized England as ‘a family
with the wrong members in control’ (1970a: 92, 68). Indeed, Orwell seemed
often to observe a law of inverse proportion such that the more fiercely he
insisted upon class realities the more he trivialized them: ‘England is the most
class-ridden country under the sun’, he wrote. It ‘resembles ... a rather stuffy
Victorian family’, one in which ‘the young are generally thwarted and most
of the power is in the hands of irresponsible uncles and bed-ridden aunts’ (pp.
67–8). On another occasion, he traced the cultural apartheid of the middle
class to their disgust at bad smells, and beckoned them towards socialism
with the assurance that ‘we have nothing to lose but our aitches’ (1970d).
Here, likewise, was a declared socialist in whose writing the principal genre
was exasperated, often hostile dialogue with the left in general. Although the
second part of The Road to Wigan Pier looked towards a socialism that could
put an end to the social wretchedness depicted in the first, its best-known
passages are those composed in ridicule of fellow-socialists. The studies in
popular culture were similarly constructed. Generals, popes, dictators,
temperance campaigners but also ‘left-wing political parties’ appeared in
random sequence in Orwell’s list of the pious authorities to whom McGill’s
|
|
7.2 Page 62 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 39
carnivalesque audience would never quite submit (1970a: 193). ‘Boys’
Weeklies’ turned on a critical motif that would one day become the call-sign
of studies in popular culture: the left’s ‘failure to understand’. What the left
failed to understand on this early occasion was the reality of England’s
‘family’ patriotism, against which callow internationalism would never
prevail. The evidence was available in ‘popular imaginative literature’, but
this was ‘a field that left-wing thought has never begun to enter’ (1961: 484).
The work of Rudyard Kipling, rather higher in register but still popular, might
raise ‘a snigger in pansy-left circles’, Orwell wrote around the same time. But
he possessed a sense of responsibility, and, unlike ‘the middle-class left’,
whose political avowals were in any case ‘a sham’, he perceived ‘very clearly
that men can only be highly civilized while other men, inevitably less
civilized, are there to guard and feed them’ (1970a: 215–29).
Case-by-case discrimination of such moments, which the essayistic
character of Orwell’s work encourages, and which for certain purposes is
necessary, should not distract attention from the fact that they are normal
features of his writing: that they define its identity and orientation in the
politics of culture. The contraries of class and politics that dominated these
studies in popular culture, as they would wholly absorb his late novels, were
themselves subject to a more fundamental binary. In committing himself to
‘the working masses who make up seventy-five per cent of the population’,
Orwell was not merely, or even principally, aligning his social purposes with
those of the exploited classes, for in his moral sociology those masses were,
in truth, the nation itself, ‘the English people proper’ (1970b: 10). And ‘the
left’, correspondingly, became something less, or other, than the collective
herald of socialism. ‘There is now no intelligentsia that is not in some sense
“left” ’, Orwell wrote, in one of those false generalizations for which he came
to be revered, and in his own terms the proposition bore a necessary truth. For
just as the working class was the contemporary mode of being of England’s
‘common people’, so the left was the current behavioural mode of an alien
|
|
7.3 Page 63 |
▲back to top |
40 KULTURKRITIK
cultural category, the intellectuals. These twin identifications determined the
character of Orwell’s discourse on culture. In the aesthetic and recreational
preferences of the social majority, he discerned the imperishable moral
strengths of a people. While in the typical dispositions of the intelligentsia,
there was little but ignorance, conformism, and nihilism mounting to
treachery. The negative imagery of Kulturkritik, which Orwell largely
disallowed as a valid representation of the common life, was retained and
intensified to the level of compulsive, phobic abuse in his characterizations
of its cultural others. ‘Pansy’ leftists, ‘nancy poets’, ‘flabbily’, ‘squashily’
pacifist, bigoted votaries of the ‘ruthless ideologies of the continent’ who
‘snigger at every English institution’ – ‘if the ‘intellectuals’ had done their
work a little more thoroughly, Britain would have surrendered in 1940’
(1970a: 74–5; 1970b: 111, 106, 332–41). Such words speak for, and against,
themselves.
Orwell saw in the political waywardness of the intelligentsia the index of
its alienation from ‘the common people’. The structural condition of this
divorce was ‘the anachronistic class system’, which must be ended
politically, through a popular reconstruction of the nation. The specifically
cultural effect of intellectual alienation was evident in the body of the English
language itself, which had:
grown anaemic because for long past it has not been invigorated
from below. ... Language ought to be the joint creation of poets
and manual workers, and in modern England it is difficult for these
two classes to meet. When they do so again – as, in a different
way, they could in the feudal past – English may show more clearly
than at present its kinship with the language of Shakespeare and
Defoe.
(Orwell 1970b: 29)
|
|
7.4 Page 64 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 41
But for now, there was the linguistic ‘decadence’ that was perhaps Orwell’s
most sustained cultural interest in his last ten years. The linguistic
commentaries he wrote in the 1940s bear a recognizable affinity with the
philological moralism that was one of the traditions of Kulturkritik. The
American H.L. Mencken and the Austrian Karl Kraus were legendary
practitioners of the genre, also as journalists (Mencken [1919] 1936; Kraus
1984); and in England, the Scrutiny group also upheld the language of
Shakespeare as the bench-mark by which modern decadence might be
judged. But the comparison is one of kind, not achievement, for Orwell’s
critical faculties were seldom exercised with less discipline than in this field.
He favoured a deliberate programme of neologism, yet he also repudiated the
metric system on the grounds that grammes and litres could never achieve the
idiomatic resonance of ‘homely’ ounces and inches (1970b: 3–12; 1970c:
306). The judgements of the celebrated late essay ‘Politics and the English
Language’ (1946) – in favour of gerunds, against double negatives, and so on
– were facile or downright crass (1970c: 156–70). What these and other
essays do show is that, for Orwell, the condition of English was of crucial
cultural interest, and the nature of that interest is best seen not so much in the
themes of his linguistic commentaries as in the language he fashioned as his
own means of analysis, judgement and self-definition.
‘Plain’ is one of the epithets conventionally attached to Orwell’s prose, but
the sense of that description is itself far from plain. Perhaps the most nearly
plain varieties of language use are jargons, more or less technical codes
developed for the specified purposes of elective user communities. And in
this sense, ‘plainness’ in non-technical utterance is also coded: it is an effect
of a jargon that cannot know itself as such, the jargon of familiarity.
Familiarities are always historically determinate, involving specific social
affinities and a correspondingly specific ‘common sense’. To idealize a social
jargon as ‘plain’ is to enforce its underlying values as the cultural norm.
However, the familiarity that Orwell valued was, precisely, not available as a
|
|
7.5 Page 65 |
▲back to top |
42 KULTURKRITIK
formed language variety: the creative union of poets and manual workers was
no more than a possibility on the far side of revolution. His style was a utopian
attempt to embody that imaginable social familiarity, to anticipate its
redemptive cultural authority in the forms of language – with effects that were
not, in any simple descriptive sense, plain. Discontinuity of register is among
its most regular features. The main register is that of informal educated
speech. The syntax is orthodox, though tending to avoid more complex
constructions, and the effort to avoid cultivated ceremony is marked by the
use of you, not one, as the impersonal pronoun, and of the contracted form of
the negative (didn’t rather than did not). But this register is again and again
disturbed by others, sometimes learned but normally more colloquial. The
use of stuff as a synonym for writing (which Virginia Woolf accurately
diagnosed as a mark of the no-nonsense middlebrow) is a case of this, as is the
wilfully indiscriminate use, in the essay on Dickens, of idiocy as a term of
condemnation. The closing sentence of the same essay, with its denunciation
of ‘the smelly little orthodoxies ... now contending for our souls’, illustrates
the imagery of physical disgust, often homophobic in character, to which
Orwell’s prose is so systematically given: squashy, flabby, pansy, nancy, the
abusive animal metaphors of The Road to Wigan Pier.
Such disruptions of register, which are not ‘plain’ but rather a baroque
impersonation of ‘plain speaking’, testify to the crisis-ridden desire of
Orwell’s cultural criticism. He looked beyond the contraries of highbrow and
masses towards an authentically national popular culture, and strained to
image it in a normative English prose style. But in doing so, he violently
disavowed his own status as an intellectual, and travestied popularity by
recourse to a diction whose educated origins in schoolboy argot were
manifest. The dream of a culture at once common and authoritative produced
a language prone to coarseness and intimidation. Orwell’s whole effort, in his
writing on culture, was to strike beyond the discursive borders of
Kulturkritik; his language is the monument to his failure.
|
|
7.6 Page 66 |
▲back to top |
MARXIST INCURSIONS
IN THE WARS 43
Freud’s psychoanalysis exposed the dualism of Kulturkritik, but in a social
perspective that reproduced its minoritarian – aristocratic – fatalism. Woolf’s
feminism exposed the oppressive gendering of the dominant cultural
universalism and looked beyond it to an emancipated androgyny – which,
however, also restored the lineage she had threatened to dispossess. Orwell’s
anti-imperialism, developing into socialism, led him to invert the customary
solidarities of Kulturkritik, to validate the desires and capacities of the
popular underworld, but in the mode of national romance – a personal utopia
equivalent to Woolf’s androgyny – that, as in the less complex instances of
Mann and Leavis, was itself a variety of Kulturkritik. Although all these
challenges had deadly critical potential, none escaped the gravitational field
of that inherited discourse.
Marxist theory, in the same years, posed more radical challenges to it. Like
Freud, the English theorist Christopher Caudwell declined to honour the
spiritualizing claims of Kultur, in which he saw one manifestation among
others of the developing relationship between the human organism and its
environment. In contrast with psychoanalysis, however, Caudwell’s
conception of that relationship was historical. The fundamental structure in
which ‘man’ engaged with ‘nature’ was the economy, whose successive
forms were therefore the expressive heart of all social and cultural
convention. ‘Modern poetry’, he wrote, ‘is capitalist poetry’ (Caudwell
1937). As such, it was self-doomed. All Caudwell’s critical studies – a
prodigious body of work encompassing literature and science, philosophy,
psychology and social theory, as well as stock themes such as love and beauty
– reiterated a single critical thesis. Modern culture as a whole, he maintained,
was in the grip of an ‘illusion’, the constitutive illusion of capitalist property,
that ‘freedom’ was the negation of social relations, that the human reality of
‘the individual’ could find full expression only outside collective bonds.
|
|
7.7 Page 67 |
▲back to top |
44 KULTURKRITIK
Freud’s psychology, Lawrence’s novels, the avant-garde art of the
Surrealists, contemporary trends in theoretical physics all testified, under
Caudwell’s judicial gaze, to ‘the bourgeois illusion’ at the heart of
capitalism’s ‘dying culture’ (Caudwell [1938 and 1949] 1971).
Caudwell discerned the imprint of capitalism in even the most rarefied or
intimate particulars of cultural life. In this, his critical endeavour matched
that of the German Marxist Herbert Marcuse. The greater strength of
Marcuse’s contemporaneous intervention in this field was that it used a
generalized representation of capitalism to ground the analysis of a
correspondingly general cultural object, which was not, as in Caudwell’s
case, a given corpus of literature and thought, but the meta-discourse that
regulated all literary and intellectual practice, the discourse of the cultural
principle itself (Marcuse [1937] 1972: 88–133). The idea of culture in this
sense subsumed the ancient distinction between the ‘liberal’ and the ‘useful’
or ‘servile’ arts: on the one hand, the specifically human pursuit of truth,
beauty and virtue, the proper attachments of free persons, but, on the other
hand, the skills that bounded the possibilities of the great majority, whose
lives must be dominated by narrow toil. In the labour-intensive slave
economy of Antiquity, this ordering of things was necessary and morally self-
confirming. However, Marcuse argued, it could not survive unchanged in the
bourgeois era, which promoted quite distinct relations of property and labour,
and more inclusive notions of human identity and possibility. Thus, in the
new class order, the liberal pursuits of the few came to be refigured as the
integrally human domain of culture – which, however, now came to be seen
in abstraction from ordinary social relations. Culture now figured as a
redemptive space in which the narrowness, division, inequality and suffering
of the social order were annulled, a place where existence achieved
wholeness and composure. But this was ‘a promise of happiness’ that could
not be kept, other than in the mode of ‘inwardness’, in the nurturing of
|
|
7.8 Page 68 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 45
individual sensibility.6 It gave contemplative access to what bourgeois
society could not yield in fact. ‘Culture’ was thus ‘affirmative’ in the worse
as well as the better sense of the word: the vicarious experience of freedom
mediated resignation and conformism, and in this way served the purposes of
oppression. Indeed, culture so conceived was the mark of social oppression,
Marcuse reasoned, and would persist along with it. The moment of real
emancipation, the final calling in of the promise of happiness, would be its
vanishing point.
The received value of ‘culture’ could have no place in Caudwell’s psycho-
historical materialist scheme. Marcuse sought to elicit the dialectic of its
emergence and functioning in bourgeois society. Another German Marxist,
Walter Benjamin, more political than either in critical style, disrupted the
conceptual identity of Kulturkritik, in effect setting it against itself. In
Benjamin’s usage, the familiar appeal to ‘tradition’ became crucially self-
aware. It was not, now, a body of values to be defended against the consuming
advance of modernity, but a way of intervening in the historical process, a
form of the politics that would determine its uncertain social outcome. The
past was a theatre in the struggle for the future. ‘Historical materialism’, he
wrote, in his late ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’:
wishes to retain that image of the past which unexpectedly
appears to man singled out by history at a moment of danger. The
danger affects both the content of the tradition and its receivers.
The same threat hangs over both: that of becoming a tool of the
ruling classes. In every era the attempt must be made anew to
wrest tradition away from a conformism that is about to overpower
it. ... Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of
hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not
be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased
to be victorious.
(Benjamin [1940] 1970: 257)
|
|
7.9 Page 69 |
▲back to top |
46 KULTURKRITIK
Technology, the engine of historical destruction in the world of Kulturkritik,
was revalued by Benjamin in the same revolutionary spirit, becoming a force
for cultural emancipation. In the cinema, as technical apparatus and social
institution, he discerned the emergence of a newly analytic mode of artistic
production and a newly critical, ‘expert’ audience ([1936] 1970: 219–53).
The epochal significance of film, for him, was its mechanical reproducibility,
and specifically its status as an art practice that superseded the distinction
between original and copy. As such, it heralded the dissolution of ‘the aura’,
the mysterious power associated with the physically ‘unique’ work of art.
Post-auratic art could not claim or be accorded that irrational privilege,
Benjamin believed; it belonged not to ‘ritual’ but to ‘politics’, to cultural
relationships freed from the spell of charismatic authority.
ANTI-FASCIST CULTURE
Caudwell, Marcuse and Benjamin, in their different and unequal critical
interventions, struck at the ideal foundations of Kulturkritik. But they were
exceptional, more or less weightless figures, not only because they were
Marxists, but because these writings, appearing first in the later 1930s, were,
as a matter of chronological fate if not conscious purpose, at odds with the
now-dominant line in Communist policy. All three proposed intransigently
leftist critiques of bourgeois culture in a period when the international
Communist movement, responding to the Nazi victory in Germany, had
turned rightwards to seek a reconciliation with the forces of liberalism.
Between 1932 and 1935, the first initiatives towards a united front against
fascism evolved into the co-ordinated policy and practice of the Popular
Front, a formula entailing the restraint of anti-capitalist impulses in the
interests of a cross-class ‘democratic’ alliance. Intellectuals, ostentatiously
identified as such, took a conspicuous part at every stage in this process
|
|
7.10 Page 70 |
▲back to top |
IN THE WARS 47
(Julien Benda rallied to the Association of Revolutionary Writers and Artists
in 1933, and a year later put his name to the launch manifesto of the Comité
de Vigilance des Intellectuels Anti-fascistes (Lefranc 1965: 433).) By the
middle 1930s, they had become essential to it.
The great bonding theme of Popular Frontism – the diplomatic code in
which Communist and liberal intellectuals might reach working agreements
– was ‘culture’ in its most familiar sense as the common spiritual inheritance
of worker and bourgeois. Caudwell’s cultural theory implied a wholesale
polarization of class against class. Marcuse saw liberal and fascist culture as
formal equivalents, ‘inward’ and universalist in one case, ‘heroically
outward’ and nationalist in the other (Marcuse 1972: 124f). There is no
document of culture, Benjamin would write, that is not ‘at the same time a
document of barbarism’ (Benjamin [1940] 1970: 258). But the official
wisdom of the Popular Front was that culture was the light and inspiration of
the (democratic) struggle against (fascist) barbarism. The controlling
register of Popular Front discourse – elaborated in an international array of
periodicals, books, organizations and events – was that of humanism
militant: literature, art, spiritual values were the great stake and a precious
resource in the common struggle against fascist inhumanity. Cultural ‘aura’
too worked its magic, in a characteristically modern form that Benjamin did
not foresee. The set-piece International Congresses for the Defence of
Culture, mounted in Paris and Madrid, were gatherings of stars: Benda,
André Gide, Thomas Mann, Heinrich Mann, Aldous Huxley and E.M.
Forster, among many others (Leroy and Roche 1986: 16f; Lottman 1982).
Political discord was never quite banished from these venues, where
leftist and liberal critics of Communist orthodoxy insisted on being heard,
and the coloration of Popular Front cultural activity varied from one country
to another, in part because of local political circumstances. But these
variations had a rationale that was itself uniform and official. If the defence
of ‘culture’ entailed a renewed appeal to the universally human, it also called
|
|
8 Pages 71-80 |
▲back to top |
|
|
8.1 Page 71 |
▲back to top |
48 KULTURKRITIK
for a positive revaluation of the nation. In its first, more strongly political
formulation – that of the Bulgarian Communist leader Dimitrov – the call to
recover national tradition bore a critical charge: the valued past was that of
the people and their struggles (Heinemann 1985: 157–86). But the national
is never so easily redefined, and in the wider cultural diplomacy of the
Popular Fronts it came to be represented as the site of mediation between the
writer and the masses (or liberal cultural tradition and Communist politics),
as the universal in everyday, local attire. In this way, the perceived necessities
of a political emergency facilitated a regression in the terms of cultural
understanding – in the English case, to a national popular variation on
Kulturkritik, which would persist well beyond its formative political
occasion, into the post-war period.
|
|
8.2 Page 72 |
▲back to top |
3
WELFARE?
In Britain, during and after the Second World War, the ‘intellectuals’ politics’
of the 1920s and 1930s turned from protest to policy. The historical condition
of this shift was the great new theme of ‘welfare’: welfare in economic and
social matters first of all, but also in education, broadcasting and the arts – that
whole institutional complex of practices that might, or might not, be
protected or sponsored or desired or criticized as ‘culture’.
Post-elementary state education was made available to all, and
compulsory to the age of 15. Merit rather than money determined access to
the upper echelon of the new tripartite state system, the grammar school.
Higher education expanded rapidly in the early post-war years, although
from a tiny demographic base. Radio, continuing as a public monopoly,
expanded and diversified its programming, but again – like education – on
strict hierarchical assumptions. Access to television viewing widened
dramatically, though without prejudice to paternalist control of the
repertoire. The licensing of commercial television in the middle 1950s
caused widespread foreboding, but in fact the new service was subject to
|
|
8.3 Page 73 |
▲back to top |
50 KULTURKRITIK
significant public-service constraints. A government-funded council was
created, succeeding the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music
and the Arts, to support the arts and promote wider interest in them. And in
the bookshops, the shelves turned orange and blue, the colours of Penguin
Books, a privately-owned BBC of the printed word (Morpurgo 1979).
Of course, pure commerce, too, was active in every paper shop and
cinema, but in the old and new centres of policy, a common formula had been
set in place. A minority culture, received and continuing, would be diffused
to an ever-widening audience. All the terms of this summary should be noted.
The expansion was real, but there was no fundamental questioning of what
counted as cultural value or of the proper forms of cultural participation. Self-
confirming traditions would now be unveiled for a deserving population.
Culture – ‘the best that is known and thought in the world’, ‘sweetness and
light’, in Arnold’s famous gloss – would now, literally, be ‘broad-cast’.
The formula governing this emerging world of policy and practice was a
Victorian bequest. In its mid-century applications, it was to a great extent the
achievement of the two salient tendencies in liberal minority culture between
the wars: the Bloomsbury circle and the group around F.R. Leavis and
Scrutiny. It is usual to stress the contrasts between the two formations.
Bloomsbury was an upper-middle-class bohemia, a congeries of families and
friends whose unity and security in the face of commercial pressure and
ancestral philistinism were sustained by private money. Scrutiny was proudly
petty-bourgeois, hostile to all metropolitan ornament and hereditary
presumption, the self-conscious vanguard of a ‘critical minority’ that sought
nothing but – and nothing less than – the recognition due to unaided
intelligence. However, these social–stylistic differences were variants of a
shared liberal formula, which both formations helped to promote after the
war. John Maynard Keynes was not only the pioneering theorist of the new
macro-economic policy; he also founded the Arts Council. Bloomsbury’s
free-thinking modernism was hardly consonant with Lord Reith’s cultural
|
|
8.4 Page 74 |
▲back to top |
WELFARE? 51
preferences, yet that ‘civilized’ manner eventually lightened his own puritan
tone in the BBC, just as it also became standard in the formerly ‘middlebrow’
cultural and recreational pages of the polite press. Scrutiny’s insistence on
careers open to talent appeared to find some acknowledgement in the
weakening of class privilege in education – where, at the same time,
Leavisian accents were more and more widely heard. The emergent styles of
cultural seriousness, in education and in the media, were essentially
generalizations, named or not, from these inter-war models.
However, amid the signs of liberal hegemony, the liberal intelligentsia
itself was not free of discontent. Intellectual life had become narrower and
meaner since the war, according to one Bloomsbury survivor. The twenties
and thirties had been bohemian and cosmopolitan; the fifties were provincial
and earnest, their tone set by ‘lower-middlebrows’ who approached the arts
in the spirit of sanitary engineers (Spender 1953: 66–8). Among a younger
generation inspired by Leavis, there were those who would have smiled at
this caricature of themselves, who affirmed that their kind of intellectual was
now poised to take possession of the heritage (Bradbury 1956: 469–77). But
others of them were disturbed by post-war Britain (or England, as they would
more typically say). Scrutiny itself, which closed down in 1953, had recoiled
from the approach of educational reform. Leavis himself could see only
further deterioration, the nearing extinction of English minority culture.
ELIOT’S WHOLE WAY OF LIFE
The year 1948 marked T.S. Eliot’s apotheosis as a great man of English
letters, opening with his elevation to the Order of Merit and ending with the
award of the Nobel Prize. It was, of course, as a poet that he received these
honours. Yet for a decade and more his energies had been significantly
deployed in a different kind of intellectual effort. The Idea of a Christian
|
|
8.5 Page 75 |
▲back to top |
52 KULTURKRITIK
Society (1939) signalled an intensification of his already-evident interest in
social theorizing, and coincided with the beginning of a period of
collaborative inquiry, in the setting of the Council on the Christian Faith and
the Common Life and its intellectual network, the Moot, during which he
undertook his most ambitious venture in cultural criticism. This took shape
in the course of 1942 and was aired first in an essay, ‘Notes Towards a
Definition of Culture’, serialized in the New English Weekly early the next
year, and then in seminars conducted with Philip Mairet, the Weekly’s editor
(Eliot 1943). It reached definitive form in 1948, appearing as a book under
the title – pointed now by a change of article – Notes Towards the Definition
of Culture.
Eliot’s text is pervaded by his Christian beliefs – he dismissed as ‘illusion’
the idea ‘that there [could] be culture without religion’ (1962: 70) – but not
too much should be made of this. His decisive assertions, far from depending
logically on Christian assumptions, might have been made with equal force
by an unbeliever. Notes proposed three related theses. First, culture, properly
understood, was of three kinds: that of individuals, that of groups or classes,
and that of the whole society. The first depended on the second, and that in
turn on the last, which was thus ‘fundamental’ (1962: 21). These three kinds
of culture, which were also ‘levels’, were the natural accompaniments of an
increasingly differentiated social organization. They were, of course, distinct
in substance, but, also, and decisively, in form. They differed in their
proportions of ‘conscious aim’, which individuals might pursue with greater
effect than groups, and these far more effectively than a whole society. Indeed
– and this was Eliot’s second thesis – culture as ‘a whole way of life’ was to a
significant degree unconscious, and for that reason was not amenable to
direction at all (pp. 19, 20). As he had written a few years earlier in the
Christian Newsletter, ‘culture might be described as that which cannot be
planned, except by God’ (Kojecký 1971, 194–5). It was to be seen, rather, as
|
|
8.6 Page 76 |
▲back to top |
WELFARE? 53
an organism, both in its delicate articu lation of interdependent functions and
in its modalities of growth and change.
These were the bases from which Eliot forwarded his third thesis, in direct
opposition to Karl Mannheim’s espousal of democratic elites. Viewed in the
light of this essentially corporatist theory of culture and society, democratic
elitism was triply deficient. First, it replicated the commonplace confusion of
cultural kinds, supposing that what was appropriate for an individual, or for
a group, was therefore appropriate for the many. Further, it entailed an
‘atomistic’ reduction of the social order, seeing an aggregate of
interchangeable individuals where in reality there was an evolved
hierarchical unity of parts. Finally, and in consequence of these associated
shortcomings, it failed to understand the requirements of cultural continuity.
A traditional elite, a cluster of gifted individuals formed in and around the
propertied classes, sustained by them and assimilating new talent on
established terms, made for a certain continuity, even in adverse modern
conditions.1But a planned system of social and cultural leadership based on
merit rather than blood or money, in so far as it fulfilled its own criteria of
operation, would actively maximize incoherence and discontinuity.
Mannheim had foreseen this difficulty, but judged it less dangerous than a
recrudescence of the old prerogatives (Mannheim 1940: 88–92). Eliot
disagreed. Cultural responsibility entailed abstinence from programmatic
intervention, a Burkean ‘piety towards the dead, however obscure, and a
solicitude for the unborn, however remote’ (Eliot 1962: 44). Class privilege,
transmitted through the institution of the family, was an irreplaceable warrant
of cultural well-being. To undermine the one was to imperil the other. ‘If [the
reader] finds it shocking that culture and equalitarianism should conflict, if it
seems monstrous to him that anyone should have ‘advantages of birth’[,] I do
not ask him to change his faith, I merely ask him to stop paying lip-service to
culture’ (p. 16).
|
|
8.7 Page 77 |
▲back to top |
54 KULTURKRITIK
The strategic point of Eliot’s titular term ‘definition’ was clear. The
Oxford English Dictionary entry that served as his epigraph offered, for those
who paused to read it, an epitome of his cultural politics:
DEFINITION: 1. The setting of bounds; limitation (rare) – 1483
If he insisted on culture as a whole way of life, it was not in the interests of
conceptual advance, and not to revalue the meanings of popular life. His
purpose was precisely to ‘limit’ and ‘set bounds’ to post-war cultural
diffusionism, to discredit the ambitions of educational liberalism as
misguided and otiose. ‘On the whole’, he wrote, ‘it would appear to be for the
best that the great majority of human beings should go on living in the place
in which they were born’ (p. 52). The strategy of Notes as a whole was to
enforce the same mock-solicitous logic in the space of cultural relations: it
was for the best that the great majority should not aspire, or be taught to
aspire, to anything more than their familiar lot.
Scrutiny commentators were unhappily aware that Eliot’s insistence on
the unconscious character of culture ran contrary to Arnold’s activist
educational vision (Bantock 1949; Cormican 1950; Pocock 1950). But Eliot
had perceived what Scrutiny’s self-styled ‘outlaws’ could not: that the
general sense of post-war policy was itself Arnoldian. Resisting the policy,
he also sought to discredit the principle that glossed it. The Arnoldian
tradition held that culture might tame anarchy, if only society’s ‘best selves’
were granted their due authority and discretion. Eliot saw in this prospectus
the anarchic subversion of intellectual society, the unwitting self-dissolution
of received minority values and privileges. As a strategy, be it meliorist or
defensive, cultural liberalism was. like democratic elitism, a contradiction in
terms.
|
|
8.8 Page 78 |
▲back to top |
HOGGART AND THE ABUSES OF LITERACY
WELFARE? 55
In the middle 1940s, when Notes Towards the Definition of Culture was
written, Eliot’s sense of English popular culture was already deeply
anachronistic. His montage of the English everyday was, so to speak, a
reprise of his own earliest impressions, one American newcomer’s version of
pastoral:
[Culture in the widest of his three senses] includes all the
characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day,
Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog
races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled
cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-
century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar.
(Eliot 1962: 31)
At the turn of the 1960s, when he reissued the book without alteration, this
vision of a world without cinema, broadcasting or print must have seemed a
hallucination. Between the first and second editions of Notes, the cultural
universe of the social majority had been extensively reordered, in part by
those ominous education reforms and an associated widening of cultural
opportunity, and in greater part through the ever more vigorous commercial
traffic in words and images. ‘Classless’ was the widely promoted description
of a process in which the inherited signs of English social caste were
reworked as commodities, turned into styles and spectacles to enliven the
mock-democratic world of mass commerce. Converging with marketing
strategies in this, public policy sponsored a vision of classlessness – through
equality of opportunity – but, precisely in doing so, instated the working class
as a real cultural presence and topic. Among the effects of these co-operating
tendencies was the emergence of a new minority in British intellectual life, a
|
|
8.9 Page 79 |
▲back to top |
56 KULTURKRITIK
scattering of writers and artists of working-class origin, who now moved into
the approved spaces of artistic and intellectual production, there to assert or
explore the values and prospects of the half-known, half-acknowledged
social world from which they had come and to which, more often than not,
they remained committed.
One of these was Richard Hoggart. Born into the Leeds working class at
the end of the First World War, Hoggart made his way through a local
grammar school and thence to the university, graduating in English Literature
on the eve of the Second. After wartime service, he joined the Department of
Adult Education at Hull University, from which he worked as a tutor until the
end of the fifties. Hoggart’s first book was a conventional work of literary
criticism: W.H. Auden. However, he was also writing short sketches of
working-class life for the Labour left weekly Tribune, where T.R. Fyvel had
succeeded George Orwell as literary editor. And by the beginning of the
1950s, he was clarifying the terms of another kind of project, ‘a new and
natural extension’, as he later described it, of ‘the true stream of English
studies’ into the landscape of contemporary culture (Hoggart 1992: 10).
His critical point of reference was Q.D. Leavis’s Fiction and the Reading
Public (1932), the founding text of Scrutiny’s cultural diagnostics. Twenty
years on, Hoggart proposed ‘a sort of guide or textbook to aspects of popular
culture’ that would make good the unfulfilled promise of Leavis’s title by
integrating the critical study of texts within an analysis of the already-formed
culture of their readers: ‘one had to know very much more about how people
used much of the stuff which to us might seem merely dismissible trash,
before one could speak confidently about the effects it might have’ (Hoggart
1990: 134–5). The work, whose precise focus would be on the impact of
mass-marketed cultural forms on the inherited ethos of the working class,
was to be called The Abuses of Literacy.
The book eventually published in 1957 differed significantly from its
early design. The title was shorn of its provocative first syllable, in an attempt
|
|
8.10 Page 80 |
▲back to top |
WELFARE? 57
to mollify a publisher fearful of crushing litigation, and for the same reason,
Hoggart was obliged to pas tiche much of his printed evidence rather than
quote it. But the major change was structural. The original analytic scheme
furnished only half of The Uses of Literacy, its second part. This was now
preceded by a long, hybrid discourse – part autobiography and memoir, part
exemplary fiction, part social documentary – on working-class life between
the wars, offered as the necessary context for the analysis of popular culture
in the fifties.
It was this reflection on ‘an “older” order’ that gave the book its tone,
distinguishing it very clearly from its Leavisian antecedent and also from a
left-wing inspiration like Orwell. Hoggart wrote here with the assurance and
feeling of one who had come from the world he described, with an unflagging
consciousness of Britain’s class order and his own dislocated relation to it. He
was, in his own later words, ‘a once-born socialist’ immovably committed to
the welfare of his native class (Hoggart 1990: 78). The contemporary cultural
materials that he went on to dissect – the glossy magazines, the pulp fiction,
the popular song lyrics – did not express the traditional ethos of this class and
did not (yet) define it, he argued. The populism of the cultural market was an
‘approach’ from the outside, exploiting inherited strengths and weaknesses
alike, threatening to reduce its working-class audience to a demoralized
lower caste. It was a kind of spiritual ‘robbery’.
However, altered social sensibility and political alignment did not
undermine discursive continuity. Hoggart’s evaluative idiom was saturated
with Scrutiny’s clinical metaphorics of health and sickness, vigour and
debility. His writing was at times quite possessed by the spirit of the Leavises:
‘The hedonistic but passive barbarian who rides in a fifty-horse-power bus
for threepence, to see a five-million-dollar film for one-and-eightpence, is
not simply a social oddity; he is a portent’ (Hoggart 1958: 250). His closing
remarks read like an oath of allegiance: here was one individual’s
|
|
9 Pages 81-90 |
▲back to top |
|
|
9.1 Page 81 |
▲back to top |
58 KULTURKRITIK
‘contribution to a much wider discussion, a single diagnosis offered for
scrutiny’ (p. 344).
Hoggart professedly saw The Uses of Literacy as disjunct, and has
remained unmoved by those who have read it as a single composition (1992:
5). But it is just here, in the forms of the book seen as a whole, that his
discursive affiliation is more strongly registered. The dominant mode of the
work is narrative; the story it tells is of decline already far gone and perhaps
unarrestable. The contrast that emerges in his account is not simply between
two periods in the life of working-class Leeds. His story begins with an
evocation of his country-born grandmother, with her customary knowledges
and skills, then remembers two generations of native city-dwellers, and turns
finally to observe the life-patterns of a fourth generation, the working-class
young of the early 1950s. Hoggart was aware of the temptation to nostalgia,
and tried repeatedly to check it. But his qualifications were too punctually
stated, too evidently concessionary in their acknowledgement of an
improved material existence, to remake what was a canonical narrative of the
descent from rural tradition into urban-industrial anomie.
The two-part organization of the text recalls Orwell’s The Road to Wigan
Pier, and its rhetorical strategy is of the same kind, though potentially more
effective. In both cases, a record of experience purports to validate a critical
analysis: because I have known this life, the tacit reasoning goes, I may
reliably make this judgement. Yet the truth must be otherwise. Memory is a
construction of the past, and in Hoggart’s descriptions (as in Orwell’s) there
was much that was already familiar from literary convention. In practice,
Hoggart’s writing appealed to a quite different kind of moral authority, as was
evident in its strategy of quotation. The text draws heavily on working-class
idiom, and on the actual or mimicked words of commercial culture. These are
clearly marked, by punctuation or typography, as evidence for analysis; they
might be termed object-quotations. At the same time, the text avails itself of
another kind of citation, which is granted a different status. These are the
|
|
9.2 Page 82 |
▲back to top |
WELFARE? 59
epigraphs that introduce his own words, and the many phrases that occur
with little or no formal marking, woven into the syntax of his own discourse
as elements of itself. They are, in contrast, subject-quotations. Amplifying
Hoggart’s own prose voice, Locke, Tocqueville, Arnold, Gorky, Benda,
Auden, Forster, Lawrence, Yeats and others form an entire chorus of wisdom
and insight. Theirs is the true authority of the book, which he upholds against
the cynical libertarianism of mass commerce: the collective voice of culture
raised against a wayward civilization.
This conceptual binary governed the vision of The Uses of Literacy and
accounted for its most significant absence: the record of working-class self-
organization in politics, work and education. Hoggart’s disarming
explanation for the omission was that these were the interests of a small,
‘earnest’ minority untypical of their class. A stronger, though not more
sympathetic explanation would cite the spontaneous perceptual effect of the
convention that framed his analysis: that of Kulturkritik. The binary culture/
civilization classifies all social tissue as either quality or quantity, purpose or
mechanism, end or means, and the logical effect of this construction is to
render politics unintelligible as a meaningful social activity: rarefied as
‘values’ or banalized as practical administration, its specific reality as a form
of social practice is lost. Working-class political activists are no smaller a
minority than the far less class-typical bourgeois novelist. If the one seemed
so obviously less meaningful than the other, it was because in Hoggart’s
received scheme of analysis, politics as such was a secondary moral reality.
‘Labour Leavisism’ would be one summary of Hoggart’s distinctively
bifocal cultural vision. Yet he was both less demonstrative and less desperate
than these categories suggest. A moment’s reflection on his subsequent work
prompts a more exact characterization. Throughout his career – in the Arts
Council and UNESCO as well as in public education – Hoggart thought to
serve his class of origin and at the same time to serve culture through the
‘practical criticism’ of policy and administration. His model institutions, the
|
|
9.3 Page 83 |
▲back to top |
60 KULTURKRITIK
three volumes of his memoirs confirm, were adult education, the BBC and
Penguin Books. Hoggart’s specific novelty was to renew, in modified social
conditions, the tradition of Kulturkritik and the liberal mission of the public-
service intellectual. In him, the post-war British Labour movement found its
own Matthew Arnold.
|
|
9.4 Page 84 |
▲back to top |
4
A RECKONING
Between the writing of Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy and its publication
came 1956, a year of shocks and portents that confounded the settled
imagination of British politics and culture and unveiled the shapes of
domestic and international relations after the post-war reconstruction. The
Anglo-French expedition to seize the Suez canal, which had been
nationalized by Egypt’s revolutionary government, ended in military and
diplomatic humiliation. The episode dramatized the predicament of an
imperial ruling caste that could neither check its hereditary arrogance in the
face of anti-colonial revolution nor readily accept its subaltern standing in an
international capitalist order now dominated by the USA. Popular revulsion
from the Suez adventure was one sign that, at home as much as abroad, old
political maxims were losing their potency. And the scandalous cultural
successes of the year – Colin Wilson’s The Outsider, John Osborne’s Look
Back in Anger and the film Rock Around the Clock – gave early warning of
new collective sensibilities in the making: eclectic, undeferential, impatient,
and always and ever ‘young’. This was also a moment of crisis for the left.
Josef Stalin had died three years earlier. The year opened with Nikita
|
|
9.5 Page 85 |
▲back to top |
62 KULTURKRITIK
Khrushchev’s post-mortem denunciation of his predecessor’s lawless,
bloodstained rule over the Soviet Union – and ended, in bloody irony, with
the crushing of the popular revolt in Hungary by Red Army tanks. The effect
of these revelations in word and deed was convulsive, throughout the
Communist movement. The British party lost one-fifth of its members, as
some 7,000 militants, including a disproportionate number of intellectuals,
resigned or were driven out. Such were the formative conditions of ‘the New
Left’ and of a new phase in the history of discourse on culture.
Two journals, both founded in 1957, formed the intellectual nuclei of the
New Left. The New Reasoner was edited from the North of England by two
ex-Communist historians, John Saville and Edward Thompson. Having
begun as an irregular oppositional organ within the party in direct response
to Khrushchev’s revelations, the journal was dedicated to the moral renewal
of Communism under the banner of a ‘socialist humanism’. Ex-Communists
also featured among the editors and collaborators of Universities and Left
Review (ULR), and the theme of a post-Stalinist socialist humanism was
reiterated there. However, the more emphatic concern of the journal, which
emerged from a group of Oxford students, was to elaborate an analysis and a
programme that would supersede not only orthodox Communism but
Labourism as well, a thoroughgoing socialist critique of contemporary,
welfare-capitalist Britain.1A new left for a new historical situation: this was
ULR’s distinctive appreciation of the intellectual challenge facing socialists
after 1956. ‘The New Conservatism’ and Britain’s modified class relations in
a period of expanding social provision and imperial decline were the subject
of Stuart Hall’s opening contribution to the review’s agenda. This was
followed, in the second issue, by a symposium on working-class culture
occasioned by the newly published Uses of Literacy.
It is worth noting, nearly fifty years later, just how critically Hoggart’s
classic was received in the New Left’s leading forum. The editors’ opening
question was courteous but incisive: ‘Would a direct account in terms of
|
|
9.6 Page 86 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 63
readership reaction differ from Hoggart's content-analysis of the
publications themselves?'2
John McLeish likened the book’s protagonist to ‘a visiting anthropologist
of a behaviourist persuasion’ (1957: 32). Gwyn Illtyd Lewis (1957) matched
Hoggart’s cultural apprehensions with his own fears of ‘commercial
devitalization’ in the English-speaking population of Wales. The cumulative
implication of these comments was grave. Hoggart had not so much studied
readers’ use of mass print culture as inferred their subjective disposition from
its contents; his relation to them, far from empathetic, was that of a clinician
observing patterns of stimulus and response – and the controlling theme of
his analysis, as Lewis glossed it, was surely familiar. In other words, The Uses
of Literacy in practice reanimated the critical discourse it offered to
supersede, inflecting but not displacing the conventions of Leavisian
Kulturkritik. Raymond Williams, in the opening contribution to the
symposium, saluted Hoggart’s ‘deep loyalty to his own people’, but then, the
more tellingly for that, made two fundamental objections. In present
conditions, he insisted, ‘working-class materialism’ must be defended as a
‘humane’ value. And Hoggart was mistaken in excluding working-class
activism as a ‘minority’ case, in effect relegating the culture of specialized
class representatives to the status of social eccentricity. This minority, as he
would later maintain in a recorded conversation with Hoggart, inherited and
sustained a general history of struggle for democracy, trade unions and
socialism – ‘the high working-class tradition’ (Williams 1957: 31–2;
Williams and Hoggart 1960: 26–30). The implication of these remarks was
fundamental. In reclaiming material desire as a moral good and politics as a
‘high tradition’, Williams was not simply adjusting the balance of Hoggart’s
analysis, he was disorganizing its basic terms, and so intimating the
possibility of an alternative way of seeing, beyond the perceptual scheme of
Kulturkritik.
|
|
9.7 Page 87 |
▲back to top |
64 KULTURKRITIK
RAYMOND WILLIAMS: BEYOND CULTURE-AND-SOCIETY
Williams resembled Hoggart in his origins and career trajectory. A few years
younger, Williams too had been born into a working-class family, risen
through a local grammar school to study English at university, served in the
army during the war, then gone to work in adult education, where he
combined his ordinary duties with various independent writing and
publishing projects. However, the differences of formation were at least as
significant. Williams’s family was actively socialist. Whereas Hoggart came
from an urban English working class, Williams’s early years were spent in the
mixed-class environment of a Welsh village. Hoggart completed his formal
education in his home town, where his left-wing convictions developed
without assuming definite programmatic form. Williams, in contrast, crossed
the national and social border to Cambridge, where, as he later recalled, the
Communist Party and the University Socialist Club provided the-staples of
his intellectual life (Williams 1979). These variations on an apparently
common biographical scheme formed two quite different politico-cultural
sensibilities: in the one case, a congenital class tenderness sustaining
allegiance to the dominant traditions of British labourism; in the other, a more
radical and more consequential political training combined with an
egalitarian self-possession conceding nothing to the deep fatalism of
England’s culture of class.
Formed once in the confident Communist sub-culture of the late 1930s,
Williams underwent a difficult, protracted reformation in the altered
conditions he found upon returning to complete his studies in 1945. Although
still a Communist, he was now outside the party, distrustful of its official
publicity and unimpressed by its cultural orientation (Williams 1979: 61–77;
1980: 240–1). The red network of his first Cambridge period had collapsed,
and the student socialists with whom he now sought constructive
engagement took their cultural bearings from Leavis. The immediate
outcome of these new associations was the short-lived journal Politics and
|
|
9.8 Page 88 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 65
Letters, which, together with its sibling, The Critic, explored an alliance of
independent socialist politics with literary-cultural themes familiar from
Scrutiny. This initiative has been mourned as the lost British counterpart of
Sartre’s Les Temps Modernes, but it is difficult to imagine that unrealized
future (Barnett, 1976). Politics and Letters – the broken register of the title
was sign enough – was the expression of a certain intellectual crisis, not a
coherent intervention in it, and would have ended in confusion had not
circumstantial difficulties foreclosed its development. The ground of this
crisis, as Williams began to understand it, was the meaning of ‘culture’ itself,
and ‘a long line of thinking about culture’ that had been ‘appropriat[ed] ... to
what were by now decisively reactionary positions’ (1979: 97).
Out of this perception, which had begun to form as a response to the
Cambridge Leavisians and then been clarified with the appearance of Eliot’s
Notes, came the inquiry that led, over the next eight years, to Culture and
Society.3If the primary motive of the book was political, its critical strategy
was, crucially, historical. The idea of culture, as a privileged term of
evaluation, had emerged during the Industrial Revolution, Williams argued,
and must then be understood as a critical actor in the remaking of social
meanings that attended it. In order to undo the moral spell of ‘culture’, it
would be necessary to retrace the process of its formation. ‘For what I see in
the history of this word, in its structure of meanings, is a wide and general
movement in thought and feeling. ... I wish to show the emergence of culture
as an abstraction and an absolute’ (Williams [1958] 1961: 17) – as a separate
and higher social sphere, from which final moral judgement might be given
and something of a moral alternative sustained.
Organized as a long sequence of author-specific analyses, Culture and
Society was in substance the history of a discourse, its formation, variation
and transmutation. Williams analysed the progressive rarefaction of culture
over the 150-year span from Edmund Burke, the great scourge of the French
Revolution, to F.R. Leavis. He showed how a cause that had taken shape as
the defence of a whole and present social order then narrowed, in stages, to
|
|
9.9 Page 89 |
▲back to top |
66 KULTURKRITIK
the lament for an irrecoverable past; how, as its actual social bases weakened,
its claims mounted towards the absolute; how, by the middle of the twentieth
century it had been reduced to the desperate self-assertion of a specialized
minority – Scrutiny – as the only sure trustees of an unattainable general
spiritual welfare. Williams identified fundamental breaks where there was
the strongest evidence of continuity, for example, acknowledging Williams
Morris’s romantic medievalism, but also insisting on the significance of his
communism. He identified continuity where there was the most confident
proclamation of a new departure – seeing in the Marxism of the thirties not
only Communism but a persisting belief in romantic visions of art. Then, in a
long concluding chapter, he explored the meaning of this complex,
unfinished history, and situated himself within it:
The idea of culture is a general reaction to a general and major
change in the condition of our common life. Its basic element is its
effort at total qualitative assessment. ... General change, when it
has worked itself clear, drives us back on our general designs,
which we have to learn to look at again, and as a whole.
(Williams [1958] 1961: 285)
The meanings of ‘culture’ were not unequivocal: ‘The word ... cannot
automatically be pressed into service as any kind of social directive. ... The
arguments which can be grouped under its heading do not point to any
inevitable action or affiliation’ (p. 285). Yet they ‘define ... a common field’
and subserve, apparently, a common purpose: ‘The working-out of the idea
of culture is a slow reach again for control’ (p. 285).
Formulations like this, abstract in reference and seemingly inclusive in
address, were themselves less than unequivocal. Culture and Society was
evidently a statement from the left, yet it was unclear what specific
intellectual and political orientations it sponsored. The most influential
interpretation, at first offered affirmatively and, since the early 1970s, more
|
|
9.10 Page 90 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 67
often stated as a charge, was that the book proposed a moral refoundation of
socialism in the tradition of English cultural humanism, that it was, in a
phrase that became routine, a ‘left-Leavisite’ alternative to the intellectual
ruin of Stalinism.4 A less-well-known interpretation agreed that Williams’s
deep theme was the necessary and desirable continuation of that tradition in
the contemporary left, but argued that his intervention was for just that reason
communist in character. In fact, it paralleled, in its own idiom, the postwar
orientation of Party cultural analysis, which sought to trace a ‘national’
lineage for Marxist thought, in keeping with the Popular Front traditions of
the 1930s and the post-war political strategy of a ‘British road to socialism’
(1979: 112). There is, in the end, little difference between these readings, and
both find support in textual and contextual evidence. The substantive
concepts of Williams’s title, Culture and Society, were those of the tradition
he discussed, but they seemed often to exert reflexive control over his own
discourse, deflecting his analytic and evaluative priorities away from
political reason proper towards a ‘higher’, finally ‘common’ moral ground –
the familiar orientation of Kulturkritik. It is striking, too, that Williams
conceived his revaluation of English Kulturkritik in the same years that saw
the Communist Party devote itself to recovering Coleridge, the Romantics,
Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris as authentically national resources for the left.
The historian Edward Thompson was prominent in this politico-cultural
initiative, and kindred themes were sounded in Politics and Letters by
another Communist scholar, Christopher Hill.5
However, neither line of interpretation leads to a secure historical
estimate of Culture and Society. The Communist Party’s cultural initiative
was predominantly nationalist in thrust, an ill-judged attempt to resist the
emerging North Atlantic culture of the Cold War by marshalling an
essentially ‘progressive’ English tradition against the ‘decadence’ and
‘barbarism’ of New York and Hollywood. The result, as evidenced in the
Party’s cultural quarterly, Arena, was a crude national populism, often
mawkish or phobic, tendentious where not self-deluding or simply dishonest.
|
|
10 Pages 91-100 |
▲back to top |
|
|
10.1 Page 91 |
▲back to top |
68 KULTURKRITIK
There was nothing of this in Culture and Society, nor anything of Arena’s
ready identification with the British Marxism of the 1930s – from which,
indeed, Williams took a clear, cool distance ([1958] 1961: 258–75). Arena’s
repertoire included a serviceable pastiche of the Scrutiny manner, defining
the ‘function of a literary magazine’, its ‘lonely’ function, as ‘the
maintenance ... of fundamental critical standards’, the pursuit of ‘critical
vitality’ as a condition of 'creative vitality'.6 In such moments, as in its
wholesale condemnation of (American) mass-cultural production, Arena’s
greater affinity was with Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy. There, of course,
the use of that register signified a real discursive continuity from Leavis. In
Williams, the marks of continuity were not even, properly speaking, residual.
They were rather the scars of a specific, unfinished engagement in alien
country. It seems preferable, with all qualifications entered, to view Culture
and Society as Williams himself saw it, as ‘an oppositional work – not
primarily designed to found a new position’ but to undermine an existing one
(Williams 1979: 98).7
Three considerations support this self-description – and in fact enhance its
claim. Williams’s attempt ‘to counter the appropriation’ of cultural criticism
for reactionary purposes was not, as continuist interpretations must assume,
the prelude to a socialist reappropriation of it. On the contrary, his historical
summary of the tradition, although generous, was fundamentally critical,
speaking of the idea of culture as ‘an abstraction and an absolute’. Neither did
he suggest that culture in this sense might be de mocratized by expansion,
privilege redeeming itself in the gesture of welfare. On the contrary, he
expressly rejected high-cultural diffusionism, and characterized the liberal
intellectual tradition of ‘service’ as an adapted form of bourgeois
individualism that sought only to limit the damage of a social order whose
basic principle it took for granted ([1958] 1961: 312). Against both forms of
the dominant ideology, he set the alternative principle of ‘solidarity’ – and
this not as an ethical abstraction and absolute, but as the historical
achievement of capitalism’s distinctive form of labour, the working class (p.
|
|
10.2 Page 92 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 69
313). With this plain endorsement of working-class creativity, Williams
affirmed the possibility that positive cultural values could be shaped in and
by, as well as against, the social relations of modern ‘civilization’. In doing
so, he marked a position beyond the imaginative range of culture-and-
society.
FROM PATERNALISM TO DEMOCRACY
Appearing in 1958, Culture and Society announced the possibility of ‘a new
general theory of culture’ and looked forward to ‘a full restatement of
principles, taking the theory of culture as a theory of relations between
elements in a whole way of life’ ([1958] 1961: 11–12). By then, Williams had
already begun writing Essays and Principles, the book eventually published
three years later as The Long Revolution. ‘We live in an expanding culture,’
Williams had written, ‘yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact,
rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions’ (1961: 12). The
Long Revolution was, for the greater part, a sustained theoretical and
historical effort towards that understanding, and, throughout, was governed
by the ambition to clarify a politics adequate to that ‘expanding culture’.
Culture and Society had attacked the prevailing critical conception of the
epoch as that of ‘the masses ... low in taste and habit’; in a short, prospective
essay also published in 1958, Williams proposed his counter-thesis: ‘culture
is ordinary’.
Implicit in this disarmingly ordinary adjective were a theoretical
proposition, a corresponding social revaluation and the germ of a cultural
politics, all three brought into focus in a long opening shot:
The bus stop was outside the cathedral. I had been looking at the
Mappa Mundi, with its rivers out of Paradise, and at the chained
library, where a party of clergymen had got in easily, but where I
had waited an hour and cajoled a verger before I even saw the
|
|
10.3 Page 93 |
▲back to top |
70 KULTURKRITIK
chain. Now, across the street, a cinema advertised the Six-Five
Special and a cartoon version of Gulliver’s Travels. The bus
arrived, with a driver and a conductress deeply absorbed in each
other. We went out of the city, over the old bridge, and on through
the orchards and the green meadows and the fields red under the
plough. Ahead were the Black Mountains, and we climbed among
them, watching the steep fields end at the grey walls, beyond
which the bracken and heather and whin had not yet been driven
back. To the east, along the ridge, stood the line of grey Norman
castles; to the west, the fortress wall of the mountains. Then, as
we still climbed, the rock changed under us. Here, now, was lime-
stone, and the line of the early iron workings along the scarp. The
farming valleys, with their scattered white houses, fell away
behind. Ahead of us were the narrower valleys: the steel-rolling
mill, the gasworks, the grey terraces, the pitheads. The bus
stopped, and the driver and conductress got out, still absorbed.
They had done this journey so often, and seen all its stages.
(Williams 1989: 3)
Much in this landscape is familiar from Eliot or Leavis or Hoggart. But the
framing and sequence of the narrative offered an alternative to their ways of
seeing. The familiar, fatal oppositions between elite and popular, culture and
commerce, town and country, past and present, continuity and change,
sensibility and machinery, Arnold’s ‘best’ and ‘ordinary selves’ – the entire
conceptual repertoire of ‘culture and society’ – were disordered in this
complex time–space of social meaning, the shared element of everyday
existence.
Culture, as Williams now proposed to theorize it, was the mode in which
all human existence defined and evaluated itself. Strictly speaking, the very
phrase ‘culture and society’ was a confusion. The two basic processes of
culture were learning and discovery, the relay of established meanings and
|
|
10.4 Page 94 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 71
the probing of new ones, and neither, in a period of significant expansion, was
adequately served by the prevailing dual order of commerce plus public
service. The case against the capitalist market in culture was familiar (most
recently, in Hoggart’s version), and, although intensified in Williams’s
theoretical perspective, was not altered by it. The inbuilt logic of market
activity was philistine, interested in any kind of expansion that might show a
profit, but indifferent or hostile to all else. Yet the alternative of public
provision – ‘common payment, for common services’ – was hobbled not only
by the usual complaint of ruinous expense but by the locked imagination of
minority culture, to which Williams now posed a twofold challenge. It was a
commonplace belief of liberal and conservative cultural criticism that the
educational reforms of the later nineteenth century had engendered the
trivializing mass journalism of the twentieth, and it was a commonplace of
argument that, with money as with culture, the bad tended to drive out the
good. Both propositions were demonstrably false, Williams retorted, and
inadmissible as valid objections to enhanced educational provision.
However, this counter-insistence was not offered as reassurance, for it was
implicit in his theoretical concept of culture that ‘growth’ entailed something
other than simple ‘extension’:
We should not seek to extend a ready-made culture to the
benighted masses. We should accept, frankly, that if we extend
our culture, we shall change it: some that is offered will be radically
criticized. ... I would not expect the working people of England to
support works which, after proper and patient preparation, they
could not accept. ... [If] we understand cultural growth, we shall
know that it is a continued offering for common acceptance, that
we should not, therefore, try to determine in advance what should
be offered, but clear the channels and let all the offerings be
made, taking care to give the difficult full space, the original full
|
|
10.5 Page 95 |
▲back to top |
72 KULTURKRITIK
time, so that it is a real growth, and not just a wider confirmation of
old rules.
(Williams 1989: 16)
Fellow socialists found much to question in a passage like this, then and in
later years. ‘Common’, if offered as a description of existing cultural
relations, appeared to deny the actual inequalities and antagonisms of
capitalism as ‘a whole way of life’ (Thompson 1961). And, if offered as the
keyword of a critical anthropology (for, as Williams believed, any culture
must be in some sense common, in order to be a culture at all), it appeared to
float into empty ethical space – as ‘an abstraction and an absolute’. The
recourse to the first-person plural strengthened suspicions on these grounds,
as also, in a strategic sense, did the irenic language of ‘offering’ and ‘growth’.
It is true – whatever else may or may not be true – that Williams’s writing at
this time inclined too much to emollience. But it is also true, and of greater
historical importance then and now, that some of the best criticism of these
ambiguities coexisted with them, in the same pages. There was much still to
rethink and to discover, but by the turn of the 1960s Williams had established
the irreducible distance between Kulturkritik in all its variants – reactionary
or reforming – and an integrally socialist politics of culture. ‘Paternalism’,
the high-minded format of cultural growth in welfare Britain, was not only
inadequate as a counter to its far more vigorous ‘commercial’ other; it was
itself mystified, and politically objectionable as a modified version of
‘authoritarian cultural organization’. The true alternative, Williams
maintained, in his 1961 lecture ‘Communications and Community’, lay in
democratic and pluralist participation in the institutions and practices of
culture, a ‘common’ evaluation-in-process of an undecided future (1989: 23–
31). Look again at the bus crew in that small allegory of culture. It is their
labour that makes the narrative possible: the connections they sustain are a
basic condition of what the observing passenger can see and report. But about
them, and especially about their relation to the cultural complex they move
|
|
10.6 Page 96 |
▲back to top |
A RECKONING 73
through, the reader can know virtually nothing, because the Williams-figure,
so knowledgeable and attentive, declines to interpret them. Paternalism
always knows in advance what ‘the masses’ really need. Commerce always
knows in advance what paternalism fears, that what the customers actually
want is something else. In the enigmatic figure of the bus crew, Williams
indicates an alternative principle (and it is here a principle, not an affectation
of personal ignorance): no one may claim to know what 'the masses' are or
want until they speak.8
|
|
10.7 Page 97 |
▲back to top |
|
|
10.8 Page 98 |
▲back to top |
CULTURAL STUDIES
|
|
10.9 Page 99 |
▲back to top |
|
|
10.10 Page 100 |
▲back to top |
1
A THEORY
Kulturkritik spoke in the name of a rarefied cluster of human values (culture)
that survived in and against the prevailing generality of discourse
(civilization). This distinction might be grounded in the nature of being, as
with Julien Benda, but more commonly it was historical. The crucial term of
historical definition, the social substance of tradition, might be a nation or a
class, or a condensation of both, but in any case, culture was the true whole or
universal, to be asserted against the false generality of modernity, with its riot
of particular social interests. If culture was hardly the realm of freedom (a
shallow, suspect value for this discursive tradition), nevertheless it incarnated
the human potential for moral discretion and responsibility, for disciplined
exploration, in radical contrast with civilization, the realm of pragmatic
necessity, in which the inertial forces of passion and interest, Mann’s ‘classes
and masses’, dominated all else. Culture so understood was by necessary
definition a practice of agonistic evaluation: any adequate appreciation of its
inherited meanings entailed the most rigorous dealing with the spontaneous
counter-suggestions of civilization. It was not permissible to relax in the name
of a generous or sanguine pluralism: that was the logic of capitulation. Nor
|
|
11 Pages 101-110 |
▲back to top |
|
|
11.1 Page 101 |
▲back to top |
78 CULTURAL STUDIES
was there virtue in a habit of contemplative refusal: culture was the threatened
mode of existence of valid – because truly general – social authority, which
must be reaffirmed if not in some way restored to potency. Metacultural
discourse bore within itself the intimation of good governance of the wayward
whole.
The formation of a new discourse on culture – and, from the 1970s, the
emergent institution of cultural studies – entailed a threefold challenge to this
tradition. First, there would be a radical expansion of the corpus, the field of
relevant inquiry, to include everyday modernity: any variety of the making of
meaning, the whole social world of sense, might now be opened to
examination. In itself, of course, this was no novelty. Anything but dismissive
of what some thought to explore as ‘popular culture’, the antecedent tradition
was obsessed with it. The Leavises and Scrutiny had dealt extensively with the
practices and institutions of mass civilization. Also, Hoggart’s Uses of
Literacy showed that Kulturkritik could accommodate just such a radically
expanded corpus, together with significant displacements of social sensibility
and commitment, without conceptual strain. The second, more important
condition of a new departure was the unification and procedural equalization
of the field of inquiry. Even in its more historicist and sociological varieties,
Kulturkritik was drawn to essentialist distinctions between culture, in the
reserved, positive sense, and the other world of everyday (un)meaning,
civilization. It was narcissistic in critical character, moving in a closed circle
of value: the objects it contemplated, where they did not conform to its own
self-image, were not recognizable at all. From now on, in contrast, it would be
necessary to unify all signifying forms and practices in a single category –
culture as the instance of meaning in society – and to insist, as a matter of
procedure, that received conceptions of literary and artistic value should not
predetermine the scope and purpose of inquiry. This second challenge
resolved the ambiguity of the first, without yet securing the terms of the new
departure. Had it been only an inclusive and procedurally uniform inquiry
|
|
11.2 Page 102 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 79
into the social world of sense, the emerging cultural studies would have been
a variety of the existing discipline of anthropology, a research programme
devoted to the ‘superorganic’ or ‘symboling’ life of human groups – though
now in industrial rather than older and marginal societies (White 1975). It is,
indeed, a real variety, but not the one that has been decisive. The defining aim
of what would become Cultural Studies proper was to demystify the
presumptive authority of Kulturkritik and the formations so defended, to
undermine it and indeed supersede it. The motivation, all along, has been
political.
WILLIAMS: CREATION IS ORDINARY
The formative conditions of this new discourse, we have already seen, were
themselves political. The crises of the Communist and Labour traditions, in a
period of significant economic and cultural change, gave it lasting definition.
There was a further condition to be met, however, or, as it were, an objective
logical proviso. The received idea of cultural authority was not merely a
naturalized version of specific social and institutional affiliations, and would
survive a challenge that pressed only so far against it. After all, Eliot and
Leavis had in effect opposed each other in such terms, but on the shared ground
of minority culture. The new discourse could secure its intellectual position
only by digging out the foundations of the old one, the philosophical
commonplaces that underpinned it. There would have to be a fresh initiative
in general theory. This was the first and the crucial aim of The Long
Revolution.
‘Culture is ordinary’, Williams had said. However, he now continued, there
are, essentially, no ‘ordinary’ activities, if by ‘ordinary’ we mean the absence
of creative interpretation and effort ([1961] 1965: 54). With this, he suspended
the ages-old premiss of Western thinking about art. Surveying the record of
|
|
11.3 Page 103 |
▲back to top |
80 CULTURAL STUDIES
aesthetic formulation in the English tradition, Williams underlined the
persistent dualism of ‘art’ and ‘reality’ (p. 35). This divorce could be
understood in opposite ways. Art might be parasitic, as Plato had claimed, a
mere fiction twice removed from the fundamental reality of the Forms, which
were the object of philosophy. Or, as in the contrasting estimate of the
Aristotelian doctrine, it might be a mode of knowledge in its own right, giving
access to the most general truths. But in either case, the basic dualism held
good: on the one hand, a primary reality, and, on the other, the work of
representing it. The Renaissance tradition confirmed and embellished the
notion of art as special revelation, as a kind of creation, opposing it again to
‘reality’, but also, sometimes – and this was crucial – to a lesser, non-inspired
kind of apprehension of that reality. By the turn of the nineteenth century, this
old dualism had attained its definitive modern intensity. In Romantic thought,
the superior cognitive powers of art became associated with a specific mental
faculty, the imagination, and with a special kind of individual, the artist.
Williams saw positive development in this record of thinking from Antiquity
to Romanticism. It showed the strengthening assertion of specifically human
powers against the persisting claims of religious tradition. Yet, as he also
noted, this long transition from a religious to a secular–humanist identity was
ambiguous, and could also involve the reinvention of old priestly norms in a
modern guise. The terms of the ancient dualism between art and reality were
not only ontological, they were also psychological and, implicitly, even social.
‘Art’, understood as the exercise of the creative imagination by the few whom
it fully endowed, was henceforward set against a ‘reality’ that included not
only a given world of objects but also a commonplace subjectivity that merely
registered its phenomena – not only things but our ‘ordinary’ perception of
them.
In fact, Williams went on to claim, the purported dualism of art and reality
was ‘false’, and should now be displaced by a new, scientifically grounded
theory of creativity. In the received understanding, creativity involved
|
|
11.4 Page 104 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 81
‘exceptional’ rather than ‘natural seeing’. It was a rare supplement to the
generic human norm. However, contemporary research in the biology of
perception had invalidated all such distinctions, showing that all seeing is
conventional. ‘Each one of us has to learn to see’ (p. 33). There exists, in
respect of any perceiving subject, an independent reality, including objects
and other subjects, but it is never simply given as an intelligible world.
‘Reality as we experience it is ... a human creation’, and ‘all our experience’,
notwithstanding our intuitions of its immediacy, ‘is a human version of the
world we inhabit’ (p. 34). To come to see, then, to enter into ‘experience’,
entails acquiring a set of ‘rules’, of which individuals are ‘bearers’. Such rules
are historical, variable through the changing times and spaces of the human
environment, and must therefore undergo more or less radical revisions, each
involving new learning. They are also, inevitably, collective: ‘we learn to see
a thing by learning to describe it’, and, thus, since the means and schemes of
description, adequate or not, are always already in place, by participating in a
common world of meaning, the sphere of communication. Learning and
communication, then, are the substantive processes of culture, which,
moreover, is not simply an image of the world but one of its modes of
constitution. Without these processes, it would be impossible to posit an
intelligible world. They are in this basic sense fully ‘creative’ – and yet, it also
follows, in no way ‘exceptional’. Creation, on this account, is one of the
banalities of social–historical ‘nature’. Creation is ordinary.
Rethinking the anthropological and social significance of creativity in this
way, Williams thought to work through the opposed versions of culture as
special, superordinate value and culture as ‘a whole way of life’, and in this
way to initiate a coherent and critical theory and politics of the domain of
social meaning. The attempt was inevitably controversial – among
conservatives and liberals, of course, but also on the left. The recurring matter
for objection – it has, at this date, become a hereditary exercise in disputation
– was Williams’s emphasis on ‘common’ meanings, on ‘community’ and
|
|
11.5 Page 105 |
▲back to top |
82 CULTURAL STUDIES
‘communication’ (Thompson 1961; Eagleton 1976). The political implication
of this elective vocabulary seemed to be a strategic gradualism, in which
capitalist relations of property and power might be dissolved through a
process of ‘growth’. Philosophically, it appeared as evidence of an
unsurmounted humanism traceable to the impact of F.R. Leavis. Questions of
political strategy need not directly concern us here, though the matter of the
political as a social form is central to my argument, and I will return to this
later. There will also be more to say about the philosophical issue. For now, a
few observations may serve to reduce these problems to something nearer
their actual scale, and, at the same time, to place the emphasis where it belongs,
on Williams’s discursive break with Kulturkritik. The analytic sequence of
The Long Revolution moves from abstract to concrete. Opening with an
anthropological account of ‘the creative mind’, it goes on to discuss issues in
the general theory of social relations, and introduces the specifically cultural
concepts of ‘social character’ and ‘structure of feeling’ (‘The Analysis of
Culture’). There follows a critique of specifically bourgeois representations
of individuality and social order, and then a suite of studies in English cultural
history (education, literacy, the press, language, writers, dramatic forms, the
contemporary novel). The book closes with a synoptic analysis of a
contemporary situation (‘Britain in the 1960s’). The analysis of culture as
‘making common’, or ‘communication’, sets out from a psycho-biological
theory of species constants: that is to say, from an order of abstraction in
which, as a principle of scientific procedure, socially specific forms and
relations of commonality – of property and labour, for example – have no
place. And if the rhetorical insistence of these terms seems greater than
theoretical definition requires, it is because they are simultaneously involved
in a struggle against modern literary common sense. The relevant contraries
of ‘common’ and ‘communication’, clearly visible in the text, are not such
categories as power, inequality, struggle and revolution. They are the special
creative individual of Romantic tradition, and the self-enclosing projects of
|
|
11.6 Page 106 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 83
modernist aesthetics (as Archibald McLeish famously declared, ‘A poem
should not mean/But be’) and the common-sense reduction of the ‘creative’ to
the ‘new’ (Williams [1961] 1965: 46–51). The book as a whole is shaped by
this purpose. As a work of history as well as theory and method, it is again
structured by specific critical engagements, challenging the canonical
Leavisian narrative of decline on its own favoured sites – education, language
and the press – and naming and endorsing an alternative grand narrative of
modernity as ‘the long revolution’. There was even more of Kulturkritik here
than was commonly suggested, and most of it was debris.
MARXISM AND CULTURAL THEORY
Williams’s ‘theory of culture as a theory of relations between elements in a
whole way of life’ was socialist in political affiliation, historical in its
perception of the formed and changeful nature of all social life, and
emphatically anti-idealist in its account of sense-making as an ordinary and
practical modality of human activity as such. However, it did not claim and
was not offered the franchise of Marxism. Over the next forty-odd years, this
apparent indeterminacy became an obligatory topic in critical discussion. The
simplest documentary evidence suggests a history in three acts: initial
commitment, disillusioned withdrawal, critical re-engagement and return.
Early affiliation to the cultural theory and perspectives of the Communist
Party was followed, after 1945, by a phase of critical attraction to the methods
and diagnosis of Leavis and Scrutiny, and a correspondingly distant
evaluation of English Marxism. The principal early works, Culture and
Society and The Long Revolution, bear the theoretical imprint of that
attraction, which was not dispelled until the early 1970s, in a new phase of
thought that led to the formulation of ‘cultural materialism’ and Williams’s
self-insertion in an international community of Marxist theory. This is a
|
|
11.7 Page 107 |
▲back to top |
84 CULTURAL STUDIES
plausible scheme; Williams himself volunteered much evidence in support of
it (1979: 144). Nevertheless, it is misleading as a means of critical access to
his work, suggesting as it does a formal parallelism between the intellectual
biography and the theoretical history. As in the tensions of the working life, so
in the logic of the theorizing: corresponding to the engagements and
disengagements of the one, there must be shifts and breaks in the other –
‘early’ and ‘late’, ‘Leavisian’ and ‘Marxist’, or whatever descriptions taste
may prefer. The value of such interpretations is, of course, that they underline
the developing character of Williams’s work over thirty years, and the need for
properly rigorous discrimination of its character and claims. Yet it is possible
to take issue with the common versions of the narrative without lapsing into
sub-critical naivety and indulgence: to claim, as I do, that Williams’s work
exhibits a fundamental continuity, yet not a fundamental coherence. If there is
a ‘break’ in his thinking, it is not so much a datable, quotable intellectual-
textual event as a persisting internal discrepancy. Williams’s theoretical
discourse is bivocal, implicating ‘culture’ in two distinct roles.
The crux in Williams’s relationship with Marxism was the tradition of
cultural analysis deriving its authority from Marx’s classic summary of his
new-found materialist conception of history:
in the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations
that are indispensable and independent of their will, relations of
production which correspond to a definite stage of development of
their material productive forces. The sum total of these relations of
production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real
foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and
to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The
mode of production of material life conditions the social, political
and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness
|
|
11.8 Page 108 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 85
of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social
being that determines their consciousness.
(Marx [1859] 1970: 181)
This formulation of the structuring role of economic relations in the making
and remaking of societies is what came to be known and cited in the concept–
metaphor of ‘base and superstructure’. Williams lodged three objections to
this formula, each quite different from the others.
First, it was predictably schematic and reductionist in its treatment of
concrete historical material: its determinist confidence in regular patterns of
(economic) cause and (cultural (effect) left it unable to account fully and
consistently for the typical complexity of practice and orientation in cultural
formations. ‘There were industrial novels’ in nineteenth-century Britain, he
remarked on one occasion, ‘but what there was not was the kind of entity
postulated by [Christopher] Caudwell – “capitalist poetry” ’ (Williams 1979:
144). This was a familiar critical theme, a matter for rebuke and qualification
in Marxist writing from the late Engels onwards, as well as a mock-sorrowful
topic for critics with not the smallest interest in resolving the apparent
difficulty. Williams’s solution – a critical development of the formula rather
than a departure from it – was to follow the disobliging indications of
appearances, to affirm and eventually to theorize complexity as a normal,
structural feature of cultural history. First outlined in the closing pages of
Culture and Society ([1958] 1961), this understanding attained formulaic
expression in Marxism and Literature (1977). Any historical period was
characterized by the co-presence of three kinds of cultural formation: the
‘residual’, continuing from an earlier formative period and still active; the
‘emergent’, taking shape in the present but tending more or less significantly
beyond its given terms; and, more powerful than either, the ‘dominant’, those
forms and practices that most directly assisted the reproduction of existing
social relations, the bourgeois in ‘bourgeois culture’.
|
|
11.9 Page 109 |
▲back to top |
86 CULTURAL STUDIES
This was a substantial issue, but not the most serious. It was, so to say, a
superstructure whose misshapen features should be traced to a fault in ‘the real
foundation’ of theory. The decisive short-coming in the base–superstructure
formula was not an excess of materialism but a lack of it. In effect, Williams
charged, the Marxist tradition had given priority to matter but otherwise
retained the belief in an immaterial plane of ideas. In this way, it recapitulated
the ages-old dualism of spirit and matter, inverting but not superseding its
constitutive terms. This had been the general implication of his critical case
against the Marxism of the 1930s, in which he identified a syncretic discourse,
part economic-determinist and part Romantic idealism, the latter
compensating for the explanatory weakness of the former ([1958] 1961: 271).
It furnished the negative example governing the theoretical emphases of The
Long Revolution, and eventually released the polemical energy that powered
the formulation of ‘cultural materialism’. The in-built suggestion of the base–
superstructure formula, Williams maintained, was that culture is a
‘secondary’ or ‘derived’ reality, an effect or expression or copy of a society
already substantially constituted elsewhere, in relations and processes
thought of as distinctively ‘material’. But the critique of ‘natural seeing’
exposed such reasoning as incoherent, as a materialism that had not yet
matured into full understanding of its own theoretical implications. Culture is
one of the modes of creation of human reality, enjoying ‘genuine parity’ with
them: ‘It is then not a question of relating the art to the society but of studying
all the activities and their interrelations, without any concession of priority to
any one of them we may choose to abstract’ (Williams [1961] 1965: 63,62).
And given this basic parity of being, it was not clear how one kind of activity
could be ceded causal privilege in the formation of social relations as a whole:
[i]f we find, as often, that a particular activity came radically to
change the whole organization, we can still not say that it is to this
activity that all the others must be related; we can only study the
|
|
11.10 Page 110 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 87
varying ways in which, within the changing organization, the
particular activities and their interrelations were affected.
(1965: 62)
It was possible to argue that: ‘[economic] production and distribution are ...
essential, for the maintenance of life ... [and moreover that] the highly variable
ways in which they are organized quite clearly colour our whole existence and
in some cases appear to determine it’ and yet to resist an ‘absolute formula’ (p.
62) and:
The formula that matters is that which, first, makes the essential
connexions between what are never really separable systems,
and second, shows the historical variability of each of these
systems, and therefore of the real organizations within which they
operate and are lived.
(1965: 136)
Qualified as these formulations are in regard to the question of determination
by the economic, it should be apparent that Williams was not primarily
concerned to write another page in the chronicle of idealist resistance to such
an idea. His key critical emphases fell elsewhere. He drew attention to the
internal changeability of history’s constitutive ‘systems’, to their variable
social reach and articulation. As he observed in The Long Revolution ([1961]
1965: 136), the relations between household production and general
production (between ‘the family’ and ‘the economy’) were not constant from
one form of society to another. Here, too, and again in Marxism and Literature
(1977) and the late Towards 2000 (1983), he emphasized the changeable social
scope of ‘the economic’, both as a cultural category and as a systematic
relationship. Furthermore – and this is what actually defines his theory, early
and late – Williams insisted on the inseparability, the ‘indissolubility’ of ‘the
whole social process’ ([1961] 1965: 55).
|
|
12 Pages 111-120 |
▲back to top |
|
|
12.1 Page 111 |
▲back to top |
88 CULTURAL STUDIES
Among the three critical elements in Williams’s reflections on the base–
superstructure formula, this one was dominant. Not merely retained as a
settled theme in Marxism and Literature, it was raised there to the intensity of
a justifying critical passion. The most conspicuous engagements of that work
– the uncharacteristically crude dealings with structural linguistics and
associated Marxist styles, coming oddly from the writer who had theorized
individuals as the ‘bearers’ of ‘rules’, and who, earlier and later, spoke easily
of cultural ‘systems’ (Williams [1961] 1965: 34; Moriarty 1995) – owed a
good deal of their impetus to this fundamental concern. Williams’s
argumentation here was typically threefold, addressing matters of substance
and procedure, and also suggesting an interpretation of the theoretical
difficulty. The substantive claim, that all cultural and other activities form, and
function as, moments of a unitary and dynamic social process, was self-
evidently in the tradition of Marx. It was distinctive mainly for its
emphatically ‘materialist’ conception of culture and was correspondingly
guarded in its concessions to the special role of the economic. However,
consistent implementation of this claim depended upon rigorous control of
‘abstraction’, which, though necessary, threatened always to deform the
substantive theory by representing analytic distinctions between cultural,
political and economic modes of social life as separate spheres of reality.1
Theory ran the risk of frustrating its own ends, and this for reasons that had less
to do with procedural shortcoming than with the logic of ‘the whole material
social process’. Abstraction and separation were the spontaneous cultural
tendencies of capitalism itself, Williams maintained. The false dissociations
of the Marxist theoretical tradition, above all that of ‘base and superstructure’,
reflected the historically specific appearances of one form of society. They
were the ‘fetishized’ appearances, as Marx described them, of capitalism,
which, as a system, fosters confusion about the objective reality of ‘our
common associative life’ (Williams [1961] 1965: 56).
|
|
12.2 Page 112 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 89
This critical association of ideas was constant: it formed the thematic core
of Williams’s theoretical discourse, which we may now consider in the light
of a terminological curiosity. Why, even as he characterized his developed
position as ‘a Marxist theory’, one ‘within historical materialism’, should he
also give it a name of its own, ‘cultural materialism’ (1977: 5)? Both the claim
and the descriptive gesture had strong, evident grounds. The terminological
linkage summarized a process of theoretical struggle in which ‘materialism’
could come to know ‘culture’ adequately only by knowing itself differently,
in a way more fully consistent with its own premisses. Here was a theory of
‘the specificities of material cultural and literary production’ (p. 5), or, with a
critical shift in emphasis, of ‘the signifying system through which necessarily
(though among other means) a social order is communicated, reproduced,
experienced and explored’ (Williams 1981: 13, emphases added).
So far, so convincing. Yet, there is room to inquire whether cultural
materialism was simply this, whether it was no more than the theory and
programme thus defined. Williams’s early definition is revealing. The ‘theory
of culture’ announced in Culture and Society and The Long Revolution was
conceived as ‘a theory of relations between elements in a whole way of life’
([1958] 1961: 11–12). The interest of this definition, which Williams
reiterated almost verbatim in The Long Revolution, and again ten years later,
lies in its phrasing, where an apparent redundancy conveys a decisive
inflection of sense.2 The object of the theory is not ‘a whole way of life’ –
which, as critics have often pointed out, would be ‘society’, not ‘culture’ – but
the relations that make it such. Culture, then, is not the whole, nor is it only
coextensive with the whole. It is, rather, the principle of whole-ness in social
life. Culture is more than a specific object of inquiry: it is the qualifying
condition of all fruitful social analysis and judgement.
This was the definition of the late 1950s. Later definitions from the
seventies and eighties differ significantly, in idiom and specificity of claim.
Yet these differences do not validate a radical distinction between early and
|
|
12.3 Page 113 |
▲back to top |
90 CULTURAL STUDIES
later Williams, between the Leavisian humanism of the one and the Marxism
of the other. The later definitions redrafted but did not substantively revise the
theoretical project of The Long Revolution, and they did not mark a break with
the critical philosophical theme that counterpointed it. On the contrary, the
critical function of ‘materialism’ in Marxism and Literature (1977) was to
serve both simultaneously: to further the theory while sustaining a cautionary
commentary upon it, and both in the name of the central category and value of
the text, the ‘whole’. As a qualifier of ‘materialism’, ‘culture’ was a
specification but also a check: the object of a theory but also a critique of the
inborn tendency of all theory in a capitalist civilization.
Valid theory, ‘substantial knowledge’, Williams affirmed in The Long
Revolution ([1961] 1965: 39), was as Coleridge had defined it: ‘the intuition
of things which arises when we possess ourselves as one with the whole’.
Unlike ‘analytic knowledge’, it arose from ‘experience’, to which, at this
stage, Williams accorded special cognitive authority. The imprint of
Leavisian romanticism is traceable here, but in the conceptual setting of The
Long Revolution it is no longer so easy to interpret. Leavis rejected all theory
as an obstacle to substantial knowledge, which, contrariwise, arose from the
mutual possession of critic and text. However, Leavis’s reasoning was dualist,
in effect distinguishing valid from spurious modes of experience, one
grounded in the intuition of human norms, the other a passive absorption of the
dominant, ‘mechanical’ civilization. Authoritative experience, for him, was
an exclusive universal. Williams could not, in elementary logic, appeal to
‘experience’ in this sense. His analysis of creativity was radically anti-
essentialist, postulating experience as a historical formation of subjectivity,
variable between and within societies, not a perceptual constant. And ‘the
human’, in his discourse, marked a social principle of inclusion, not a
perennial moral nature. Two other options remained. The first, which
Williams took, was to abandon the criterion of experience in that dogmatic–
subjectivist sense and to pursue ‘substantial knowledge’ within a programme
|
|
12.4 Page 114 |
▲back to top |
A THEORY 91
of critical theory-formation. The distrust of ‘analytic knowledge’ persisted,
sometimes emphatically, at other times less so. But as his last theoretical
codifications made clear, ‘experience’ was to be understood as an effect of
‘signifying systems’. The idea of a sovereign category of culture, ‘a general
concept which might be capable of indicating all [its] complex interrelations’
(1981: 206), persisted too, but as a goal of theory, not a founding intuition.
The alternative was to retain the cognitive sovereignty of ‘experience’, but
now in a historical and inclusivist perspective whose inescapable dangers
would be subjectivism and relativism – the frustration of critical thought by an
uncritical deference to individuals’ spontaneous perceptions of themselves
and their world. A passage like this, coming late in The Long Revolution, sees
Williams exclude that option, in the name of the real categories and the theory
that knows them, but then delineate, with critical ambiguity, the path by which
it might return:
In an industrial economy, social production will either be owned or
controlled by the whole society, or by a part of it which then
employs the rest. The decision between these alternatives is the
critical decision about class, and if we are serious about ending the
class system we must clear away the survivals, the irrelevancies,
and the confusion of other kinds of distinction, until we see the hard
economic centre which finally sustains them. With that basic
inequality isolated, we could stop the irrelevant discussion of
class, of which most of us are truly sick and tired, and let through
the more interesting discussion of human differences, between
real people and real communities living in their valuably different
ways.
([1961] 1965: 363)
|
|
12.5 Page 115 |
▲back to top |
92 CULTURAL STUDIES
There were, in that last sentence, intimations of both the best and the worst
kinds of utopianism. Socialism is the necessary means to a general human
liberation, but, in turn, must affirm nothing less as its historic commitment:
that is the central political conviction of The Long Revolution. But even as he
insisted on the structural locks of capitalism, Williams echoed the terms of
another discourse, one in which that ‘hard’ thing dematerializes into an old
and wearisome topic: ‘classes’ and other such categories become ‘irrelevant’
abstractions unworthy of ‘real people’ in all their ordinary variety. Here is a
kind of utopianism that deals with capitalism by wishing it out of existence in
a transfiguring vision of the everyday – a kind that might be called ‘populist’
(see pp. 134ff. below). This was not the meaning that Williams intended and
acted upon, but it was, objectively, there to embrace, as others would. With the
emergence and consolidation of Cultural Studies as an organized academic
pursuit, from the later 1960s onwards, the question of populism became
crucial.
|
|
12.6 Page 116 |
▲back to top |
2
A CENTRE
Williams, striking beyond the discursive boundaries of Kulturkritik, explored
a socialist theory and politics of culture, in the service of a long revolution.
Richard Hoggart pursued his own critical programme in a new institutional
departure, a Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS). The
subsequent development of critical thinking about culture in Britain – and
beyond – has been inseparable from the fortunes of that initiative, which had
no strict precedent in the record of English studies. It will be necessary
henceforward to acknowledge the new reality of collaborative academic work
on culture – without, however, making any claim to reconstruct an
institutional history. What is most important in the present context is the
discursive mutation that now occurred, in the search for an alternative
collective identity and voice. One simple way of proceeding now is to ask a
question. What did Hoggart propose, and with what results?
LITERATURE AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL STUDIES
Hoggart’s opportunity had come with his appointment, six years after The
Uses of Literacy (1958), to the chair of Modern English in the University of
|
|
12.7 Page 117 |
▲back to top |
94 CULTURAL STUDIES
Birmingham. The rationale and practical substance of the proposal formed the
subject of his inaugural lecture.
Hoggart’s title, ‘Schools of English and Contemporary Society’ (1970b:
245–59), testified to his continuing affiliation with the dominant national
variety of Kulturkritik. His first principle was that of literary Romanticism,
with its belief in the inborn superiority of literature as a mode of knowledge
and judgement: ‘how well would we be able to apprehend, let alone express,
the complexity of personal relations, if it were not for literature working as
literature?’ (1970b: 248). In the implicit answer to that question lay the
defining commitment of English studies. And this, in turn, implied a duty
towards language in general, as the element of human discrimination, at a time
when its well-being could not be taken for granted: ‘I wonder whether in any
previous period so many words were being used inorganically – not because
the writers had something to say about their experience, but on behalf of the
particular concerns of others’ (p. 251).
It was not sufficient, Hoggart judged, to deplore the handiwork of ‘the
advertisers and the public relations men’. The ominous tendencies of
contemporary usage – centrally, the human disintegration implied in the forms
of public address – were systemic in kind, arising from modernity as such.
They were: ‘part of the price of self-consciousness (up to a point and of a
certain kind), a consequence of the endlessly working conveyor-belt
productiveness of modern communications, and of the increasing
centralization and concentration of societies’ (p. 252). To these spontaneous
historical tendencies, literary criticism – the developed experience of
‘literature working as literature’ – was the necessary form of resistance.
Thus far, Hoggart had rehearsed the Leavisian topic of cultural emergency.
But the implicit terms of Mass Civilization and Minority Culture were now
inflected by the distinctive social commitments of The Uses of Literacy and a
less fatalistic style of Kulturkritik. Teachers of English would discover that:
‘the voices that most readily speak to their school children are very different
|
|
12.8 Page 118 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 95
from the voices heard in that high art they are now trained to teach’ (Hoggart
1970b: 253). And the difference was not necessarily that of the new or the
antipathetic: ‘many [teachers] listened to those popular voices before they
came to university and some might still do so with some part of themselves’
(p. 253).
‘Only connect’: Hoggart took over E.M. Forster’s motto for Howards End,
in urging a new effort, at once more ‘humble’ and more curious, to 'make sense'
of this cultural 'split'.1 'Literature and Contemporary Cultural Studies’ was
Hoggart’s provisional designation of this problem area, for which he outlined
a field and a threefold programme of inquiry. The field would be contemporary
culture as a whole: its forms, practices and organizations, the formation of its
producers and of their audiences. Although there were precedents for work
across so wide a field – Hoggart cited the examples of F.R. Leavis and Q.D.
Leavis, ‘more important than most’, and George Orwell (pp. 255, 257) – it
would be necessary first of all to clarify the terms of a fresh engagement:
Talk about ‘highbrows, middlebrows and lowbrows’ continues,
although it is now almost entirely useless as critical terminology.
The education press (still following Ortega y Gasset) talks about
‘your common man’ and ‘the masses’ as though these were well-
defined terms rather than conditioned gestures. Most of the
discussion of conformity, status, class, ‘Americanization’, mass
art, pop art, folk art, urban art and the rest is simply too thin.
(1970b: 255)
Critical review, ‘historical and philosophical’, of ‘the cultural debate’ would
therefore inform the second aspect of the studies, which would involve
empirical research in the sociology of contemporary culture, its writers, artists
and audiences, its circuits of authority and reputation, its underlying economy,
and their myriad ‘interrelations’. The third, and the ‘most important’, form of
inquiry would be literary criticism. There were strong methodological reasons
|
|
12.9 Page 119 |
▲back to top |
96 CULTURAL STUDIES
for this ordering of priorities, Hoggart maintained. Only ‘the directly literary
critical approach’, with its developed practices of rhetorical and thematic
analysis, could determine the specificity of textual phenomena: ‘unless you
know how these things work as art, even though sometimes as “bad art”, what
you say about them will not cut very deep’ (p. 257).
Claims of this kind are valid enough, but, paradoxically, only within limits
that Hoggart’s discursive tradition refused to accept as compatible with an
adequate apprehension of literature. Literary ‘art’, in the Leavisian school of
English and contemporary cultural studies, bore witness to the possibility of
human wholeness. Literary criticism realized itself only in so far as it
understood this, and was thus not so much an analytic ‘approach’ as an
indispensable control on all purposeful cultural inquiry. This was the
problematic of English Kulturkritik, which had governed the reasoning of The
Uses of Literacy, and which, the inaugural lecture made plain, retained its
primordial authority in Hoggart’s discourse. But it was a problematic no
longer perfectly in place. The reference to Orwell was a local sign of a
disturbance in cultural identification and vision. Among the many things that
students of popular culture needed to learn, Hoggart suggested, was ‘a little
more humility about what audiences actually take from unpromising
material’. Indeed: ‘perhaps no one should engage in the work who is not, in a
certain sense, himself in love with popular art’. If it was true that ‘one kind of
“love” is a disguised nostalgia for mud’, that ‘assimilated lowbrowism is as
bad as uninformed highbrowism’, it was also true that in the ambiguities of
mass art and in the ambivalent experience of it there was insight to be gained:
All this is related also to hopes, uncertainties, aspirations, the
search for identity in a society on the move, innocence, meanness,
the wish for community and the recognition of loneliness. It is a
form of art (bastard art, often) but engaging, mythic and not easily
explained away.
(p. 257)
|
|
12.10 Page 120 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 97
Even in its ‘increasingly machine-tooled’ forms, ‘there are sometimes spaces
between the brittle voices in which a gesture sets you thinking in a new way
about some aspect of human experience.’ In short, ‘we have to recognize the
meaningfulness of much popular art’ (pp. 258–9).
The valorization of literature as the touchstone of moral sentience, the
representation of modern history as a spontaneous process fostering
abstraction, indifference and disintegration, the answering strategy of
engagement with the contemporary, in a trans-disciplinary effort governed by
literary criticism: Hoggart varied these characteristically Leavisian
perceptions and commitments in the direction of greater openness and
curiosity, but, unlike Williams, did not try to displace them. At the same time,
he could not simply re-enact the characteristic social gesture of Kulturkritik,
the drama of minority significance versus mass stimulus and response. In
acknowledging the ‘meaningfulness’ of ‘much’ popular culture, he implicitly
called into question the ascribed identities, faculties and relations of the
discourse as such, the constitutive terms of its claims to authority. But this
disturbance – eased already by that saving ‘much’ – was a sign of strain, not a
moment of rupture. The cultural identity of ‘we’ and the status of ‘meaning’
remained awkward in Hoggart’s own work. Was popular culture ‘meaningful’
only as ‘symptom’, or could it be ‘representative’, not merely expressing but
exploring and criticizing its conditions of existence? Was a faltering
paternalism the only alternative to ‘the new populism’? (Hoggart 1970a: 205–
8) These questions were left at the boundary of Kulturkritik to be taken up in
the new Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
FROM HOGGART TO STUART HALL
Without Richard Hoggart there would not have been a Centre. But the
inspirational figure in the history of the CCCS, the individual who did more
than any other to fashion its character, was Hoggart’s deputy and eventual
|
|
13 Pages 121-130 |
▲back to top |
|
|
13.1 Page 121 |
▲back to top |
98 CULTURAL STUDIES
successor in the role of Director, Stuart Hall. Of course – and who has not
learned to say so? – this is problematic. For here was a ‘centre’ that did not or
could not or must not embody any of the qualities that the metaphor suggests.
It was not a fixed point or even a singularity. It did not regulate a boundary or
determine a path towards closure. It was not the origin of Cultural Studies, or
its end. Philosophical glosses of this kind, which are conventional in
retrospects of Birmingham, are motivated as much by honour as by
conviction. A comparative institutional history, integrating anecdote and
archival material in a wider politico-cultural context, would be illuminating.
But for the purposes of a less ambitious account, it can be said that if Stuart
Hall cannot be taken to represent the Centre, then it cannot be represented at
all.
Hall himself has never spoken for the CCCS quite as, to take a relevant
comparison, F.R. Leavis, with all the usual disclaimers, would speak for
Scrutiny. Diversity, openness and provisionality are the recurring themes of
his various reconstructions – which form the greater part of the published
record (Hall 1980a; 1996c). His writings from the Centre – frequently
authored with others – highlight a practice of ‘negotiation’ (one of his key
words) with critical interlocutors both inside and outside the institution. This
was not only the sign of a certain working context. His post-CCCS writing in
the eighties and nineties has shared with the early work a habit of strong,
punctual emphasis but also, quite generally, a tendency to elusion.
Systematicity is not a positive value for Hall, who explicitly distinguishes
‘Theory’ from his own preferred practice of ‘theorizing’ (Hall 1996a: 150). In
his case, then, as much as in that of CCCS, there is reason for critical caution,
but also, perhaps, for a little compensating tenacity. For Hall’s work is highly
thematic, and if it has no use for fixed schemes, its propensities are
nevertheless quite regular.
Hall was exceptionally well-qualified to implement the idea of a Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies. He had been trained in English literature, in
|
|
13.2 Page 122 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 99
Jamaica and later at Oxford, and then gone on to develop working interests in
film, television and mass literary forms. His first professional publications
were an essay on film studies and a book, co-authored with Paddy Whannel,
The Popular Arts.2He had been a founding member of the New Left, one of
the team that created Universities and Left Review and the first editor of its
successor, New Left Review. His characteristic emphasis within these
collectives was not merely the contemporary – the necessary orientation of
any political commitment – but the new. His earliest political essays pursued
the apparent novelties of Britain in the fifties, a remaking of Conservative
politics and – controversially – an emerging ‘sense of classlessness’ (Hall
1958). And, like Hoggart or Williams though more decidedly so, as a black
subject of the Empire, he had not inherited and could not simply assume an
unmarked intellectual identity in England’s dominant culture. There was, in
this personal combination, the ground of continuous development from
scheme into practice and cumulative achievement, but there was also the
potential for a leap forward – which is what happened in the unimagined
conditions of post-New Left culture in the later 1960s. Hoggart set his course
by the natural lights of English Labour politics and a modified cultural
liberalism. Hall, who had been formed in the 1950s crises over Suez and
Hungary, espoused a more radical socialism and a general principle of
renewal, both in politics and in theory, where Marxism seemed to him an
inescapable, though also questionable, affiliation. With all institutional and
personal considerations set aside, Hall’s interests were far better adapted to
the emerging culture of the left. The easing of Cold War ideological pressures,
the intensification of anti-colonial and anti-imperialist warfare throughout the
non-metropolitan world, and the structural expansion of higher education in
conditions of faltering capitalist prosperity were the formative conditions of
mass student radicalism in the major countries of the West. The events of
May–June 1968, when a student revolt in Paris sparked a general strike of
French workers, the escalation of the wars of liberation in Vietnam and
|
|
13.3 Page 123 |
▲back to top |
100 CULTURAL STUDIES
Cambodia, and the international wave of solidarity they inspired, were the
most spectacular manifestations of the new phase. The British student
insurgency was modest in scale, duration and striking-power, but it was one
necessary condition of a cultural remaking of the left. The other condition was
more strictly intellectual. These were the years of New Left Review’s ‘Western
Marxist’ programme, through which Hall’s successor editors worked to
displace the dominant traditions of socialist thought in Britain – an
‘empiricist’ indifference or hostility to theoretical inquiry and a
characteristically ‘English’ confidence in the virtues of piecemeal social
reform. With its mightily self-possessed liberal intelligentsia, accommodated
labour movement, and weak, compromised Communist Party, Anglo-British
culture seemed especially resistant to radical attack. New Left Review’s
conviction was that systematic, critical dissemination of Europe’s unofficial
Marxist schools would assist the formation of independent and versatile
socialist thought in the homeland of ‘empiricism’. Some of this work was
already available in English, but only a concentrated effort of learning and
discussion could unlock the critical potential of the tradition as a whole
(Anderson 1976; New Left Review 1977). The year 1968 dates the symbolic
fusion of politics and ideas, the entry of a new intellectual generation into
popular struggle and a spring tide of revolutionary criticism in the bourgeois
academy. In the same year, Hoggart left Birmingham for Paris – on
secondment to UNESCO – and Hall assumed undivided responsibility for the
Centre.
TEN YEARS OF CULTURAL STUDIES
Looking back, just over a decade later, in the last days of his tenure, Hall
judged that Cultural Studies had achieved autonomy, now having ‘a direction,
an object of study, a set of themes and issues, a distinctive problematic of its
own’ (Hall 1980a: 26). Its project was ‘the elaboration of a non-reductionist
|
|
13.4 Page 124 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 101
theory of cultures and social formations’ (pp. 39–40). How far did this
conception honour Hoggart’s prospectus of 1963, and how far did it deviate
from it? CCCS had remained committed to the contemporary. Its principal
interest lay in that ‘period of change and development’ that had opened with
the ‘qualitative break’ or ‘decisive rupture’ of the Second World War.
Although it had come to define its working chronological range as one
hundred years (from 1880), the Centre maintained its emphasis on
contemporaneity as the presence of the new. However, the range of the
cultural had now been expanded. In Hoggart’s definition, the repertoire of
cultural forms was effectively bounded by the law of copyright, including
published works and licensed performances of all kinds, but not, apparently,
anything more. The majority population, now glimpsed as culturally active,
yet non-producing in this sense, came into sociological vision as audiences.
The organizational and economic relationships he proposed to investigate
were, implicitly, those of cultural commerce. The Centre amended the
sociological brief through a process of critical reflection that also transformed
the core definition of the field. Public as well as commercial institutions were
drawn into range: BBC television news broadcasting, for example, and the
formal education system, including its literary curricula. Ethnographic
initiatives, mainly in the controversial field of youth ‘sub-cultures’, which
CCCS explored as ‘rituals of resistance’, brought the central structures of state
and economy into critical question and at the same time confirmed Hoggart’s
audiences as producers in their own right, collective authors of the texts and
performances of everyday life.3 Cultures – the plural was now inherent in the
definition and thus implicit in any use of the singular – were now understood
‘anthropologically’ (Hall) as ensembles of practices, not primarily as
artefacts, high or low, to be analysed in abstraction from their economic and
political conditions of existence.
But what, then, would be the distinctive pattern of cultural studies?
Hoggart, while urging an opening to sociology, had been at pains to emphasize
|
|
13.5 Page 125 |
▲back to top |
102 CULTURAL STUDIES
its intrinsic inadequacy to the object of inquiry: literary criticism alone could
furnish the means of elucidating the operations of culture as such. He had also
urged a critical audit of conceptual resources, as part of the effort to capture
the defining ‘interrelations’ of contemporary culture as a whole – a
‘philosophical’ priority not inevitably favoured by the ethnographic emphasis
on self-interpreting experience (Hall et al. 1980: 88–95). Indeed, both
requirements had been met, though in forms that hardly matched the
expectations of 1963. The specificity of culture as a mode of social practice
came to be reasoned from premisses quite alien to the English literary-critical
tradition. Structuralism, a theory–method generalized from Saussurean
linguistics and instanced, in the work of the CCCS, by Claude Lévi-Strauss
and Roland Barthes, grounded a conception of culture as ‘signifying practice’,
an active and structured making of sense. The analytic programme so
authorized was at once inclusive, coherent and specific. It acknowledged
meaning as co-extensive with sociality. It saw in any signifying practice,
irrespective of its place in the order of social distinction, the same general
process of selection and combination of terms and relations from an already-
given code. It also gave analytic priority to forms, or, in Hall’s words (1980a:
30), shifted attention ‘from the what to the how of cultural systems’. In all three
respects, the structuralist option seemed an advance. Yet, it could only be a
moment in a more comprehensive theoretical development. As a radically
anti-expressive theory of signification, according priorities to codes over
messages, structures over meaning-events, it was not self-evidently
reconcilable with strong conceptions of autonomous cultural agency, of
individuals and groups as active creators of their world. Moreover, the inner
logic of structural analysis pressed towards formalism and abstraction,
bracketing meaning and dismantling society – and thus draining the
Birmingham project of its sense, which was precisely the exploration of the
social order of meaning. Social theory proper, an account of ‘interrelations’,
was a necessary interlocutor, and above all a corpus of theory whose signal
|
|
13.6 Page 126 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 103
importance for CCCS was its characteristic preoccupation with ‘questions of
culture, ideology and “the superstructures” ’, in a style ‘consciously
counterposed to the vulgar reductionism of the Marxism of the Second and
Third Internationals’ – the ‘base and superstructure’ reasoning which was
taken to have dominated official Marxist theory from the 1880s to the present
(1980a: 25).
Two theorists had special impact: the French philosopher Louis Althusser
and the Italian Communist thinker Antonio Gramsci. Althusser, with his
insistence on the necessary complexity of the social whole, on the ‘relative
autonomy’ and ‘specific effectivity’ of all social practices, outlined one
possibility of a non-reductionist account of ‘cultures and social formations’
(Althusser 1969). His concepts of ‘overdetermination’, which identified the
presence in any given social relation of the other relations forming its
conditions of existence, and of ‘conjuncture’, the unique state of
overdetermination that defined this complex social whole at any given
moment, opened the way to historical as well as theoretical specificity in
analysis. Gramsci, to whom Althusser owed significant debts, had pioneered
the study of culture as a mode of political struggle, as the site and means of the
effort to establish, or resist or counter, the non-coercive rule of dominant class
blocs, their ‘hegemony’, the historical ‘common sense’ that secures the actual
‘consent’ of the oppressed – and this always in historical, ‘conjunctural’ forms
of analysis (Gramsci 1971). These were the chief exemplars of ‘an open
Marxism’ capable of going beyond dogmatic reiteration to discover
something new (Hall 1980a: 29).4 Of course, 'the break into a complex
Marxism’ meant continued attention to its inherited problems, above all, the
unresolved concept of ‘ideology’, which would now have to be thought in
relation to the emerging concept of ‘culture’, and, underpinning these – or
dominating them – the old vexation of ‘base and superstructure’, which
Raymond Williams had made a central theoretical issue (CCCS 1978; Hall
1980b). More gravely, perhaps, it remained an open question whether
|
|
13.7 Page 127 |
▲back to top |
104 CULTURAL STUDIES
Marxism, as a general theory, could actually survive the discovery of
something new. The feminist ‘interruption’, as Hall termed it, had already
challenged the primacy conventionally accorded to class relations in the
formation of social consciousness, and invalidated the associated reduction of
‘material conditions’ to ‘exclusively economistic or “productivist” ’ terms
(Hall 1980a: 38; 1996c: 268; Brunsden 1996). The question of race was
already interrupting both (CCCS 1982; Gilroy 1988). Dogmatic appeals to
classes, their essential interests and necessary struggles, were inadequate to
the political, theoretical and moral challenges posed by the subordination of
women, and the weighty and complex psycho-social reality of gender. A
cultural theory that could not account for the central modern experience of
racism, and for the universal reality of ethnicity, would be stunted.
Nevertheless, Hall maintained, the problems, if not the familiar solutions, of
Marxism were the crucial ones for a materialist ‘theory of cultures and social
formations’. They were ‘the heart of the matter’ (1980b: 72).
THE NEW SUBJECT
Gramsci’s lessons were theoretical but also ethical and political. Hoggart had
suggested that the new subject area called for a different kind of subjectivity,
meaning by this a modified balance of sympathy, a willingness, at last, to
‘connect’ with popular cul tural life. Under Hall, the Centre pursued a more
radical aim, seeking not so much to modify the typical identity and address of
Kulturkritik, the social relations inscribed in its discourse, as to displace them,
in ‘a new kind of intellectual practice’ and a corresponding ‘organizational
form’ (Hall 1980a: 43). Collectivism was the governing norm of CCCS
activity. Its members organized themselves into working groups – devoted,
say, to media or women or race – but also participated in regular plenary
sessions, where particular projects were opened to wider discussion, in a
general context of urgent, often hard-fought theoretical development. The
|
|
13.8 Page 128 |
▲back to top |
A CENTRE 105
Centre Working Papers were thematically co-ordinated, and favoured joint,
often multiple authorship – practices that survived the journal’s mutation into
a fully commercial series of books. These forms of organization had an
inherent intellectual value. They helped to strengthen irregular cross-
disciplinary initiatives against the spontaneous resistance of the entrenched
division of academic labour, by promoting an ethos of mutuality in research
and criticism. They were consonant with the antiindividualist style of the left
in the seventies, and, specifically, implied the will to discontinue the run of
charismatic performances that had defined the historical personality of
Kulturkritik. Their most general rationale was political, emerging from a
distinctive reading of Gramsci’s strategic reflections on the social dynamics
of intellectuals (Gramsci 1971: 5–14). On the one hand, as Hall put it, there
were the ‘traditional’ intellectuals, who typically ‘set themselves the task of
developing and sophisticating the existing paradigms of knowledge’. On the
other, there were
those who, in their critical role, aim to become more ‘organic’ to
new and emerging tendencies in society, who seek to become
more integral with those forces, linked to them, capable of
reflecting what Gramsci called ‘the intellectual function’ in its wider,
non-specialist and non-elitist sense.
(Hall 1980a)
The role of this kind of intellectual was, first, to engage critically with modern
ideas ‘in their most refined form’ (Gramsci) and to do so, Hall would
subsequently add, ‘without theoretical limit’; second, to contribute to
‘popular education’, to communicate beyond the quasi-natural boundaries of
established intellectual life. ‘Our aim’, he declared, ‘could be defined as the
struggle to form a more “organic” kind of intellectual’ (Hall 1980a: 46).
Hall emphasized the difficulty and necessary modesty of this ambition.
The objective social order of knowledge could not be cancelled by an act of
|
|
13.9 Page 129 |
▲back to top |
106 CULTURAL STUDIES
will, and intellectual self-reform yielded contradictions of its own (for
example, collectively written texts might, by virtue of their process of
composition, be less, not more widely accessible). Nevertheless, the ambition
was inherent in the project of Cultural Studies at Birmingham. It seemed
impossible to dissolve the object of Kulturkritik, to re-imagine mass
civilization as a space of meaningful popular choice and activity, without also
dissolving its subject, the authorized voice of the cultural principle. ‘[To]
produce work which is progressively more “organic” ... has been, throughout,
the Centre’s task and goal’ (Hall 1980a: 47).
|
|
13.10 Page 130 |
▲back to top |
3
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL
SITUATIONS
Stuart Hall’s association with the Birmingham Centre is so evidently
important in any account of his work that its relatively short duration may be
overlooked. It lasted some fifteen years in an intellectual career that began in
the middle 1950s, and it preceded the decades of his greatest productivity and
influence as a cultural theorist and engaged intellectual of the left. That
unfinished record of activity demands attention in its own right.
Hall’s formative critical relationship was with the New Left – which had
been peripheral to Richard Hoggart’s vision – and with its inspirational
intellectuals, Raymond Williams and Edward Thompson. In this perspective,
his parting account of the CCCS in the 1960s and 1970s appears differently.
Hall narrated a theoretical journey in three stages, beginning with resources of
literary-critical and historical provenance, continuing as a struggle in and
against sociology, and then, with crucial assistance from structuralism,
emerging into the open space of a ‘complex Marxism’. There is no reason to
query this account of a sequence of studies. Yet, as the history of a problem it
seems circular, in as much as the questions that were put to sociology were
|
|
14 Pages 131-140 |
▲back to top |
|
|
14.1 Page 131 |
▲back to top |
108 CULTURAL STUDIES
already those of the complex Marxism that lay beyond it, and indeed had
formed the initial endowment of the Cultural Studies project. A complex
Marxism – or better, an emphatically ‘complex’ relation to Marxist tradition
– was inscribed in its genetic code, which regulated a peculiarly ‘organic’
interdependency of theory and politics.
HALL: BEYOND NEW LEFT ‘CULTURALISM’
In a second retrospect, this one conceptual rather than institutional, also
published in 1980, Hall gave this formative relationship much greater
prominence (Hall 1980b). Together with Hoggart, he confirmed, Williams
and Thompson had ‘re-founded’ the study of culture. In Culture and Society,
Williams had ‘settled accounts' with the anterior tradition (p. 58).1 The Long
Revolution assigned a fundamentally different theoretical content to the old
terms, positing ‘active and indissoluble relationships between elements or
social practices normally separated out. ... “Culture” is not a practice. ... It is
threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their interrelationship’
(Hall 1980b: 59). In developing this conception, moreover, Williams had
resisted
the literal operation of the base/superstructure metaphor, which in
classical Marxism ascribed the domain of ideas and of meanings
to the ‘superstructures’, themselves conceived as merely
reflective of and determined in some simple fashion by the ‘base’;
without a social effectivity of their own. That is to say, his argument
is constructed against a vulgar materialism and an economic
determinism.
(Hall 1980b: 59–60)
|
|
14.2 Page 132 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 109
Thompson’s Making of the English Working Class had taken its shape in a
distinct but comparable pattern of critical engagements – here, with economic
and labour history, and with English Marxist historiography – with convergent
results: ‘in its foregrounding of the questions of culture, consciousness and
experience, and its accent on agency, it also made a decisive break: with a
certain kind of technological evolutionism, with a reductive economism and
an organizational determinism’ (Hall 1980b: 58). That is to say, it broke with
any theoretical scheme that converted popular self-expression into a
ventriloquistic effect of machinery, economic ‘laws’ of motion, or party
enlightenment.
At the same time, nevertheless, Thompson had found fault with Williams’s
distinctive historical emphases, in a critique that became a standard reference
in Cultural Studies. The Long Revolution was misguided, Thompson argued,
in its emphasis on culture as ‘a whole way of life’ – a pacific, evolutionist
notion to which he counterposed the more dramatic ‘whole way of struggle’.
And there was a counterpart abstraction of ‘power’ and of culture as
‘ideology’, the familiar Marxist notion of socially motivated
misrepresentation, which Thompson glossed as ‘a system of ideas and beliefs,
a constellation of received ideas and orthodox attitudes, a “false
consciousness” or a class ideology which is more than the sum of its parts and
which has a logic of its own’ (Thompson 1961).
Hall seconded these objections, which seemed to identify a political
insufficiency in Williams’s cultural theory, but then went on to define a critical
perspective in which both Williams and Thompson appeared open to
challenge. The difficulties of the ‘culturalist’ paradigm, the category to which
he now assigned The Long Revolution and The Making of the English Working
Class, were both theoretical and political. ‘Culturalism’ opposed the
relegation of the cultural to the role of economic after-beat, the secondary,
merely superstructural reflex of a ‘real’ material world: ‘it conceptualizes
culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in turn, as
|
|
14.3 Page 133 |
▲back to top |
110 CULTURAL STUDIES
a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity
through which men and women make history’ (Hall 1980b: 63). However,
culturalist forms of analysis won their release from economism at the cost of
another kind of determinism, which Hall characterized in the manner of Louis
Althusser:
in their tendency ... to find common and homologous ‘forms’
underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their
movement is ‘essentializing’. They have a particular way of
understanding the totality – though it is with a small ‘t’, concrete
and historically determinate, uneven in its correspondences. They
understand it ‘expressively’.
(1980b: 64)
This tenacious embrace of the whole as a whole was, in the first instance, a
theoretical difficulty. It inhibited the attempt, which Hall judged
indispensable to cultural theory, ‘to think both the specificity of different
practices and the forms of articulated unity they constitute’ (p. 72). And
further, in so far as it accorded a privileged role to ‘experience’, it obscured the
action of structuring relations in the force-field of history. In this way, it
promoted a ‘naive humanism’, with ‘the necessary consequence’: a political
practice that was ‘voluntarist’ in its estimate of the historical potency of will
and ‘populist’ in its deference to spontaneous popular self-consciousness (p.
67).
Hall’s counter-move, a critical traverse of ‘structuralism’, was designed to
correct the apparent shortcomings and aberrations of the ‘culturalist’
paradigm, but not to reject its questions. These he assimilated to his own
thematic, a cluster of theoretical and political meanings that regulated his own
complex relation to Marxist discourse on culture. Some appropriately general,
synoptic discussion of that relation will be necessary, but it will be helpful to
approach it with renewed awareness of Hall’s specific, concrete engagements
|
|
14.4 Page 134 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 111
in the years since the ‘re-founding’ of cultural discourse. Three cases may
serve, if not as epitomes then at least as illustrations and occasions for critical
pause. One is from the 1970s, accentuating issues in cultural analysis (media
discourse). A second is from the 1980s, contrastingly political in matter and
address (the new course of capitalism and its subjects). A third, setting the
emphasis of the 1990s, is involved with questions of identity (the cultural
politics of ethnicity). In Hall’s movement through these fields of engagement,
a certain narrative unfolds itself: not, to be sure, a well-made plot, rather a
sequence in the (theoretical) life of the subject.
THE STRUCTURES OF SIGNIFICATION
Television has been the epicentre of cultural disturbance since its general
development in the mid-twentieth century. It was the main concern of Hall’s
work in the early 1970s, and an exemplary case for his most general positions
in cultural theory. Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, which
was first aired in 1973, outlined a whole orientation in critical research.2 Hall's
purpose was to theorize televisual communication as a specific signifying
practice, a structured social relationship in the domain of meaning; to argue
that audiences played an active part in this discursive process, which, though
structured and thus constraining, was not guaranteed in its effects; and to
show, in terms that were neither technical nor psychologistic but social, how
‘distortion’ entered the circuit of meaning. In an Althusserian paraphrase, his
purpose was to think both the ‘autonomy’ of a cultural practice and its
structural ‘relativities’. Following a methodological indication in Marx, Hall
characterized communication as a structured process in which ‘no moment
can fully guarantee the next moment with which it is articulated’. The whole
so formed is truly ‘complex’ rather than ‘expressive’, in that none of its
elements can simply be reduced to any other. However, in as much as the
process is specifically communicative, ‘the discursive form of the message’ is
|
|
14.5 Page 135 |
▲back to top |
112 CULTURAL STUDIES
dominant. An ‘event’ must become a ‘story’ before there can be a
‘communicative event’ (Hall 1980c: 129), and the story, the representation
that is the sense of the latter, must be intelligible within ‘the frameworks of
knowledge’ of the audience. ‘Encoding and decoding’ are the constitutive
activities of the process, which can thus no longer be grasped as the optimal
transmission–reception of pre-given ‘content’. Hall’s generic theoretical
reference here was structural linguistics, but his discussion of ‘connotation’,
the second-order significations that cluster around the ‘literal’, denotative
meaning of the sign, called upon more probing and socially engaged semiotic
styles – those of Roland Barthes (in Mythologies and the earlier, anti-
structuralist V.N. Volosinov (Marxism and the Philosophy of
Language).3Connotation, for Hall, was the presence of history in even the
most literal image:
The level of connotation of the visual sign, of its contextual
reference and positioning in different discursive fields of meaning
and association, is the point where already coded signs interact
with the deep semantic codes of a culture and take on additional,
more active ideological dimensions.
(Hall 1980c: 133)
It was the level at which the sign was ‘open to new accentuations and ... enters
fully into the struggle over meanings – the class struggle in language’ (p. 133).
The corollary of this claim was that the indeterminacy of connoted sense
was itself determinate. While connotative codes were typically less clearly
and less strictly defined, they were ‘not equal’. They functioned in ‘a dominant
cultural order’ in which ‘the different areas of social life appear to be mapped
out into discursive domains, hierarchically organized into dominant or
preferred meanings’. Since this order was ‘neither univocal nor uncontested’,
preferred meanings could not be guaranteed. But in so far as it was dominant,
it underwrote a balance of probability, favouring the preferred readings and
|
|
14.6 Page 136 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 113
limiting the range of deviations from them: ‘Of course, there will always be
private, individual variant readings. But “selective perception” [the official
account] is almost never as selective, random or privatized as the concept
suggests.’
Decoding activity exhibited ‘significant clusterings’, for which Hall,
concluding, proposed a formal Gramscian typology of viewing ‘positions’:
the ‘dominant–hegemonic’, the ‘negotiated’ or ‘corporate’, and the
‘oppositional’. In the first position, the viewer works within the dominant
order of connotation, so producing the ‘ideal’ experience of communication
(the national interest is the national interest). In the second, ‘adaptive’ and
‘oppositional’ codings intersect: the hegemonic order of meaning is
honoured, yet suspended for an ‘exceptional’ case (the national interest
demands general pay restraint but my own union’s claim is justified). The third
position involves deliberate, critical recoding in an alternative order of
meaning (for ‘national interest’ read ‘capitalist interests’). The discrepancies
between the first and second positions were the real condition of
‘misunderstandings’ and ‘failures of communication’, Hall suggested. The
passage from the second to the third, should it occur, was a moment of crisis:
‘Here the “politics of signification” – the struggle in discourse – is joined’
(1980c: 138).
Hall’s essay enacted a post-‘culturalist’ turn in advance of its formal
designation. ‘Culture’ was now secured as a strong modality of social
relations, one implicitly coextensive with social life itself, and as a field of
active popular (and other) subjects. However, the primary purpose of the
analysis was to establish the autonomy and productivity of specific cultural
practices – in this case, television – and at the same time to explore their
structured relations with the society as a whole. The meaning of the cultural
practice would not be ‘guaranteed’ as the ‘expressive’ moment in social
relations. It was itself materially structured work. Yet contrary to pluralist or
populist belief, audience activity was not unconstrained. Production and
|
|
14.7 Page 137 |
▲back to top |
114 CULTURAL STUDIES
reception alike were subject to the ordered probabilities of an englobing
dominant culture, which encoded determinate conditions of economic and
political existence. The field of culture was worked over by ideology.
Summarized in these general terms, Hall’s essay cleared a path beyond the
perceived obstacles and hazards of ‘culturalism’, leading towards a Marxist
theory and politics of culture. In another, later essay, however, his reasoning
seemed to point in the opposite direction. The paradoxical occasion of this
reverse was a plea upon behalf of the new.
NEW TIMES FOR SUBJECTIVITY
New Times was the name of a project of political reconstruction forwarded in
the 1980s by a group of modernizing Communist intellectuals and non-party
collaborators. The institutional base of the project was the party monthly,
Marxism Today, in which Hall’s political writing had become a signal feature.
Hall contributed to the New Times discussions, and, with the journal’s editor,
Martin Jacques, assembled the book-length version of it. The core thesis of
New Times was economic. Capitalism was now undergoing a major internal
reorganization involving a transition from the ‘old assembly-line world of
mass production’ and mass markets to a new world of ‘flexible specialization’
and product differentiation – or in the standard terminology, from a ‘Fordist’
to a ‘post-Fordist’ regime of accumulation. This change was not ‘exclusively
economic ... in the narrow sense’. Post-Fordism was ‘shorthand’ for a
comprehensive remaking of society and culture:
The ‘New Times’ argument is that the world has changed, not just
incrementally but qualitatively, that Britain and other advanced
capitalist societies are increasingly characterized by diversity,
differentiation and fragmentation, rather than homogeneity,
|
|
14.8 Page 138 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 115
standardization and the economies and organizations of scale
which characterized modern mass society.
(Hall and Jacques 1989: 21, 11)
The urgent task now was to impress this reality on a political left that preferred
old ‘certainties’ to ‘venturing into uncharted territory’, so much so that it had
become, in many ways, ‘a culturally conservative force’ (p. 14). This was the
context of Hall’s synoptic version of New Times.
Hall disavowed the totalizing ambitions of culturalism or mechanical
reductionism. ‘New Times’, he wrote, signified ‘an attempt to capture, within
the confines of a single metaphor, a number of different facets of social
change, none of which’ – post-Fordism, post-industrialism, postmodernism
or ‘the revolution of the subject’ – ‘has any necessary connection with the
other’ (Hall 1989: 117). The post-Fordist thesis itself was ‘not committed to
any prior determining position for the economy’. But strong metaphors live
dangerously, and this one had totalizing, determinist ambitions quite its own.
The contemporary historical process, as Hall rendered it, appeared integrated,
directed, and fateful in its implications for the old ‘mass’ society, its economy,
politics and culture. Post-Fordism was reinventing a whole world, one for
which Hall found his descriptions in the analytics of Michel Foucault and
Jean-François Lyotard’s vision of a ‘postmodern condition’ relieved of ‘grand
narratives’. Post-Fordism was the matrix of an expanded and ‘pluralized’ civil
society, with enriched possibilities of choice in everyday life. In the new
conditions, ‘the all-encompassing state’ no longer dictated the range and the
forms of political engagement. Politics was now coextensive with civil
society, where ‘points of power and conflict’ multiplied, and now
encompassed matters hitherto deemed ‘apolitical’ – the family, health, food,
sexuality, the body. There was no ‘overall’ map of this new situation, but
perhaps no conventional need for one either. ‘Perhaps there isn’t, in that sense,
one “power game” at all, more a network of strategies and powers and their
articulations’ (p. 130). Politics, long thought to move in concert with the
|
|
14.9 Page 139 |
▲back to top |
116 CULTURAL STUDIES
‘economic’, was now contrastingly ‘cultural’ in bent, in keeping with the
general tendency of ‘the revolution of our times’ (p. 128). For
[if] ‘post-Fordism’ exists, then it is as much a description of cultural
as of economic change. Indeed that distinction is now quite
useless. Culture has ceased (if it ever was – which I doubt) to be a
decorative addendum to the ‘hard world’ of production and things,
the icing on the cake of the material world. The word is now as
‘material’ as the world.
(p. 128)
The old distinction between ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ moments of change
no longer held, Hall continued, and subjectivity itself had turned mercurial.
The familiar collective subjects – those of class, nationality, ethnicity, gender
and so on – were becoming ‘more segmented and “pluralized” ’, as the
individual grew more salient, and subjectively more mobile and various, in a
culture that celebrated self-fashioning and promoted the aestheticization of
the everyday. Much of this culture might be ‘commodified consumption’, but
to halt at that familiar judgement was to miss its historic promise: the
‘democratization’ that ‘is also potentially part’ of ‘the hidden agenda’ of
market exchange, and ‘the opening up of the individual to the transforming
rhythms and forces of material life’ (p. 128).
This lesson on New Times was addressed to ‘the left’, a formation
contrastingly ‘old’ in its resistance to their meaning. Of the counterpart ‘old
times’, the world of states and class struggles once evoked as the englobing
reality of the television audience, not many traces remained. Although Hall
and his co-editor stressed the corrective point in their monocular framing of
the present – exaggeration as a necessary critical tactic – that intention does
not adequately account for the pattern of Hall’s mode of address or his
governing theme. In an interview given some two years earlier, Hall had
spoken with fine, mocking feeling against elitist expropriations of popular
|
|
14.10 Page 140 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 117
speech, which none the less continued to have disruptive historical force: ‘it is
as if the masses have kept a secret to themselves while the intellectuals keep
running around in circles trying to make out what it is, what is go ing on’ (Hall
[1986] 1996b: 140). The kind of intellectual ‘politics’ he had in mind was that
‘which follows from saying that the masses are nothing but a passive reflection
of the historical, economical and political forces which have gone into the
constitution of modern industrial mass society’ (p. 140).
This characterization emerged in the course of a discussion of
postmodernist theorizing, but its reference is critically more general and
ambiguous. It might describe Kulturkritik, and might serve equally as a chilly
reference to Marxism. An associated phrase citing ‘false consciousness’ and
‘the banalization of mass culture’ as negative equivalents corroborates the
impression that, in a certain perspective, ‘the left’ could seem little more than
a sub-set of ‘the intellectuals’. This association, in so far as it takes hold,
produces an overall adjustment of categories and a counterpart association
between ‘the masses’, or popular subjects, and the prevailing social order, on
the ground of ‘reality’. Here, arguably, was the discursive logic of New Times
as a whole, and of Hall’s keynote essay, which, as it were, unveiled the ‘secret’
that eluded ‘the left’. This form of address was not itself new, or merely the
creature of a polemical occasion. It had characterized the cultural writings of
George Orwell, who systematically counterpointed popular secrets to left-
intellectual doctrine, in this way authorizing his own habit of heresy. It became
the call-sign of Cultural Studies practitioners, intellectuals who in less cranky
ways also thought to become ‘more organic’. Orwell’s secret reality was a
traditionalist Englishness, and thus antithetical to Hall’s commitment to the
modern and the hybrid. But the secret pleasures of everyday capitalism, which
Hall now disclosed to the left, were not less ambiguous as cultural grounds for
a critique of politics, and no less serviceable for a more up-to-date kind of
populism.
|
|
15 Pages 141-150 |
▲back to top |
|
|
15.1 Page 141 |
▲back to top |
118 CULTURAL STUDIES
Hall exaggerated the novelty of the times, in the interest of accentuating the
discrepancy between the real world of popular modernity and the genre
narratives of left tradition. However, the function of the ‘new’ in his discourse
was not merely descriptive. More than a contingent quality (present or not,
exaggerated or not) of social phenomena, it seemed to be an index of their
relative value, and, in a further elevation of significance, a necessary condition
of worth, to be ascribed where it could not simply be found. Thus, in a passage
already cited here (p. 116 above), he over-wrote his not-so-old objection to
‘culturalism’, asserting that the culture/economy distinction was ‘now’
obsolete. Culture had ‘ceased’ to be a ‘decorative addendum’, he announced,
though a disarming parenthesis owned up to his general theoretical conviction
that it had never been such. ‘The word is now as “material” as the world’ – that
is to say, as much as it had always been. Another passage, also concerning the
social status of the cultural, exhibited the same tendency to convert logical into
temporal relations: ‘There is no clear evidence that, in an alternative socialist
economy, our propensity to “code” things according to systems of meaning,
which is an essential feature of our society, would necessarily cease – or,
indeed, should’ (Hall 1989: 235). This is a logical bluff. If the ‘propensity’
really is ‘essential’, the possibility of cancelling it cannot arise, and appeals to
the balance of evidence are redundant. Hall’s compulsive temporalization of
logic, which grants to discursive shifters like now and no longer the status of
truth-tests, is symptomatic of a perspective in which novelty has become a
value in itself and even an autonomous cultural force.
This valorization of the new was not part of the break towards cultural
studies, much though that involved engagement with the contemporary. It was
a constant in Kulturkritik, and, in the more activist varieties of that discourse
(Leavis’s, for example), a practical rationale. In those cases, of course, the
value of the new was negative: it was a ‘portent’ or a manifest danger.
Tradition was the positive term, not, as it effectively became for Hall, Marx’s
incubus that ‘weighs like a nightmare’. That polarization establishes the
|
|
15.2 Page 142 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 119
distance between Hall’s text and those earlier manifestos for new times, but
also illuminates the form of their antagonism, which was symmetrical. F.R.
Leavis saw a technological apparatus, not a mode of production, as the engine
of modernity. Hall acknowledged capitalism, but gave analytic priority to
specific regimes of production and consumption – Fordism and its emerging
successor.4 Leavis relegated politics to the status of administration, an
instrumental practice without final significance. Hall dispersed the political,
in the sense of a system of practices enmeshed with state and government,
‘generalizing’ it as the instance of struggle in an expanded civil society. Both
saw the new forms of labour-process as decisive for popular life, but with
opposite emphases and valuations. Leavis deplored ‘standardization and
levelling down’, while Hall privileged the potential of the new ‘rhythms of
material life’. Against the automatism of ‘mass civilization’, Leavis upheld
the critical value of ‘minority culture’, the historic commitment of an
intelligentsia strong in its intuitions of essential human purposes, but now
largely stripped of its moral authority or tempted to trade its responsibilities
for reputations. Hall validated the spontaneous tendencies of the post-Fordist
everyday, and strained to force them to the attention of a left now isolated in
its traditionalist dogmas. New times, strange times. Hall is no Leavisite – the
thought is grotesque – but in this socialist manifesto he replicated the
discursive form of that ‘old’ recusant discourse, rewriting Kulturkritik in a
mirror, as futurism.5
IDENTITIES IN MOTION
The idea of native virtue was shared ground for Orwell and Leavis. Orwell’s
populist socialism took its nourishment from the intuition of a continuous,
normative Englishness, as did Leavis, whose humanist elitism rested its claim
to authority on the endowments of a national popular past. Neither variety of
|
|
15.3 Page 143 |
▲back to top |
120 CULTURAL STUDIES
cultural reason could have resolved the paradoxical idea of ‘new ethnicities’.
This plain phrase, which indicates the dominant theme of Hall’s writing in the
1990s, activates a whole unfinished history of aspiration and blockage.
Ethnicity, in common understanding, is never new. Like the genes and the
gods, it is for all time. And the pluralization of the term imputes variousness
in a domain where relationships are least of all relative: character and tradition
are fate. Hall’s case, broached in the context of black cultural politics in Britain
today, told against all such perennialist and essentialist commonplaces, with
critical implications of the most general kind (Hall 1996d).
Hall distinguished two phases in the recent history of black cultural
engagement (the immediate occasion was a London seminar on Black Film
and British Cinema, though the horizon of implication lay well beyond that).
In the first, the values of political colour – ‘black’ as the signifier of convergent
histories and a shared situation – claimed priority over diverse identifications
of ethnicity and race. The leading practice was to challenge the positioning of
blacks as ‘the unspoken and invisible “other” ’ of the dominant (white)
aesthetic and cultural discourses. The goal was access to the sites and means
of cultural production, for the purposes of affirmative self-representation,
against the grain of the dominant, racist order of signification. That kind of
cultural politics continued, and must do so indefinitely, Hall maintained.
However, in a second phase of struggle, one was no longer concerned only
with the ‘relations of representation’, initiative was passing to ‘the politics of
representation itself’, to a theory and practice of culture beyond ‘the innocent
notion of the essential black subject’ ([1989] 1996d: 441–3). Representation
was now grasped as ‘formative’ and ‘constitutive’, not ‘expressive’; and the
shaping conditions of ‘blackness’ would now appear as historical, without
‘guarantees in nature’. Hall’s definition of ethnicity carefully sieved the
concept to eliminate any trace of literal or metaphorical genetic purism: just
as ‘black’ had been sprung from racist discourse and remade as a positive term,
so now ‘ethnicity’ must be reappropriated from mainstream multiculturalism,
|
|
15.4 Page 144 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 121
which tended to absolutize it as changeless cultural personality. Ethnicity was
‘what acknowledges the place of history, language and culture in the
construction of subjectivity and identity’, and, more than that, ‘the fact that all
discourse is placed, positioned, situated, and all knowledge is contextual’ (p.
446). The vagueness of this formulation disconcertingly conveyed its critical
positive assertion. Ethnic identities are not fixed by inheritance. Rather, they
form and re-form in successive and varied contexts of existence. Diaspora, a
great scattering of populations across oceans and continents, had been a
distinguishing condition of black cultural history, which thus recorded a
pattern of encounters between acquired resources and the expectations,
demands and possibilities of new situations – a complex sequence in which,
however, there was no plausible option of return’. Ethnicity thus marked the
permeability of ‘race’ in its constitutive relations with the orders of class,
gender and sexuality, which were never fixed in a quasi-natural scheme of
essences and characters. Conversely, the self-differing differences of
ethnicity must now be seen as universal, no less a feature of national
populations and classes that claim unmarked universality than of those they
subordinate, and in doing so mark as ‘ethnic’. Ethnicity did not so much
characterize the actors in cultural politics as delineate the field and object of
their struggle:
We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it
functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with
nationalism, imperialism, racism and the state, which are the
points of attachment around which a distinctive British or, more
accurately, English ethnicity has been constructed. ... We are
beginning to think about how to represent a noncoercive and a
more diverse conception of ethnicity, to set against the embattled,
hegemonic conception of ‘Englishness’ which, under
Thatcherism, stabilizes so much of the dominant political and
|
|
15.5 Page 145 |
▲back to top |
122 CULTURAL STUDIES
cultural discourses, and which, because it is hegemonic, does not
really represent itself as an ethnicity at all. ...
Fifteen years ago [in the seventies] we didn’t care, or at least I
didn’t care, whether there was any black in the Union Jack. Now
not only do we care, we must.
(Hall [1989] 1996d: 447–8)
Hall’s concept of ethnicity had no part in the cult of genes and custom that the
term familiarly evokes. Maintaining a strong contextual association with
‘race’, integrating relations of class, gender and sexuality as elements of its
core definition, it was nevertheless irreducible to any of these categories – or,
indeed, to itself.
Ethnicity here played a performative role, fulfilling, in its definition, Hall’s
standing principles of historical specificity and uncertainty. It could not be
schematized, without self-cancellation; more than any other social category,
it embodied contingency – that which is neither necessary nor impossible.
However, there were corresponding political risks in this ‘positive conception
of the ethnicity of the margins, of the periphery’, with its ‘politics of ethnicity
predicated on difference and diversity’ (Hall [1989] 1996d: 447). It might
serve to reinforce the postmodern populism into which New Times had been
tempted, or – Hall himself noted – might slacken into something not very
different in effect, a revised liberal pluralism. As it happened, the logic of his
critique of the notion of ‘the essential black subject’ led him to reverse the
emphases of his New Times essay, to affirm the stolen freedoms, the moment
of carnival, in popular culture, but also to insist upon the structuring realities
of symbolic subordination and the capitalist market:
popular culture, commodified and stereotyped as it often is, is not
at all, as we sometimes think of it, the arena where we find who we
really are, the truth of our experience. It is an arena that is
profoundly mythic. It is a theatre of popular desires, a theatre of
|
|
15.6 Page 146 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 123
popular fantasies. It is where we discover and play with the
identifications of our own selves, where we are imag ined, where
we are represented, not only to the audiences out there who do not
get the message, but to ourselves for the first time.
(Hall [1992] 1996g: 474)
The language of this passage, with its syntactic shift from active to passive
voice (‘we discover ... we are imagined’) and its crucially equivocal diction
(‘we are represented ...’), draws a fine but firm line between the popular and
the populist.
However, a more general problem remained, as Hall was aware. What, or
where, was the ‘politics’ in this ‘cultural politics’? Discounting as inadequate
an unbounded liberalism of ‘difference’ – ‘an infinite sliding of the signifier’
– he nevertheless acknowledged the apparent difficulty in his own cultural
position, which
does not make it any easier to conceive of how a politics can be
constructed which works with and through difference, which is
able to build those forms of solidarity and identification which make
common struggle and resistance possible but without which
political contestation is impossible, without fixing those
boundaries for eternity.
(Hall [1989]1996d: 444)
In a subsequent talk on the same topic, this one more pronouncedly critical of
the old black essentialism, Hall reiterated his conviction that ‘there is a politics
to be struggled for’, and gave an illustration of its concerns and rationale.
Endorsing Paul Gilroy’s contention that ‘blacks in the British diaspora must,
at this historical moment, refuse the binary black or British’, he explained:
You can be black and British, not only because that is a necessary
position to take in the 1990s, but because even those two terms,
|
|
15.7 Page 147 |
▲back to top |
124 CULTURAL STUDIES
joined by the coupler ‘and’ instead of opposed to one another, do
not exhaust all of our identities. Only some of our identities are
sometimes caught in that particular struggle.
(Hall 1996g)
This reasoning – on behalf of a demand that is itself compelling – indicated a
path of theoretical advance but also incarnated the obstacle laid across it.
Politics is not coextensive with culture, nor is their relationship stable over
time. Yet in so far as this distinction is drawn in the plane of ‘identities’, it is
liable to fading, or simple erasure: politics as a motivated disturbance in and
of the identity-complex that is culture, and not ostensibly anything other than
that. Hall had admitted ‘the difficulty of conceptualizing’ the politics he now
urged, but it may be that the real difficulty arose from the conceptualization
already in place – a ‘cultural politics’ in which the critical accent had quietly
slipped back from the second (and secondary) term to the first.
WRESTLING WITH MARXISM
Of the many critical dialogues that give Hall’s work its individual texture, the
most sustained and most agitated has been with Marxism. The recurring issue
has been the determining role of economic relations in culture and politics,
‘that old base/superstructure paradigm’ ([1986] 1996b: 135). But as that old
phrasing should suffice to remind us, some things are too obvious to be
altogether visible. Here, as in the prior case of Williams, it is worth asking just
what was at stake. In fact, Hall’s constructive theoretical purpose was closely
akin to Williams’s. He had two related aims. The first was to establish the
specificity of culture as a constitutive social practice in its relations with the
other constitutive practices, political and economic, of the social as a whole.
The second was to develop forms of analysis capable of grasping the concrete
historical shapes of these relations in their irreducible originality. The base–
|
|
15.8 Page 148 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 125
superstructure formula seemed inadequate to this task. It was reductionist,
appealing to mechanistic or expressivist notions of causality that read culture
as the effect of a more fundamental activity or as the emanation of a core
reality, and in either case consigned it to a passive, second-order existence. Its
privileged reality was the economy, and specifically its objective system of
classes, whose forms of subjectivity were assumed to be fixed at that level.
Third, it was necessitarian, dogmatically committed to discovering only what
it already posited as the inevitable state and direction of affairs. Hall’s first
critical appeal was to Louis Althusser, who rethought the formula in terms of
a necessary complexity of structure, proposing an ‘overdetermined’ totality of
relatively autonomous social practices, which the economy determined only
‘in the last instance’. Althusser’s theoretical reconstruction assigned analytic
priority to ‘the conjuncture’, the concrete, unrepeatable state of this complex
whole in a given space and time. However, his own work remained at a higher
level of abstraction, and did not resolve the ambiguities of ‘the last instance’.
Antonio Gramsci, on the other hand, had fashioned his conceptual instruments
in and for his analyses of a concrete historical society, Italy, and it was on his
work that Hall based his own canons of inquiry: not ‘capitalist society’ in
general but capitalist ‘social formations’ (Britain) and their unique
‘conjunctures’ (Thatcherism); not generic ‘classes’ but ‘historic blocs’,
specific formations of classes and other social forces; not ‘the dominant
ideology’ pure and simple but the much more complex matter of the prevailing
‘common sense’ and the struggle within it for non-coercive social authority,
or ‘hegemony’ (Hall [1986] 1996c).
The most salient characteristics of this Marxist variety were its valorization
of culture as a site and modality of political struggle, and its strategic emphasis
on ‘the concrete situation’. Two reorientations in general theory insured them
against the stunting effects of ‘orthodoxy’. Pursuing his critique of expressive
causality, Hall rejected ‘economic determinism’ in favour of a conception of
‘determinancy’ in which the economic appeared not as a cause, in the stronger
sense of that term, but as the shaping environment of ‘thought’:
|
|
15.9 Page 149 |
▲back to top |
126 CULTURAL STUDIES
The determinancy of the economic for the ideological can ... only
be in terms of the former setting the limits for defining the terrain of
operations, establishing the ‘raw materials’, of thought. Material
circumstances are the net of constraints, the ‘conditions of
existence’ for practical thought and calculation about society.
(Hall 1996a: 44)
The notion of conditions that constrain, and, in that strong yet imperfect sense,
determine thought – a notion owing something to the later Williams – was
compatible with the base–superstructure paradigm (Williams 1977: 87).
However, Hall was inclined to associate it with a theoretical break towards a
new understanding of culture, in which rival forces struggle, within the
unbounded, practically infinite space of language or languages, to fix the order
of meaning. These struggles over meaning are the specific (residual) reality of
‘ideology’ – the instance of political desire in language, as it were – which,
therefore, can no longer be understood as an ‘expression’ of preconstituted
social subjects. It is rather an ‘articulation’, in Ernesto Laclau’s word, a linking
of discrete social meanings such as ‘people’ and ‘nation’, a conjoining of
‘elements which do not in themselves have any necessary political
connotations’, and in which subjects find positions of utterance and agency
(Hall [1993] 1996h: 295, 305).
This, by the early 1990s, was Hall’s consolidated alternative to that old
base–superstructure paradigm. But what precisely did it displace? Not a
generic theoretical reality called Marxism, even though he had entertained the
designation ‘post-Marxist’ and characterized his relations with the tradition
as ‘wrestling with the angels’ (Hall [1986] 1996b: 148; [1992] 1996e: 265).
Neither was it, in any simple sense, the conception of determination by the
economic, notwithstanding the frequency of his reproaches over many years.
Hall’s style of engagement with this familiar crux is worth particular attention.
Speaking of the theoretical challenge posed by feminism, for example, he
announced: ‘a break with any residual attempt to give the term “material
|
|
15.10 Page 150 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 127
conditions” an exclusively economistic or “productivist” meaning’ and
underscored ‘[the] necessary complexity of different kinds of contradiction,
attributable in neither a “first” nor a “last” sense to the “economic” in its
simple designation’ (Hall 1980a: 38). Some years later, referring directly to
Marx and his theoretical tradition, he repudiated ‘the automatic conception of
classes lodged at the heart of fundamentalist Marxism’, and insisted that ideas
‘do not precisely mirror, match or “echo” the class structure of society’ (Hall
[1986] 1996c: 423, 434).
The shared stylistic feature of these formulations is their thickness of
modification. Adjectival phrases, inverted commas and variant repetition
make up a good part of their substance, and with paradoxical effects. These
modifiers add force to the utterance but at the same time obscure its exact
propositional content. Only discursive convention inhibits the recognition
that the criticism is more vigorous in its address than it is clear in its conceptual
reference. The last of these four instances exhibits the rhetorical pattern with
special vividness, strenuously denying what no serious interlocutor would
assert, but also adding a modification (‘precisely’) that, taken seriously, would
reduce the drama to bathos. Emphasis, in cases such as these, is the opposite
of what it purports to be: it is a way of not coming to the point. It is the deceptive
figure of theoretical evasion. The meanings of Hall’s quarrels with the old
paradigm are not the stereotypes they often seem.
A stable set of preferences has governed Hall’s critical orientation in the
field of Marxist theory. Wherever there appears to be a tension between
objective conditions and subjective discretion, or between the general and the
specific, or between the abstract and the concrete, he favours the latter term.
His privileged object of analysis is the conjuncture. His cardinal value, ethical
as well as cognitive, is contingency, the ‘openness’ of history as site and
practice. There can be no self-consistent Marxist objection to these tenets, in
general terms: they are the necessary presuppositions of any project of
historical inquiry and purposeful action. Yet it may be judged that in Hall’s
|
|
16 Pages 151-160 |
▲back to top |
|
|
16.1 Page 151 |
▲back to top |
128 CULTURAL STUDIES
discourse they exercise more than the necessary minimum force, supporting a
distinctively voluntarist appreciation of historical processes. Gramsci
proposed a distinction between the ‘organic’ elements of a concrete situation
– its ‘relatively permanent’ constitutive features – and the ‘conjunctural’,
those elements that ‘appear as occasional, immediate, almost accidental’. The
reality of the situation, he said, lay in its specific configuration of the two, in
their ‘dialectical nexus’, which analysis must attempt to capture, however
difficult the task (Gramsci 1971: 177–9). In Hall’s usage, the conjunctural
achieves clear, constant priority over the organic, which, in turn, undergoes a
tendentious redefinition. Thus, he could criticize appeals to ‘the logic of
capital’ in cultural studies – to the structures and propensities of capitalism as
formative realities of contemporary culture – on the grounds that ‘very little
by way of concrete and conjunctural analysis can be derived at this high-level
... form of abstraction’ (Hall 1980b: 71). The interest of this judgement lies not
so much in its intentional claim as in the default assumption that the ‘concrete’
and the ‘conjunctural’ are equivalents. This is questionable. For Gramsci, the
conjuncture is a moment in the longer organic life of a social formation, which
is no less concrete for being more extensive in time. But Hall assimilates the
concrete to the conjunctural, in opposition to the organic, which is now
reduced, via the ambiguous category of ‘the capitalist epoch as a whole’, to the
‘abstraction’ of a mode of production as such. In this way, he effectively
suspends the operation of the ‘relatively permanent’ aspects of historical
situations, to the advantage of what is ‘occasional, immediate, almost
accidental’ in their formation, and thus, ironically, lends credence to an
abstract valorization of the present-as-possibility – the ‘voluntarism’ for
which he rebuked Williams and Thompson. His practical sense of contingency
respects the same deep preference. The contingent is what is neither necessary
nor impossible. It is one of the basic philosophical assumptions from which
historical analysis sets out, not a meaningful guide to any particular
substantive conclusion. It specifies nothing about what is surely crucial in any
|
|
16.2 Page 152 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 129
given concrete situation, namely, its discoverable order of probabilities. But
once the constitutive action of ‘the organic’ is suspended, contingency
emerges as the simple and sufficient conceptual other of necessity, as pure
electivity, in a historical field where low probabilities enjoy a paradoxical
enhancement of opportunity.
Hall would almost certainly reject this as a position in cultural theory, even
if he were to acknowledge it as what I claim it is, an objective propensity in his
thought. Its logic is in a way existentialist, prompting the thought that the work
of Jean-Paul Sartre may bulk larger in his intellectual inventory than has
commonly been noticed. Its political motivation is more familiar. The error
that Hall has struggled to expunge from Marxist cultural theory is not generic
‘determinism’ but the specific form of it known, since Althusser, as
expressivism – the notion that social phenomena are so many transcriptions of
an essential economic principle. In practice, his concern has been still more
specific, or rather selective, emphasizing not so much ‘the economy’ in its
totality as the associated system of classes, and not the totality of such relations
and interests but rather the working class, with its structurally given attributes
and goals. Illustrated in this setting, expressivism appears as something worse
than a theoretical error: its logic of explanation constitutes a de facto denial of
popular creativity, the very principle of cultural studies. By the ‘popular’, Hall
wrote at the turn of the 1990s, he and his collaborators in CCCS had meant
‘those forms and practices which are excluded from, and opposed to, the
“valued”, the canon, through the operation of symbolic practices of exclusion
and closure’ (Hall [1993] 1996h: 293). He recalled how, in their work on sub-
cultures, they had pondered: ‘the built-in limits to all such forms of resistance
– because of their gestural quality, their dissociation from the classic agencies
of social transformation, their status – as it was put in the language of the time
– as “magical solutions”’ ([1993] 1996h: 293). His retrospective comment is
telling: ‘This is a serious question ... but this way of putting it also reflected the
lingering presence of the belief that the symbolic could not be anything but a
second-order, dependent category’ ([1993] 1996h: 294).
|
|
16.3 Page 153 |
▲back to top |
130 CULTURAL STUDIES
It is indeed a serious question, and just as serious, in its own scale, is the
fallacy in Hall’s interpretation of it. A ‘second-order, dependent’ practice is by
definition incapable of transforming the social whole that includes it, But it
does not follow that first-order practices are equivalent in their capacity to do
so. The unexamined possibility remains that practices may be equally material
– and in that sense co-primary – and yet unequal in their power to constitute
and reconstitute social relations, and this precisely because of their material
specificity as practices. The terms of the old anxiety, as Hall reports it,
acknowledge this possibility. His interpretive retrospect denies it, confusing
an interesting question of political theory – what is the strategic weight of
cultural practices? – with that old topic of economic reductionism. In a
moment such as this one, the critique of the base–superstructure appears as
something more than the scientific pursuit it can legitimately claim to be. If
Hall’s attacks on economism seem compulsive, excessive in relation to their
long-discredited object, it is because they serve a wider strategic purpose, one
long familiar from the reasoning of Kulturkritik. The insistence on the
material effectivity of culture, its first-order reality, also plays an allegorical
role in a ritual affirmation of its political capability, its claim to social
authority.
Hall has more than once reminded an audience that the cultural binary high/
low, although lacking essential grounds of any kind, retains its considerable
historical efficacy. The warning is apt, and not least in relation to his own
work. The propensities of his ‘complex Marxism’ – a certain futurism,
voluntarism and cultural reduction of politics – are the signs of a discursive
otherness within it, elements of the uncanny, attesting the continuing force of
Kulturkritik, which has been renounced, negated, turned upside down and
inside out, but not quite overcome. It would be wrong – inaccurate and unjust
– to represent them as the essential truth of Hall’s theorizing. It is difficult to
annotate them without exaggeration – though when Ortega wrote that
exaggeration is a necessary condition of thinking at all, he was exaggerating
|
|
16.4 Page 154 |
▲back to top |
A THEATRE OF CRITICAL SITUATIONS 131
only slightly. It is proper to acknowledge that these propensities find their
sustenance in real and grave problems: how to manage the permanent
difficulty of being contemporary; how to estimate the strategic force of the
symbolic, in a society in which culture is commodified, commodities are
eroticized and political authority depends upon popular consent. Yet, it is
necessary to recognize their reality and force, and the discursive ambivalence
they betoken. Hall’s writing is at least as complex as he would wish. Dialogue,
for him, is a principle of individual style. The great cast of interlocutors his
prose assembles is in that sense the opposite of Hoggart’s chorus. Yet that
chorus has not left the stage, and appears at times to lead the dialogue as a
whole. The possibilities of Cultural Studies are nowhere so richly illustrated
as in the work of Stuart Hall, and this is among them.
|
|
16.5 Page 155 |
▲back to top |
4
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE?
Kulturkritik was (and is) amateur. Spoken more often than not from academic
sites – in literary studies above all, but also in sociology and philosophy – it
nevertheless remained an elective, committed practice, a tendency driven by
logics of love and hate. Cultural Studies, likewise but oppositely committed,
has evolved into a profession, with all the opportunities and entailments of its
academic kind. The proliferation of this tendency–discipline on the campuses
of the English-speaking world and beyond has favoured the most noteworthy
recent development in its common intellectual life: by the middle 1990s, it has
been estimated, one in every four new Cultural Studies titles was about
Cultural Studies itself (Ferguson and Golding 1997: xiv–v). Some of these
writings continue long-running disputes over theory and method in the field –
over the relative validity of explanatory and interpretive strategies of analysis,
for example, or the different varieties of ethnographic research (Garnham
1997; Morley 1997; McGuigan 1992). Some, in keeping with the first impulse
of the discipline, argue the claims of unrecognized cultural subjects, seeking
not merely to enlarge the field of inquiry but to reorder it: gender and race were
historic ‘interruptions’ (Hall) of this kind, and the postcolonial thematic has
|
|
16.6 Page 156 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 133
since emerged as a more or less radical revisioning of both. Textbooks and
course readers make their predictable, growing contribution to this literature
of self-representation, but only to generate as much anxiety as they are
designed to moderate, since they fuel the demand for self-definition that
Cultural Studies habitually resists. As Richard Johnson has written, perhaps
consciously defying the lesson of Mickey Mouse, the sorceror’s apprentice in
the Disney classic Fantasia, Cultural Studies is properly ‘a process, a kind of
alchemy for producing useful knowledge; codify it and you might halt its
reactions’ (Johnson 1996: 75).
‘Institutionalization’ – the inscription of an autonomous project in a formal
education system – is among the darker themes of the collective
autobiography. It has been overwritten, in the 1990s, by the larger, more
portentous narrative of ‘globalization’. Both are regularly invoked in the
current phase of self-examination, as Cultural Studies practitioners look to
their constitutively ‘political’ beginnings and ends, commitments that must
not be scanted in the new environments of production and circulation (Mellor
1992). Yet these reference points are hardly secure. ‘Birmingham’ has been
decentred, in a fractious international network now conventionally resistant
to all claims of origin, especially where they concern an old colonial heartland.
That tradition is specifically British – English, even – and not a template for
others, in Australia or the Unites States, say, who affirm the distinct, more or
less contemporaneous, beginnings of their own cultural studies (Carey 1997;
Frow and Morris 1993; Stratton and Ang 1996). Ends are not self-evident
either, in a period in which the great emancipationist projects of modernity are
said to have lost coherence and authority, and not so much for ill as, in all
senses, for good. The story of an academic quarterly is perhaps emblematic.
In the middle 1980s, The Australian Journal of Cultural Studies gave itself
into the care of a London publishing corporation. It was decided that the
leading editorial role would henceforward rotate from Australia to Britain to
the United States and so around again. A less limiting address now seemed
|
|
16.7 Page 157 |
▲back to top |
134 CULTURAL STUDIES
appropriate, and the journal was re-launched shorn of all locative indication
as Cultural Studies. In 1991, a further simplification occurred: editorial roles
were stabilized, and assumed by two US academics, Lawrence Grossberg and
Janice Radway. This was the second time in a year that Grossberg had taken
the rostrum in the general interest of his discipline. With Cary Nelson and
Paula Treichler, he had organized the huge international ‘Cultural Studies’
conference at the University of Illinois (1990). Its edited proceedings,
published under the same title in 1992, have been perceived as an attempt not
merely to illustrate but to be the discipline – a mock-international forum
incarnating ‘a new American hegemony in English-speaking cultural studies’
(Jameson 1993; Stratton and Ang 1996: 363–5). At Cultural Studies the
journal, meanwhile, the new editors’ first visible act of policy was to rewrite
its politico-intellectual charter. Marxism and feminism disappeared as tokens
of past or future affinity in the new declaration, which, with admirable
inclusiveness, committed Cultural Studies to the front lines of equal-
opportunities liberalism.1
POPULISM IN CULTURAL STUDIES
By this time, and in the perceived conditions of a new world order in Cultural
Studies, the anxious themes of depoliticization and intellectual decline had
become familiar – in the United States as well as in the old capital, Britain,
where the ‘American’ development fed apprehension, in Canada and in
‘postcolonial’ Australia (Barker and Beezer 1991; Ang 1992: 311–21; Hall
[1992] 1996e: 273–5). By this time, too, a more closely defined polemical
theme had won equally widespread sponsorship. Often motivated by the same
anxieties, this was in any case quite distinct in its implication: the danger now
manifest in the discipline was not depoliticization but active political
misdirection. Cultural Studies was developing backwards, into ‘populism’
|
|
16.8 Page 158 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 135
(Williamson 1986: 14–15; Modlewski 1986; Craik 1987; Birch 1987; O’Shea
and Schwartz 1987; Morris [1988] 1996).
What’s in a charge? Populism, for all its attachment to the great simplicities
of people and nation, is often confusing as a political phenomenon (some
would say, always and essentially so), and its definitions are correspondingly
unsettled. Its varieties have extended from left to extreme right. It has framed
the strategies of peasant revolutionaries, as in late-Tsarist Russia, and militant
trade-unionists, as in Argentina more recently. It has also been turned against
the working class, as it was in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, and as it is now
turned against blacks and other Ausländer in the inflamed nationalist sub-
cultures of the European Union. The populism at issue in the more modest case
of Cultural Studies is unquestionably of the left, by lineage and declared
affiliation. In the Marxist tradition, the designation ‘populist’ has normally
conveyed a critical judgement on strategies that mistakenly – or wilfully –
subsume working-class interests under a wider and putatively common cause,
which may be more or less pronouncedly ‘national’, but is invariably that of
‘the people’ and its (unique) culture. Varieties of that kind of populism have
had a role in post-war Labour and Communist history in Britain, and also, as
Stuart Hall and others have judged, in the thinking of the early New Left, but
with little independent effect (Anderson 1980; Williams 1980: 233–51). ‘The
nation’, in Anglo-British politics, has long been the discursive property of the
dominant class bloc. The left has never gained access to it in fundamentally
oppositional terms (though Orwell stands as an illustration of the desire to do
so). Most who claim it today are fighting rearguard actions in the name of
presumptions and destinies now officially suspended: bigoted
monoculturalists, Westminster Unionists and Europhobes. ‘The people’, in
the relevant, expanded sense, have been no easier to rally. In a country with an
old capitalist agriculture, historic priority in industrial production and high
levels of concentration in commerce, small property has been culturally
indistinct and politically weightless: where the ordinary folk are not bonded
|
|
16.9 Page 159 |
▲back to top |
136 CULTURAL STUDIES
as ‘the nation’, they pass unobtrusively among the great wage-labouring
majority.
However, small intellectual networks are more impressionable than whole
societies, and the Birmingham tradition – which, emerging from the New Left,
is a specific formation of that Labour-cum-Communist culture – has not
escaped charges of populism on both ‘national’ and ‘popular’ grounds. The
first term of the indictment is politically the more urgent, in a quite concrete
sense. The meanings of ‘Englishness’, inevitably though not exclusively in its
association with ‘Britain’, have become critical in the two generations since
1945, and will be integral to the cultural politics of the next two, as ‘national’
(ethnic and constitutional), European and global relations assume
unprecedented shapes. For now, nevertheless, the relevant past is no more
resolved than the future. Paul Gilroy, himself a graduate of the Birmingham
Centre, has insisted on the implausibility of efforts to winnow ‘good’ from
‘bad’ English nationalism – to quarantine a domestic popular tradition from
the overseas history of a slaving, colonizing state, which was the real strategic
context of nation-formation – and denounced the persistence of nativist
assumptions in early New Left discourse (Gilroy 1988; 1992). There are good
grounds for Gilroy’s criticism, which has been widely accepted – in one case
by a commentator who, disconcertingly, accepts the evidence but reverses the
verdict, dismissing the criticism as ill-conceived (Carey 1997: 16).
Englishness was a condensing moral–social value in Edward Thompson’s
writing, and also in that of Hoggart, whom Williams, himself a principal
suspect in the matter, took to task for just this reason. The work of Raphael
Samuel, who was, like Thompson, a historian, a rebel Communist and a key
presence in the early New Left, lends further weight to this consideration,
while also complicating it. Yet there may also be reason in the arguments of
those who claim that British cultural studies emerged as a critical element in
the post-imperial crisis of national identity. Some draw attention to the
presence of ethnically marginal figures – Williams, for example, and Hall – in
|
|
16.10 Page 160 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 137
its formative years (Schwartz 1989: 250–5). Others are willing to venture that
the British case may illustrate a general rule of emergence for cultural studies,
one that has perhaps held good for Australia and the United States as well
(Stratton and Ang 1996: 381–8).2 The arguments in the first group have not
been concluded; the evidence in the second seems insufficient; neither
testifies to a fatal implication in the idea of the nation. Indeed, the stronger
temptation, in the great conversation of fin de siècle academia that is home to
Cultural Studies, is that hasty and simplified notions of globalization and the
local, or an overgeneralized resort to the idea of postcoloniality, will foster the
illusion of a new post-national condition and a corresponding inattention to
the continuing force of the nation-state in the patterning of large- and small-
scale social relations today.
The second charge, bearing on ‘the popular’, has much greater plausibility,
but for reasons that enjoin caution rather than confidence in critical
evaluation. The imputation of nationalism has come, unambiguously, from
the left. It is a moment in the conflictual development of an emancipatory
cultural politics in the sphere of race and ethnicity. The issue of populism has
been posed in this sense – but also, earlier and with greater resonance, in the
interest of a more familiar and better-established cause. There is, after all, a
perspective in which any positive interest in the culturally popular must be
suspect: that is, the perspective of Kulturkritik. For a Leavisian, for example,
the claim to find values where there can only be prices, to see activity and
choice where history dictates passive uniformity, is self-evidencing populism
of the most reprehensible kind. If Kulturkritik is not what it used to be, its
topics retain their intuitive appeal to the common sense of academia and polite
journalism. The wisecracks about the structural analysis of beermats, or
mock-heroic rallies championing, say, Keats over Dylan, can still charm the
educated crowd. Such talk, in the forums of properly critical dialogue, has the
value of rhubarb. The popular, as it has been taken up in Cultural Studies, is
not a simple transvaluation of ‘the mass’, nor is it the locus of some ‘authentic’
|
|
17 Pages 161-170 |
▲back to top |
|
|
17.1 Page 161 |
▲back to top |
138 CULTURAL STUDIES
alternative to it. No essential formal property distinguishes its genres and
practices as ‘low’ rather than ‘high’. Although it has been involved in these
categorizations, which have real effects and therefore cannot be excluded in
the interests of conceptual purity, popular culture has come to be seen, as it was
for the authors of Resistance Through Rituals (Hall and Jefferson 1976) as:
‘those forms and practices which are excluded from, and opposed to, the
“valued”, the canon, through the operation of symbolic practices of exclusion
and closure’ (Hall [1993] 1996h: 293). It is, if not necessarily oppositional, at
least ‘subaltern’ in Gramsci’s sense: its relevant contrary is not ‘high’ or
‘minority’ but ‘dominant’ (Shiach 1989). This conception is the shared
ground of the controversy, not the encampment of one party to it.
Indeed, the keyword, ‘populism’, has itself been claimed on both sides. For
Judith Williamson and Meaghan Morris – two early critics of the rising trend
– it is a plain negative. For Iain Chambers, whose version of the popular has
been central to the dispute, it is affirmative. Jim McGuigan’s title, Cultural
Populism, defines the field of his critical labour, not his thesis, which in fact
depends on a distinction within the category. His opening definition is a
problem in itself: ‘Cultural populism is the intellectual assumption, made by
some students of popular culture, that the symbolic experiences and practices
of ordinary people are more important analytically and politically than
Culture with a capital C’ (McGuigan 1992: 4). Sliding, at the crucial point in
its elaboration, into the conversational usage of Cultural Studies – the self-
validating appeal to what is ‘politically important’ and the facile reference to
‘Culture with a capital C’ – this might be either parodic or complicit or both.
In any case, it is not the in clusive characterization the argument calls for.
However, a little further elaboration relieves the ambivalence: ‘The vital point
is to do with the positive relationship between intellectuals and popular
culture [which includes] an appreciative non-judgemental attitude to ordinary
tastes and pleasures’ (1992: 4). Thus, Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams are
representatives of a ‘left-democratic populism’ (1992: 26), as indeed is the
|
|
17.2 Page 162 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 139
Labourist Kulturkritiker Richard Hoggart, who imagined the Cultural Studies
practitioner as humble and a little in love. McGuigan himself is a cultural
populist in this sense. The case he has to make concerns an ‘uncritical populist
drift in the study of popular culture, a discernible narrowing of vision and
fixation on a self-limiting set of issues’ (1992: 5) – against which he upholds
‘the possibility of a critical populism’ that might unify interpretive and
explanatory forms of inquiry, accounting ‘for both ordinary people’s everyday
culture and its material construction by powerful forces beyond the immediate
comprehension and control of ordinary people’ (1992: 5).
In effect, McGuigan charges, Cultural Studies began by mobilizing the
concept of ‘the popular’ against the elitist image of ‘the mass’, but has since
tended to conflate the two, finding in the forms and practices of the culture
industry the conditions of autonomous popular activity (1992: 38). Valorizing
the spontaneous pattern of cultural recreation in this way, uncritical populism
is not simply naive, it is objectively conformist. Banal routines are
transfigured, becoming deceptive modes of subversion. Television and
shopping are now revealed as sites of dual power: ‘there is so much action in
the micro-politics of everyday life that the Utopian promises of a better future,
which were once so enticing for critics of popular culture, have lost all
credibility’ (1992: 171).
McGuigan has been reproached – by John Storey, for example (1996: 7–8)
– with misrepresenting Cultural Studies as a monolith. The claim is unfair,
most readers of his book will judge, but it is also in part self-defeating, for it
carries the necessary implication that his charge as he actually states it has
grounds in reality. It is possible to judge that McGuigan exaggerates the
incidence of the problem, and to query his belief that the solution lies in a
renewed intellectual association with critical political economy, and yet to
acknowledge that this is so. And indeed, such acknowledgement is not merely
widespread in Cultural Studies. In one form – which Storey himself illustrates
– it has become a conversation-piece in the discipline (Storey 1996: 7). The
|
|
17.3 Page 163 |
▲back to top |
140 CULTURAL STUDIES
journal Cultural Studies carried two anti-populist texts in its first issue, and
soon afterwards published Jim Bee’s challenge to the ‘First Citizen of the
Semiotic Democracy’ (1989: 353–9). Ien Ang – herself charged with
populism by Tania Modlewski – has stressed her differences with ‘the most
exuberant ambassador of this position’, who has ‘virtually declar[ed] the
audience’s independence in the cultural struggle over meaning and pleasure’
(1996: 242–3). Angela McRobbie – who figures in McGuigan’s shortlist of
pop conformists – mocks the claims for ‘hyperactive’ audiences and disowns
‘the few wilder voices who see self-expression and resistance residing in the
actions of those who loiter in shopping malls’ (1996: 256). Meaghan Morris
has discerned in the phenomenon of Cultural Studies fandom a new persona:
‘the white male theorist as bimbo’ (1996: 159). All these sarcasms refer to one
individual: populism is multiform, legion, and its name is Fiske.
John Fiske has certainly worked for his professional notoriety. In a book
such as his Television Culture, the complex relations between ‘containment’
and ‘resistance’ in viewing experience undergo euphoric simplification, and
the audience takes control of the broadcast text (Fiske 1987; 1996: 115–46).
Or, in words borrowed from the French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau,
‘the strategies of the powerful’ are ceded no advantage over ‘the tactics of the
weak’ (Morley 1997: 125) – an estimate that in most realworld situations
would guarantee defeat. Yet, as McGuigan and others have pointed out, Fiske
does not in fact occupy a paradigm apart (McGuigan 1992: 75; Barker and
Beezer 1991: 12). The rule of perverse optimality that governs his readings –
that is, the less probable interpretation is normally the more compelling one –
is widely respected, if not often so rigorously observed, in Cultural Studies.
Even Stuart Hall, whom McGuigan exonerates on the principal count, could
mistake a big-hearted pop concert for a 'movement'.3There is perhaps an
element of ritual in this collective willingness to isolate Fiske, which suggests
that the group may feel more threatened than it cares to say. Meaghan Morris’s
critique of ‘banality in Cultural Studies’ – a text widely cited, though not often
|
|
17.4 Page 164 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 141
with a due sense of disturbance – is indispensable here. Her ‘bimbo’ trope is
deadly: cruel indeed, but also critically incisive. What is at stake in the matter
of cultural populism is not only – not even mainly – a sentimental or wishful
valorization of the popular cultural object; it is the discursive fashioning of the
subject who claims to represent it.
BIMBOS AND FANS
The ‘banality’ that Morris perceives is that of the bad ‘mass’ object of
Kulturkritik. It has been reanimated now, she argues, as the authentic posture
for the practitioner of Cultural Studies. The return has specific practical
effects: ‘Once “the people” are both a source of authority for a text and a figure
of its own critical activity, the populist enterprise is not only circular but ...
narcissistic in structure’ (Morris [1988] 1996: 158, emphasis added). Escape
from ‘the circuit of repetition’ is conceivable, Morris believes, but the familiar
alternative option in the discipline is ‘to project elsewhere a mis-
understanding or discouraging Other figure (often that feminist or Marxist
Echo, the blast from the past) to necessitate and enable more repetition’ (p.
158). Morris here spotlights some key features of the Cultural Studies
performance: the convention of self-justification, associated with an equally
conventional refusal of self-definition; the trope of an adventure forever only
beginning; the thirty-something will to be young at heart. But the bimbo-
subject is not only narcissistic; it is also mindless. Feminism (‘grumpy’) and
Marxism (‘cranky’) are residues of a pre-postmodern ethic of critical reason,
which Iain Chambers, another of Morris’s case studies, has renounced in
favour of a new theory or format of knowledge, what he calls a ‘popular
epistemology’.
For Chambers, popular culture is not only a field of activity and of
committed inquiry; it is the space of a democratic alternative to the dominant
forms of knowledge. He writes: ‘Official culture, preserved in art galleries,
|
|
17.5 Page 165 |
▲back to top |
142 CULTURAL STUDIES
museums and university courses, demands cultivated tastes and a formally
imparted knowledge. It demands moments of attention that are separated from
the run of daily life’ (Chambers 1986). Popular culture, the everyday
experience of a late-twentieth-century city, shapes a different kind of
‘expertise’, one that
mobilizes the tactile, the incidental, the transitory, the expendable;
the visceral. It does not involve an abstract aesthetic research
amongst privileged objects of attention, but involves mobile orders
of sense, taste and desire. Popular culture is not appropriated
through the apparatus of contemplation, but, as Walter Benjamin
once put it, through ‘distracted reception’.
(Chambers 1986)
The ‘public is an examiner’, Chambers concludes, in words borrowed from
Benjamin, ‘but an absent-minded one’ (1986: 12). The novelty and special
value of its kind of critical intelligence is that it is the opposite of the familiar
kind. Here is a protocol for the Cultural Studies subject – though ‘studies’
hardly describes the format of engagement that Chambers offers to exemplify
in Popular Culture. No more meta-discourse: to seek to explain the passing
scenes of popular culture ‘would be to pull them back un der the
contemplative stare, adopting the authority of the academic mind’ (1986: 13).
Such ‘vanity’ ignores the epistemological promise of ordinary distraction: ‘an
informal knowledge of the everyday, based on the sensory, the immediate, the
pleasurable and the concrete’ (1986: 13).
The selection implicit in this general description of popular culture is as
tendentious as Eliot’s list from 1948 – the cabbage, the Derby and the rest (see
p. 55 above). It is, of course, contemporary in implied sensibility, and in that
respect the opposite of Eliot’s: Chambers’s pastoral belongs to the street. But
it presses strategically in the same direction, and even more strongly.
Chambers’s everyday is, rather more fully than Eliot’s, the simple other of
|
|
17.6 Page 166 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 143
‘high’ culture and its associated faculties: fast food and dance are its likeliest
epitomes, and any popular interest calling upon a different order of investment
becomes a practical self-contradiction. Yet hedonism and distraction do not
self-evidently characterize the subjectivity of voluntary work in churches,
charities, trade unions and political parties. Nor – to take a less rarefied
popular gratification that even Eliot did not overlook – do they account for the
forms and practices of sport culture. We need only think of football fans:
dauntingly learned, concentrated to the point of obsession, masterful in their
urge to second-guess every move in the politics of tournaments and
boardrooms, they are a mass-intellectual rebuke to the bimbo-popular. The
logical and psychological properties that Chambers assigns to
‘contemplation’ are necessary conditions of all knowledge, not only the
academic kind. In slighting them, he light-mindedly reduces his notion of
‘popular epistemology’ to self-contradiction. The appeal to the ‘tactile’ and
the ‘visceral’ seems streetwise, but it is more easily recognized in its normal
academic setting, as an irrationalist philosophy of ‘life’ – or, in literary studies,
as dogmatic anti-intellectualism in the style of D.H. Lawrence. Chambers’s
dualistic scheme of disembodied intellectual contemplation and mindless
popular distraction illustrates that recurring tendency in Cultural Studies to
invert the basic categories of Kulturkritik, and, in its distinctive individual
extremism, projects it into one likely future. An adequate cultural theory
would have to find ways of understanding the insistent life of the body in
signification of all kinds – the ‘contemplative’ theoretical tradition of
psychoanalysis has been precisely such an attempt. But when, as here, the
popular is drained of conceptuality, and then promoted as a model of
intellectual practice, there is no longer either theory or culture, and Cultural
Studies is left to contemplate its own end.
Chambers championed his popular epistemology in the face of ‘culture ...
with a capital C’ and its typically contemplative interpreter, the academic.
Two years later – in 1988, the year of Morris’s intervention – Dick Hebdige
|
|
17.7 Page 167 |
▲back to top |
144 CULTURAL STUDIES
advanced the cause of ‘banality’ against another kind of intellectual. Post-
dating the first engagement with popular culture to the installation of the first
Thatcher government in 1979 – a recollection that seems to mistake
autobiography for collective history – Hebdige queried the general political
rationale for such departures. Should not popular culture be studied for its own
sake, rather than for high-minded political reasons? It is indeed ‘banal’, but
‘vitally’, not ‘fatally’ so. However, this vitality charges the popular-cultural
process itself, not the constructed object of analysis, which in reality has
served as ‘the glass on to which generations of intellectuals have been
projecting so many of their own largely unadmitted desires and anxieties’. In
this brusque interpretive reduction, Hebdige challenged metacultural
discourse as a whole, including his own disciplinary formation and its
declared political tasks. The ‘aspirations’ that animated the giant Live Aid
concert of summer 1985 – the event that Stuart Hall took for a movement –
were in the end ‘more profound than the quest of intellectuals either to merge
with the imaginary masses or to triumph in their disappearance’ (Hebdige
1988).
Here is a vision still bolder than that of Chambers: the recon ciliation of
subject and object in post-Cultural Studies, the intellectual as fan. It is not easy
to discern the position from which Hebdige could now speak. His judgement
depended for its authority on precisely the kind of intellectual ‘merging’ with
the people that it rejected as self-deluding. In this it bears a close family
resemblance to the old Cretan Paradox, the kind of statement that, if true, is
false, and vice versa. It is relevant to note that Hebdige’s conclusion echoed,
at a range of seventy years, the words of another ironist who defended a self-
affirming culture against intellectual schematism, fearing, in all such
presumption, ‘the end of music’. As Thomas Mann not only might have said,
but very nearly did say: ‘Banality may be fatal to the intellect. ... On the other
hand, it may just save our lives’ (Hebdige 1988: 32; and cf. p. 6 above)
|
|
17.8 Page 168 |
▲back to top |
ORGANIC INTELLECTUALS?
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 145
Chambers and Hebdige bear witness, euphorically in one case, ironically in
the other, to the existential project of the Birmingham Centre, which was
‘organizational’: that is, the formation of a new kind of intellectual, who, in
Stuart Hall’s parting formulation, would
aim to become more ‘organic’ to new and emergent tendencies in
society, who [would] seek to become more integral with those
forces, linked to them, capable of reflecting what Gramsci called
‘the intellectual function’ in its wider, non-specialist and non-elitist
sense.
(Hall 1980a: 46)
Hall’s words are worth repeating now, in the light of a longer retrospect from
the early 1990s:
we were trying to find an institutional practice in cultural studies
that might produce an organic intellectual. We didn’t know
previously what that would mean, in the context of Britain in the
1970s, and we weren’t sure we would recognize him or her if we
managed to produce it. ... [We] couldn’t tell then, and can hardly
tell now, where that emerging historical movement was to be
found. We were organic intellectuals without any organic point of
reference; organic intellectuals with a nostalgia or will or hope ...
that at some point we would be prepared in intellectual work for that
kind of relationship, if such a conjuncture ever appeared. More
truthfully, we were prepared to imagine or model or simulate such
a relationship in its absence. ... We never connected with that
rising movement; it was a metaphoric exercise.
(Hall [1992] 1996e: 267–8)
|
|
17.9 Page 169 |
▲back to top |
146 CULTURAL STUDIES
These sentences relay Hall’s abiding sense of difficulty, and his awareness of
the ‘necessary modesty’ of committed intellectual work. But as a reflection on
a period, they do not carry conviction. They seem disarming rather than self-
critical, and thus attract the closer attention they discourage. Emergent
historical movements, familiar, new or reinvented, proliferated in that
diversely militant decade. Feminist and black struggles, which Hall singles
out only a paragraph later, provoked formative crises throughout British
society, as they did in the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Perhaps
the greatest among the myriad problems of the time was that of the emergent
tendencies of capital and the right – and here it is proper to remember Hall’s
early, ambitious analyses of Thatcherism (Hall and Jacques 1983), and to note
the ‘organic’ role of Cultural Studies intellectuals in the last years of British
Communism, as expositors of the New Times that also nurtured New Labour
(Rustin 1989). Hall’s rhetorical emphasis on collective cognitive impotence –
what ‘we’ did not know, were unsure of, might not recognize, and so on –
marks an even more curious feature of this desolate retrospect, namely, that it
becomes plausible only on the drastic condition that the available political
knowledges of those days are suspended, put under erasure or simply
nullified. Such indeed is the implication of Chambers’s ‘epistemology’, which
reduces the very idea of popular politics to self-contradiction, and of
Hebdige’s creative embrace of banality, with its counterpart dismissal of
leftist aspiration as a symptom of intellectual pathology. And in this,
paradoxically, they illustrate a possible version of organicism, as Hall defined
it. Broad, non-specialist, non-elitist intelligence: or distraction on the town.
This is organicism as farce.
Yet Birmingham fostered such developments of thought as true varieties of
its general orientation, whose bearings were not entirely what they were taken
to be. The most striking feature of Hall’s Gramscian vision of organicization
is that it effectively displaces Gramsci’s own categories. Hall reinvents the
classic distinction between ‘traditional’ and ‘organic’ intellectuals – which is
|
|
17.10 Page 170 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 147
crucially historical and social-structural in its sense – as one between
academicist and partisan dispositions and styles of practice. At the same time,
he transfers to the second, privileged term, the ‘organic’, the identifying
properties of the first. Gramsci’s traditional intellectuals were typically broad
and non-specialist in ethos, and represented themselves as a distinct and
cohesive body serving a general social interest. They could do so because of
their objective character as adaptive residues from older class formations.
Organic intellectuals, in contrast, arose from fundamental social classes and
represented them metonymically, as any part may represent a whole, and not
merely in virtue of a free act of commitment: as the conspicuous biological
metaphor implies, Gramsci understood them as intellectuals of and for their
social group, a specialized function of its general historical life-process
(Gramsci 1971: 5–14). In Hall’s reading, however, social– structural
determinations dissolve into a pattern of more or less conscious, resolute
‘alignments’, and organic intellectuals assume the moralized form of a
partisan popular tendency within the field of the traditional (Hall [1986]
1996b: 433). The matter at issue here is not scriptural. On the contrary, an
adequate, purposeful discussion of the problematics of ‘organicism’ – which
is indeed crucial for any project of social transformation – would entail
uninhibited critical development beyond Gramsci. What counts for now is the
discursive ambiguity of the organicizing motif in Birmingham Cultural
Studies. The characteristic of traditional intelligentsias, as Gramsci
understood them, cannot be reduced to everyday academic practice – with
which it is then possible, against discouraging odds, to make a politically
committed break. The tradition of unspecialized intelligence, in its sublimated
form as stewardship of the general social interest, has always presupposed a
break of a rather different kind – as the prophets of European Kulturkritik,
traditional intellectuals par excellence, all confirm. The very idea of a political
break is uncomprehending, in a domain – that of culture – whose imputed truth
is a critique of all politics, of politics as such.4
|
|
18 Pages 171-180 |
▲back to top |
|
|
18.1 Page 171 |
▲back to top |
148 CULTURAL STUDIES
THE ‘POLITICS’ OF METACULTURE
The thought seems incongruous. Stuart Hall has maintained that, however
much Cultural Studies may vary, as it invents or reinvents itself in new
locations, its constitutive interest must lie in the nexus of representations and
‘power’ (1997: 30). Martin Barker and Anne Beezer are among those who
resist what they perceive as a ‘new paradigm’ that displaces ‘power as a central
concept’, while retaining their belief in a disciplinary subject, ‘we’, that would
reassert that centrality (1991: 9). Richard Johnson, Hall’s successor at CCCS,
has characterized the Birmingham intervention as a ‘struggle to reform the
“old left” politics’, as ‘a constructive quarrel with dominant styles within the
Labor Movement, especially the neglect of cultural conditions of politics, and
a mechanical narrowing of politics itself’ (Johnson 1996: 79). ‘We’ are
nothing if not ‘political’.
Johnson’s formulation is admirable as a synopsis of early New Left
intellectual strategy; it remains contemporary, and would probably win wide
assent in his discipline. Whether it accurately describes the stronger tendency
in Cultural Studies practice is nevertheless debatable. Here is David Morley,
taking issue with ‘the relativist, self-reflexive orthodoxy’ now installed in his
field:
the overall effect of much of this has in the end been a disabling
one, as a result of which it becomes pretty hard for anyone to say
anything about anyone (or anything) else, for fear of accusation of
ontological imperialism. Apart from other considerations, and
despite the declared political credentials (and intentions) of much
of this kind of work, within cultural studies, this is in fact, politically
disabling. It is hard to mobilize around a political platform of
principled uncertainty, especially if one of those principles is that it
is ultimately impossible to know what is going on.
(Morley 1997: 122)
|
|
18.2 Page 172 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 149
And here is Angela McRobbie, looking back on her influential study of the
girls weekly Jackie, which she has come to fault as inadequate in its
appreciation of such practices as day-dreaming at work:
to ignore these more private aspects of everyday experience is to
avoid considering their function and how they make sense in terms
of politics and social change.
(cited in McGuigan 1992: 110)
Next, Lawrence Grossberg, on ‘the current roadblock in cultural studies’:
its inability to address the specificity of the relations between
popular culture and systemic politics in the context of a hegemonic
struggle.
(cited in McGuigan 1992: 214)
Finally, then, Iain Chambers, distilling the critical insight of his Popular
Culture:
It is an argument about popular aesthetics, about disposable
culture, about everyday perception and ultimately about the
sense, the politics of our world.
(Chambers 1986: 190)
Here, cumulatively, is the Cultural Studies imagination. Morley,
McRobbie and Grossberg offer the same narrative of realization, tracing in the
curve of a paragraph or even a sentence the passage from philosophy, day-
dreams or disciplinary agendas to platforms, struggle and social change. In
Chambers, the narrative is already complete: as the syntactic parallelism
suggests, his list is not a sequence of topics but a set of equivalences. There
may be, as Todd Gitlin has judged, a ‘consolatory’ logic at work in this
imagination – the reflex of a left-wing generation making its way in the great
|
|
18.3 Page 173 |
▲back to top |
150 CULTURAL STUDIES
reactionary tides of the late twentieth century. Perhaps it distinguishes a phase
in a long history of what Stuart Hall has termed ‘politics by other means’ –
specifically, an alternative means of furthering the early ambition of the
British New Left (1990). Or perhaps – this further thought does not cancel the
others – an older, more basic desire has renewed its pressure.
Politics is everywhere in Cultural Studies. The word appears on nearly
every page of the corpus. Only ‘culture’ itself has greater salience in the
general discourse of the subject. Truly commonplace in this respect, yet also
predictably urgent in its stress, ‘politics’ functions in this quarter as an
expletive. It is, in pragmatic effect, the p-word. Expletives are propositionally
redundant; their discursive function is, as linguists say, ‘phatic’, determining
the conditions of a communicative exchange rather than its paraphrasable
conceptual content. The p-word in Cultural Studies is predominantly phatic in
accent, confirming a relationship, an identity and, implicitly, a desire. That
desire is not merely to remain politically committed in the face of
institutionalizing pressures, and not even only to help cultivate a more
adequate political imagination in the left; it is, in Gitlin’s further, more
disturbing critical judgement, simply ‘to be politics’ (1997: 37).
What might it mean to ‘claim to be politics’? Johnson’s critical stress on the
‘cultural conditions of politics’, which follows as a necessary and weighty
consequence of the theoretical mutation that led to Cultural Studies, precludes
such a claim, implying as it does the non-identity of cultural and politics, and
a knowing subject irreducible to either. In the discursive formation from
which he was speaking, however, the strategic meaning of the culture/politics
distinction was quite specific. The ‘cultural conditions’ were the typical
preferences of the social majority – popular culture – and the politics that of
the organized left, and to each there corresponded a kind of intellectual: the
organic to whose function Birmingham aspired, and the traditional, the
ideologues of what might be called politics with a capital P. So configured, the
‘constructive quarrel’ assumed a form that belied the apparent sense of the
|
|
18.4 Page 174 |
▲back to top |
TOWARDS POPULAR CULTURE? 151
distinction, becoming, in practice, a struggle to establish the sovereignty of
culture over politics in the disputed territory of the popular. In this, for Cultural
Studies, lay the meaning of the New Times venture, which really did enact a
‘claim to be politics’ in the most drastic metaphoric sense of an old saying: ‘we
are what we eat’. The manifest rationale of that venture – a defining moment
in the life of the British Cultural Studies intelligentsia – was to refashion the
sensibility of a dullard left. Its objective discursive impulse was to subsume
the political under the cultural, to undo the rationality of politics as a
determinate social form. It is time to recall that Leavis and Scrutiny also urged
constructive engagement with the cultural conditions of politics, in a critical
practice whose logic belied the relative modesty of its claims. Kulturkritik
reasoned politics out of moral existence, as a false pretender to authority.
Cultural Studies, inverting the social commitments of that tradition but
retaining its discursive form, has been tempted to follow suit. And to the extent
that it has yielded, it has disclosed its character as a strictly limited mode of
opposition to Kulturkritik, with which it continues to share the discursive
space of metaculture.
|
|
18.5 Page 175 |
▲back to top |
|
|
18.6 Page 176 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND
SOCIETY
|
|
18.7 Page 177 |
▲back to top |
|
|
18.8 Page 178 |
▲back to top |
The record of European Kulturkritik in the twentieth century bears witness to
its force: its power of attraction as a way of evaluating modernity, and – no less
impressive – its ability to absorb radical challenges to its presumptive truth.
The cultural studies tradition took shape in radical opposition to Kulturkritik,
but my critical claim has been that there too metacultural discourse has
remained tendentially dominant. That is, it has not simply been the dominant
tendency, but the discourse that spontaneously tends to dominate. Such an
assertion is inevitably controversial. Actually existing Cultural Studies is a
heterogeneous formation. Intellectual purity has never been seen as a rule to
observe or a goal to attain in its strategies of self-development, and the
pragmatic conditions of late-century academic existence have in fact tended to
favour rather than frustrate this preference. (The discipline is better adapted to
its environment than its devotees or their traditionalist detractors like to think.)
Yet throughout this impure formation there runs a critical differential, a theme
that marks off the idea of Cultural Studies proper from the various theories and
methods that support the teaching and research programmes carried on in its
name. What has distinguished this project–discipline from the ordinary run of
theories and sociologies of culture is its impulse to create its analytic object as
a subject: to establish what is spoken of as the entity that speaks of it. Thus, it
seeks to validate a new cultural subject, and, in final effect, to institute culture
as the authoritative subject of a discourse on social relations.
|
|
18.9 Page 179 |
▲back to top |
156 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
Culture, here, is more than a corpus of forms and practices, however
radically extended in range. It is more even than the social whole seen in its
signifying aspect: as in Kulturkritik, it is the principle, the condition of valid
social judgement. Benda’s eternal truths, Mann’s nation and Leavis’s human
values were variant embodiments of this indivisible authority, in the name of
which they uttered their critiques of modern social particularism, and, above
all, of those interests they associated with ‘mass’ existence. Cultural Studies
has displaced the notion of the mass for the sake of the subaltern popular, and
therewith discomposed the authoritative subject of Kultur in the interest of a
radical alternative. But in doing so much yet no more, it has reproduced the
discursive form of what it seeks to overcome. The stake is not the scope of what
is held to be ‘culture’, or the pattern of social values inscribed in it – as if the
old Kulturkritik were at fault only in its narrowness and traditionalism. What
is at issue here is that principle. It is the status of the cultural, and specifically
its relation to the established form of general social authority, namely politics.
Kulturkritik did not doubt its entitlements: politics is inherently deficient as a
mode of general authority, which can emerge only from the elusive life of the
whole, or culture. Cultural Studies could scarcely recognize itself in such
terms, but nevertheless so it has spoken, constituting itself as a permanent
rebuke to the upstart authorities of ‘the left’. If the p-word in Cultural Studies
discourse often seems as empty as it is insistent, this is because the desire that
powers it is, in the context, unspeakable. Culture, now popular and
oppositional, and represented by the ‘organic intellectuals’ of the new
project–discipline, takes over the prerogatives once vested in another kind of
intellectual. Metacultural discourse is metapolitics, the be all and end all of
(left) political reason.
THE DESIRE CALLED CULTURAL STUDIES
How might this uncanny phenomenon be accounted for?1Cultural Studies has
become a part of its own corpus in recent years, as commentators explore the
|
|
18.10 Page 180 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 157
logic of its emergence and tendencies of development, laying special
emphasis on its immediate social and political contexts. Jim McGuigan notes
its specific appeal for those without secure social antecedents for their identity
as intellectuals – first-generation working-class graduates, and ‘in general for
those from positions of social subordination and marginality’ (1992: 11–12).
He also notes the formative pressure of a more concentrated sectoral interest,
a new ‘class fraction’, neither bourgeois nor intellectual in anterior senses, but
implanted now in culturally central practices of ‘presentation and
representation’ – the media and the publicity industry. Out of this determinate
historical configuration, he suggests, comes ‘the populist intervention in
cultural knowledge’ that is Cultural Studies, and which ‘can be understood, in
the first instance, as a ... struggle for symbolic power, representing fairly
narrow interests yet similarly evincing a certain democratization of culture: a
postmodern populism’ (p. 220). Uncritical populism thus appears as an inborn
behavioural propensity, in which ‘solidarity’ tends to degenerate into
‘sentimentality’, which is in effect a kind of social conformism. John Fiske’s
notions of semiotic democracy, of television as a liberated cultural zone, are
‘homologous’ with the neo-liberal dogma of consumer choice, McGuigan
observes. They are a mock-oppositional replay of the leading ideology in
contemporary capitalism.
This sociological hypothesis coexists with a critical judgement of
uncertain explanatory status, concerning, as it happens, the fading of
explanation as an intellectual value in Cultural Studies. McGuigan condemns
the growing preference for sympathetic interpretation as a priority in the
analysis of popular consumption, and the corresponding want of attention to
structural conditions of cultural practices, and calls for a reunification of
interpretive and explanatory forms of inquiry. But, beyond this, he is also
tempted to consider this partitioning of theory and method as a causal factor
in the growth of ‘uncritical populism’. Todd Gitlin, on the other hand,
although writing in a spirit akin to McGuigan’s, sees in the narrative of
Cultural Studies the imprint of a specifically political history. Gitlin endorses
|
|
19 Pages 181-190 |
▲back to top |
|
|
19.1 Page 181 |
▲back to top |
158 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
the formative ambitions of Cultural Studies in its own customary terms. He
seconds early New Left perceptions of the increasing social weight of popular
culture in post-war capitalism, and of the unfamiliar, perhaps politically
significant collective subjectivities taking form within it. But he is
correspondingly astringent in his assessment of the new project–discipline as
it evolved in the political conjunctures of the 1970s and 1980s. Cultural
Studies, he writes,
is a form of intellectual life that answers to passions and hopes
imported into its precincts from outside. Cultural studies may not
be a significant social movement beyond the precincts of certain
academies [Gitlin is alluding here to a characteristically grandiose
claim on behalf of the discipline], but it certainly responds to the
energies of social and cultural movements – and their eclipse.
(Gitlin 1997: 25–6)
Gitlin’s thesis is that the political claims of Cultural Studies have developed in
inverse proportion to the actual political fortunes of the wider left of which it
has been a part. It has fashioned itself as a redemptive substitute for blocked
or defeated movements:
Perhaps it was youth culture that would inaugurate, cement,
ennoble the rising class that inevitably would displace and
overcome the ruling groups! At least popular culture had vitality,
rebelliousness, oppositional spirit – and then, by implication, so
could the people who made it popular. If political power was
foreclosed, the battlements of culture still remained to be taken! Or
perhaps – if one really believed that the personal was political –
they had already been taken. Or perhaps the only reason politics
looked unavailing was that the wrong culture was in force.
(1997: 29)
|
|
19.2 Page 182 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 159
More sympathetic, for all his broad parody, than McGuigan, Gitlin is equally
severe in his judgement on Cultural Studies conformism, and not at all
academicist in his sense of the necessary corrective:
[Is] there a chance of a modest redemption? Perhaps, if we
imagine a harder-headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the
burden of imagining itself to be a political practice. A chastened,
realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions.
It would not claim to be politics. ... It would be less romantic about
the world but also about itself. Less would be more.
(1997: 37)
The p-word, no longer compulsively uttered, might recover some of its critical
force.
BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE
McGuigan’s sociological conjecture and Gitlin’s political reading furnish
important elements of an understanding of Cultural Studies. In themselves,
however, they lack both specificity and generality. A fully concrete account
would have to be strictly comparative, neither assuming the world-defining
significance of the British experience nor reducing the ambiguities of its
singular international effectivity. At the same time – and this is the crucial
consideration in this setting of argument – it would not mistake local
specificity for uniqueness in time and space. It would not defer to the
assumption – which is that of Cultural Studies itself – that the discursive
formation to be explained is a novelty, or only a novelty, a recent creation of
distinctively recent conditions. Gitlin accepts this assumption, if only by
default, with the interesting result that his perceptions exceed the terms of his
explanation. The specificities of the 1970s cannot have given rise to a
|
|
19.3 Page 183 |
▲back to top |
160 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
phenomenon that long predates them. The cultural impulse ‘to be politics’ is
older and more general. ‘The anti-political populism of Cultural Studies’, as
Gitlin terms it, seems less a development, be it for good or for ill, than a case
of persistence, if not regressive fixation, a paradoxical episode in the history
of metaculture. It is this discursive formation, not the record of Cultural
Studies, which is only one of its sites of elaboration, that is centrally in
question here.
‘The working-out of the idea of culture’, Raymond Williams once wrote,
‘is a slow reach again for control’ (1961: 285). The placing of control, at the
close of a sentence and also a paragraph, in the concluding chapter of Culture
and Society, marks its critical importance. There is more to say about this
(though it is worth noting at once that in English, compared with other
languages sharing the Latin original, the word can be ambiguous,
semantically associated not merely with checking or monitoring but also with
the far stronger meanings of dominance or command). But first, however, we
should pause to consider the temporality here inscribed in ‘the idea of culture’.
The ‘working-out’ and the ‘slow reach’ imply a progressive movement
towards a point of transcendence, in which a persisting condition – the reach
is slow – is negated. But into the phrasing of this temporality Williams inserts
the stylistically awkward again, thus invoking a second, distinct temporality
in which the future becomes the moment of recovery, the making good not
merely of lack but of loss. The functioning of these distinct temporalities in
metacultural discourse is complex in the strict sense: neither is the inner truth
of the other, and they vary to extremes, from case to case, in their relative force.
It is the more interesting, then, that Williams, who knew this, should
nevertheless have emphasized their joint implication in a single historical
practice.
Intuitions of loss define the temporal imagination of Kulturkritik. Be it of
a whole national mentality (Mann) or of a rarefied spiritual discipline (Benda),
of political or cultural order (Ortega, Leavis) or of a cohesive social scheme of
|
|
19.4 Page 184 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 161
perception and interest (Mannheim), the loss is always one of integral
authority. The past is the standard from which modernity has erred, and the
pattern – if there is one – of adjustment. For Mann and Benda, the only
strategic options were personal, the ethical disciplines of irony or
contemplation. Ortega turned to prophecy. Leavis and Mannheim canvassed
activist solutions in the public sphere. All substantiated their claims to critical
integrity in imageries of aristocracy or priesthood, the historic types of a
general authority they would honour as recusants in exile or, deceptively, as a
new meritocracy in the face of the modern iconoclasts. Mannheim and Leavis
coupled the temporalities of transcendence and recovery in efficient schemes
of cultural substitution, in which new educational elites would recover
something of the authority of old hierarchies. (Eliot, the settled reactionary,
perceived as much, and stiffened his defences accordingly: Kultur was not, in
truth, best served by Kritik, which might educate a Cromwell – or, at any rate,
a Hoggart.) For another pair, Woolf and Orwell, no such discursive finesse was
available. They wrote in solidarity with subaltern social interests – those of
women and workers, respectively – that could not easily be sublimated into an
ideal community of the mind, a location that neither of them was, in any case,
pre-adapted to occupy. The double temporality of ‘culture’ worked here, too,
producing visions of emancipation but also a damaging ambivalence. Woolf
drew on the literary past for her image of an androgynous future, but was also
drawn back to it, as a time before the onset of feminist agitation and a crisis-
ridden 'sex consciousness'.2Orwell called for a socialist revolution powered
by a national–popular England – which was, however, the spiritual base from
which he launched his own rhetorical insurrections against his fellow
intellectuals of the left.
The later tradition of metaculture has dispensed with all such temporal
couplings, efficient or not. If Eliot, in his conservatism, exemplified the flat
rejection of social transcendence, seeking only to confirm inherited cultural
inequality, his true antithesis is Cultural Studies, which incarnates the will to
|
|
19.5 Page 185 |
▲back to top |
162 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
negation, in the interests of emancipatory change. No longer ... is the time
signal of the discipline. The past is that which must (now) be repudiated, be it
Kulturkritik or a certain Marxist economism, which in this discourse appear
as strict complements, both figuring the annulment of popular creativity. Or –
for the axiom is reversible – that which is to be repudiated must for that very
reason be rendered as past, even at the cost of apparent self-contradiction: the
temporalizing rhetoric of Stuart Hall’s commentary on New Times is an
epitome of this (pp. 117ff. above). The typical Cultural Studies subject – the
practitioner as advocate of the disciplinary project – itself enacts this
compulsive modernism, always announcing itself as if for the first time,
shedding what it would otherwise have to assume as a formative, therefore
limiting, history, a past of one’s own. At a comfortable extreme – which, as the
cases of Iain Chambers and Dick Hebdige illustrate, is not merely hypothetical
– this modernism is indeed objectively conformist. A certain kind of organic
intellectual reverses Eliot’s traditionalism and lives the present as though it
were the desirable future – which, once it has been conjured into actuality in
this way ceases to exist as a critical force capable of passing judgement on
what actually exists. However, to insist one-sidedly on the banalizing effect of
such gestures would itself be an act of banalization. Metacultural discourse in
the left-modernist variation that is Cultural Studies incarnates the impulse to
accelerate Williams’s slow reach for control, a utopian desire to be – actually
be – one step ahead of its own validating historical process.
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
The motifs of ‘acceleration’ and measured anticipation (a practice ‘one step
ahead’ of its own process) come from the days of Thomas Mann’s Reflections.
Their source is a lecture given by the Marxist critic and philosopher Georg
Lukács in June 1919, in his capacity as a Commissar for Education and Culture
in the Hungarian revolutionary government.3 The urgent purpose of the
|
|
19.6 Page 186 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 163
lecture, 'The Changing Function of Historical Materialism’, was to define the
specificity of socialist revolution and, in particular, to vindicate the role of
‘violence’, the moment of deliberate force in political practice, in its making.
However, as the title suggests, Lukács built his case from arguments of the
most general kind, which, it will quickly emerge, go to the heart of the question
of metacultural discourse.4 His fundamental theoretical intent was a critique
of ‘economics’. The historical achievement of capitalism, and its difference
as a system from all its predecessors, he maintained, lay in its unprecedented
power to transform the given material world, to transcend ‘natural limits’
(Lukács 1971: 233). Yet in the same measure, the specifically social relations
and objectives that would henceforward be historically dominant themselves
assumed the special, apparently natural form of ‘economics’, a social form in
which the realities so designated appeared, along with law and the state, as a
‘closed’ system, an apparatus ‘apparently quite independent, hermetic and
autonomous’ (p. 230). Marx had classically criticized the ‘vulgar’ economists
who abstracted the capitalist market from its constitutive social relations and
eternalized it as economic nature. Now, Lukács argued, vulgar Marxism had
done likewise, mistaking the specifically capitalist form of economic life for
an anthropological constant, a ‘law’ of history. The laws of economic nature,
be that eternal or evolutionary, were indices of alienated social relations. In
cancelling the reality, revolution would also ‘annul’ the law. The moment of
‘socialization’, Lukács declared, entails a restructuring of property relations
but also, and in consequence of that, a transformation of the status of ‘the
economic’ within the social whole. It involves ‘a turning in the direction of
something qualitatively new’, that is, ‘conscious action directed towards the
comprehended totality of society’ (p. 250). Violence – or mass revolutionary
politics – breaks ‘the hold of reified relations over man and the hold of
economics over society’, and clears the approach to a state of things in which
‘ideology’ becomes the dominant, ‘the authentic content of human life’ (pp.
251–2).
|
|
19.7 Page 187 |
▲back to top |
164 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
If Lukács’s prospectus seems to us to evince a richly period quality, that is
a reflection on our own historical parochialism. The problem he tackled here
is that of metaculture itself. The theme of ‘economics’ will be familiar to any
reader of Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall as that of ‘base and
superstructure’ – indeed Williams, in an independent parallel development of
thought, constructed his own critique in the same substantive terms (pp. 83–
92 above).5 However, with greater lucidity than either, Lukács associated the
theoretical crux of economic determinism with the politico-cultural crux of
deliberative authority (the idea of ‘a consciously directed society’ [1971:
251]), and proposed an integrated solution to them. Economic determinism is
not so much pure error, Lukács argued in effect, as a false generalization from
the historically distinctive reality of capitalism, which constitutes ‘the
economic’ as a specialized, autonomous process and favours corresponding
forms of social reason – ‘economics’. The necessary corollaries for a society
thus governed by ‘economic compulsion’ are an instrumentalized politics (a
form of governance based on submission to an intractable real world) and an
ineffectual culture (valued but useless ‘principles that [can] occur only as
“superstructure” ’, as secondary, dependent). In other words, a structurally
induced enfeeblement of authority and power of social deliberation. In this,
too, capitalism differs constitutionally from preceding and succeeding forms
of society. Although Lukács did not say so much, it is consistent with his
analysis to recall the fatalistic discourses of social authority – religious or
traditionalist – that transfigured the ‘natural limits’ of feudalism. He was of
course emphatic in his conviction that socialism could outstrip not only
‘natural limits’ but those of ‘economics and violence’ as well, creating the
conditions of a politics consisting in what had ‘until now’ been ‘merely
“Ideology” ’ – or culture.
The historical context of Lukács’s argument was socialist revolution,
achieved (in Russia) or in progress (in his native Hungary and elsewhere in
Central Europe). It is capitalism that must concern us here. Lukács’s basic
|
|
19.8 Page 188 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 165
claim, in its first, Marxian form, is that the capitalist mode of production is
necessarily anarchic, in the strongest sense: it is finally ungovernable (Marx
[1869] 1976: 635, 667). Yet the epoch of capitalism has also been that of
politics, the locus and means of the struggle for social self-determination
according to one or another available formulation of that distinctively modern
end: liberty, democracy, independence, equality, welfare, socialism.
Bourgeois civilization has exalted politics in socio-economic conditions that
sooner or later thwart all but the best-adapted of programmes. This historic
paradox, which has intensified over the decades since Lukács wrote, with the
widening of popular claims to entitlement and participation in public affairs,
has done more than any local disappointment or scandal, however great in
itself, to discredit the very idea of politics. But if politics as deliberative
intervention in social relations as a whole is the supreme instance of ‘general
labour’, it is not the only one. Culture, after all, is coextensive with social
relations as a whole – and can, indeed, be represented, in specific cultural
practices, such as that of Kulturkritik, as an alternative community of
meanings and values. For Herbert Marcuse, writing in the heroic phase of
twentieth-century Kulturkritik, the modern ideal of culture functioned as a
contemplative resolution of the objective disorder of bourgeois society.
Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, which, for all its differences of style
and procedure, offers a congruent interpretation, traced the formation of
culture as ‘an abstraction and an absolute’, as the last court of appeal.6
Matthew Arnold, who was the pivotal figure in Williams’s history, looked
towards an ideal fusion of culture in that sense with its practical equivalent, the
state. Metacultural discourse has been the form in which culture dissolves the
political and takes up the general labour proper to it, assuming the role of a
valid social authority.
However, the terms and agencies of that authority are not simply given.
Culture, precisely because it is no less but also no more than the instance of
meaning in social relations, is wholly implicated in all social antagonism, and,
|
|
19.9 Page 189 |
▲back to top |
166 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
latterly, as ‘the culture industry’, in the ordinary conflicts of capitalist
production itself. Intelligentsias, diverse in their provenance, occupational
composition and social affinities, do not spontaneously give voice to a self-
evident general interest. Even more so than politics, therefore, culture and
intellectuals alike appear both central and marginal, commanding and merely
pretentious, sublime and ridiculous, everything and nothing. Paul Valéry’s
satiric dream-vision has lost none of its sting:
Tatters of dream came to me. I formed figures which I called
‘Intellectuals’. Men almost motionless, who caused great
movement in the world. Or very animated men, by the lively action
of whose hands and mouths, imperceptible powers and
essentially invisible objects were made manifest. ... Men of
thought, Men of letters, Men of science, Artists – Causes, living
causes, individuate causes, minimal causes, causes within
causes and inexplicable to themselves – and causes whose
effects were as vain, but at the same time as prodigiously
important, as I wished. ... The universe of these causes and their
effects existed and did not exist. This system of strange acts,
productions, and prodigies had the all-powerful and vacant reality
of a game of cards. Inspirations, meditations, works, glory, talents,
it took no more than a certain look to make these things nearly
everything, and a certain other look to reduce them to nearly
nothing. ... [And among these intellectuals] the most ridiculous
were those who made themselves, on their own authority, the
judges and justices of the tribe.
(Valéry 1948: 61–2)
Such images of culture and intellectuals are stock items in everyday discourse,
polite and popular, and with good historical cause. What Marx said of the
quarrel between romantics and utilitarians applies equally to the vexatious
|
|
19.10 Page 190 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 167
problems of ‘culture’ and ‘intellectuals’: they are commonplaces in the
spontaneous discourse of capitalist society, and will go on circulating ‘up to
its blessed end’ (Marx 1973: 162). Seeking always to manage the objective
social contradictions that irritate it into life, metacultural discourse is
constitutionally dependent on a rhetoric of ‘splitting’. In a process akin to that
described in the psychoanalytic tradition, the ambivalences and ambiguities
of ‘culture’ and ‘intellectuals’ in a capitalist society are rewritten as fateful
polarities of good and bad, true and false, high and low.7 Kulturkritik offers
the simpler illustration: ‘culture’ (good) must repeatedly discover
‘civilization’ (bad) and its approaching catastrophe, which is what confirms
its own identity and mission. Intellectuals must either conform to their moral
essence or pervert it. They are either true clercs or treacherous accomplices of
the market and the masses. Cultural Studies, a complex formation in which
metacultural discourse is tendentially dominant but not necessarily so,
presents a more variegated picture, but not a fundamentally different one.
Would-be organic intellectuals, who may go so far as to renounce the title of
intellectual for the common world of fans, must repeatedly discover the truth
of popular culture, must always bear witness to it in defiance of the powers of
‘culture with a capital C’, which is also the left with a capital ‘L’.
Metacultural discourse, it might be said, is a form of resistance through
ritual, offering what the Birmingham circle would once have conceptualized
as a ‘magical solution’ to the poverty of politics in bourgeois society. The
difference between its older and more recent phases is one of temporality. Seen
as Lukács saw it, the perverse autonomy of ‘economics’ in the capitalist mode
of production is uncheckable. ‘Conscious action directed towards the
comprehended totality of society’ is inconceivable except as revolution.
‘Socialization’ of production, its ‘annulment’ in the reified form of
‘economics’, is the structural condition of a collective life in which culture
might really become the social dominant. And that outcome is contingent
upon the mustering and exercise of effective political force in and against the
|
|
20 Pages 191-200 |
▲back to top |
|
|
20.1 Page 191 |
▲back to top |
168 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
historical present. Metacultural discourse elaborates the alternative, which
itself assumes two forms. Kulturkritik looks to the past for the symbolic
metapolitical forces capable of subduing civilized anarchy. Scrutiny’s images
of public virtue, of ‘disinterested’ governance of the whole, were feudal in
provenance. Its critical meritocrats, like Mannheim’s, would be a new
priesthood. In Cultural Studies, the unquenched desire for an emancipated
future has powered a symbolic transformation of the present. In the great
commodity display of modern times, where Kulturkritik saw only
indifference, standardization and levelling down, Cultural Studies prefers to
see only use-values, sensuousness and a rainbow of discretionary potential.
The fascination with ‘youth’ is telling. The slow reach has attained the speed
of time travel. It can seem, on a good day, as if Lukács’s vision has been
realized, as if popular culture has outrun ‘mere ideology’ and the ‘violence’ of
politics, to take final, unmediated possession of itself and its social world.
The authority that metacultural discourse recalls from the past promotes
order and wholeness. The authority it alternatively borrows from the future
affirms difference – and that not only as diversity, but as the heterogeneity that
asserts itself within the normalizing frames of reason or humanity or nation,
disrupting them. That contrast is historically substantial, as any comparative
biographical survey of Kulturkritik and Cultural Studies would show. Yet, it
has not been sufficient to rupture the formal continuity of metaculture, which,
in either mode, invents an authoritative subject, ‘good’ culture, be it minority
or popular, whose function is to mediate a symbolic metapolitical resolution
of the contradictions of capitalist modernity. Popular culture, as it appears in
this rarefied discursive construction, replays the dialectic of the high tradition
that concerned Marcuse in the 1930s: it, too is ‘affirmative’, in both the good
and the bad senses. The excitable ‘conformism’ and ‘populism’ for which
Cultural Studies has been chided run parallel to the negativism and elitism of
Kulturkritik. They, too, are driven by an ambiguous ‘promise of happiness’.
Conformity here is not merely pragmatic adaptation to an overwhelming
reality, even if it must always resemble that, but a deflated utopianism.
|
|
20.2 Page 192 |
▲back to top |
CULTURAL POLITICS?
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 169
Metacultural discourse is a creature of discrepancy, for which it constitutes
itself as resolution. The discrepancy is that of culture and politics in the plane
of social authority. In the earlier phase, that of Kulturkritik, the critique of
politics is flat and final. Politics cannot metabolize the moral insights of
culture, and is therefore inherently deficient as a social form. If not shunned
altogether, as Benda preferred, it must be regulated by a superordinate politics
of mind. Cultural Studies repudiates this tradition on demonstratively political
grounds, but only to submit ‘its own’ polity, that of the left, to the same
critique, with comparable effects. The progressive foregrounding of
subjectivity in Cultural Studies, and the privileging of identity as the site and
stake of social antagonism, achieve far more than the enrichment and
complication they plausibly offer – or rather, much less than that – if, in
theoretical reality, there is no longer a valid and specifically political practice
to enrich or complicate. The problem that animates and seemingly justifies
metacultural discourse, is not, at bottom, one of moral substance – having to
do with specific social interests and purposes – however graphically the
‘content’ of politics may have featured in the record of critical controversy. It
is one of form.
Only the typical dualism of Kulturkritik – the splitting of culture and
civilization – obscures the insight on which Cultural Studies is founded. If
culture, in its general reality, is the moment of meaning in social relations, if it
is nothing less but also nothing more than the sense-making element of all
practice, then it cannot also be exalted as the higher moral tribunal before
which the lower claims of politics must submit to arbitration. On the contrary,
and for the same reason, there is no instance of culture that is exempt from
political implication. But the same sanction must then apply to popular
culture, which, likewise, may not be privileged as Cultural Studies would
wish. Moreover, to pass from that crucial founding insight to the
|
|
20.3 Page 193 |
▲back to top |
170 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
commonplace that ‘everything is political’ is to scant the apparently
contradictory insight on which Kulturkritik drew for its compelling pejorative
visions of modernity: politics is never everything. This seems paradoxical.
After all, the specific practice of politics is to determine the totality of social
relations in a given space. But this quintessentially general labour is
specialized in mode. It is normally deliberative in character, governed by the
question, What is to be done? Political utterance, then, is always injunctive,
regardless of its medium, occasion or genre. It wills, urges, dictates. Its aim is
to secure assent (a process in which issues of identity are indeed central) and,
failing that, compliance, of which coercion furnishes the last guarantee.
Cultural practices proper – those second-order elaborations of social meaning
whose principal function is signification – have no need of that modal
specialization, or no authoritative access to it, even where they pursue
‘political’ ends. They lack the formal distinction of political practice, from
which they differ, correspondingly, in their norms of judgement. Culture may
absolutize any value (including, as metaculture, that of itself). It may offer an
infinity of moral discriminations, in mutually irreducible patterns. No
meaning or value simply translates any other. Politics, whose rationale is to
secure this or that general condition of existence, in a determinate social
perspective, must always seek optimal terms of alignment, of solidarity and
antagonism. Contrariwise, a political project may entail promoting division in
a domain of cultural affinity, and for the same basic reason. Thus, as Gramsci
perceived (1985: 99–102), political and cultural evaluation tend
spontaneously towards non-co-ordination: each with respect to the other is
both excessive (too broad, too narrow) and insufficient (too broad, too
narrow). The culture-politics discrepancy is always historically specific. It is
the crisis of national tradition, or democratic legitimacy, or public standards,
or class-consciousness, or ethnic continuity. Nevertheless, discrepancy itself
is the general rule.
|
|
20.4 Page 194 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 171
The rule is general, and also without discernible limit of jurisdiction, for if
politics remains modally specialized even when conducted wholly in the
plane of culture, then Lukács’s vision of free and fluent human self-
elaboration must be qualified. Even if cultural practice were to be released
from ‘mere ideology’ and political practice from the necessity of ‘violence’,
the discrepancy would persist into a future beyond lucid imagining. For just
so long, Marcuse’s ‘affirmative culture’ would continue in its equivocal
elaboration of the promise of happiness, in a purely ‘inward’ cancellation of
objective social contradictions, which would thereby be spared more
consequential political attack. And so also, therefore, would metacultural
discourse, which is the most general form of that affirmation, synoptic and
engaged, embodying the will to resolution. Yet it does not follow necessarily
that metaculture constitutes the inescapable discursive condition of critical
thought, either in that elusive future or in the more tangible one we already
inhabit. The only necessity in the case is that of discrepancy itself, which, once
grasped as such, appears in another aspect, not as a place of historic frustration
and wish-fulfilment but as a space of possibility.
‘Cultural politics’ is a spacious category. Socially committed art practice
and criticism are a familiar instance. Stuart Hall’s explorations of new
ethnicities and black popular culture exemplify this kind of cultural politics.
Public policy is the ground of another kind, which controversies over national
‘heritage’ richly illustrate (Wright 1985; Samuel 1994); and in a development
especially associated with Tony Bennett, this has assumed the form of
‘cultural policy studies' (Bennett 1992).8 Bennett's project is avowedly
reformist, entailing a break from ‘criticism’ in favour of ‘technical’
intervention in institutions: ‘cultural studies might envisage its role as
consisting of the training of cultural technicians’ (Bennett 1993: 83). Glenn
Jordan and Chris Weedon, in contrast, reaffirm the liberationist mission of the
discipline. ‘Cultural politics’, they say, in their book of that name, ‘is the
|
|
20.5 Page 195 |
▲back to top |
172 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
struggle to fix meanings in the interest of particular groups’ (Jordan and
Weedon 1995: 544):
Whose culture shall be the official one and whose shall be
subordinated? What cultures shall be regarded as worthy of
display and which shall be hidden? Whose history shall be
remembered and whose marginalized? What images of social life
shall be projected and which shall be marginalized? What voices
shall be heard and on what basis? This is the realm of cultural
politics.
(Jordan and Weedon 1995: 4, typography modified)
These questions are unarguably fundamental. But there is a fur ther question,
not itself political, to put in return: is there any cultural practice that would not
be politics, or any politics that would not be cultural? It seems not: ‘everything
in social and cultural life is fundamentally to do with power. It is integral to
culture. All signifying practices – that is, all practices that have meaning –
involve relations of power’ (p. 11). The claim lodged here is more emphatic
than precise, but its driving impulse seems unmistakable. ‘Cultural politics’,
in a word, to which Jordan and Weedon resort more than once, is ‘everything’.
Their title is one word too long: the distinction between culture and politics,
on which their linkage logically depends, has been talked out of theoretical
existence.
This need not happen. In the present context of argument, the idea of
cultural politics acquires a precise conceptual value as a critical check on the
metacultural dominant, and as the logical ground, though certainly not the
substance, of an alternative. It has to be said again, with emphasis, that the
analysis I propose here is formal in character, neither implying nor excluding
any particular identification in the field of antagonistic social interests –
though, as I hope the analysis of metacultural discourse has helped to show,
form is not a secondary matter. Cultural politics, as understood here, is not a
|
|
20.6 Page 196 |
▲back to top |
METACULTURE AND SOCIETY 173
special case of either politics or culture. Its field of action is mapped in the
discrepancy between its constitutive terms, from which also it absorbs the
tension that motivates it. Stuart Hall speaks too starkly, and perhaps with a
certain romantic prejudice, in defining culture as ‘infinite semiosis’, sense-
making without end, and politics as its equally abstract regulator, ‘arbitrary
closure’ (Hall 1997: 30). Historical formations of culture, as structured social
processes, are not so mercurial in their movement as either phrase suggests,
and that definition of politics is already culturalist. Nevertheless, he
exaggerates to the point. No politics, in so far as it respects its constitutive
function, which is to determine the order of social relations as a whole, can
adequately replicate the contours and textures of the cultural formation in
which it seeks to have effect. The field of identities, interests and values is
always excessive. This excess has been simplified and spiritualized as the
higher truth of humanity or the nation (Kulturkritik), and then simplified and
politicized as the unregarded democracy of everyday life (Cultural Studies),
but these alternative versions of the cultural principle are gambits in a space
that does not answer to their reductive definitions. The excess has no fixed
composition or tendency. It is a heterogeneous mass of possibilities old and
new and never mutually translatable, possibilities no longer or not yet and
perhaps never to be chartered as bearing general authority, as proper norms of
political judgement. Culture is everything, in the sense that there is no social
life outside formations of meaning, but it never adds up. Political practice
seeks to determine social relations as a whole – a whole more richly
differentiated than the subtlest of programmes, which, therefore, can never
lucidly aspire to be everything. And in that necessary non-identity lies the very
possibility of the activities, the interests, the perspectives that can
meaningfully be distinguished as cultural politics.
Stuart Hall has emphasized the ‘necessary modesty’ of Cultural Studies.
The point of these closing pages on the concept of cultural politics is to suggest
that the immodesty his project–discipline has learnt willy-nilly from its
|
|
20.7 Page 197 |
▲back to top |
174 METACULTURE AND SOCIETY
authoritarian forebear, Kulturkritik, is, in theory at least, not necessary.
Genealogy is not destiny. The social desire that metaculture encodes is
inextinguishable: what compels it is Herder’s ‘image of happiness’. But
metaculture as a discursive form is romance, a journey through the waste land
in search of lost virtue or into an enchanted forest of commodities, where even
the future is in season all year round. It is better, surely, to settle for lucidity –
to honour the image of happiness ‘negatively’, as Adorno put it, by retaining
the contradictions ‘pure and uncompromised’ (1981:32) – and to enter
cultural politics with a greater modesty that in fact subserves a greater
ambition, as the art of the possible.
|
|
20.8 Page 198 |
▲back to top |
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
1 For an illuminating discussion, see Lloyd and Thomas 1998.
2 Dover Wilson’s scholarly 1932 edition of Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy
(1869) was the first of its kind; the journal Scrutiny, which was launched
in Cambridge in the same year, 1932, pursued an avowedly Arnoldian
cultural strategy; the USA’s leading Arnoldian, Lionel Trilling, published his
biography, Matthew Arnold (New York: W.W. Norton) in 1939.
PART I
CHAPTER 1
1 Walter D. Morris (Mann [1918] 1983a) translates the last word of the title as
‘nonpolitical’. Here and subsequently I prefer the customary rendering
unpolitical, which is not only more nearly literal but also, I believe, more
appropriate: whereas ‘nonpolitical’ denotes a stance of neutrality in relation
to rival political interests, as in the familiar case of charitable organizations,
‘unpolitical’ describes a posture of moral detachment (usually critical) from
politics as a form of social relationship.
2 Monday 16 September, 1918: ‘What do they [the Allies] want? To drive out
of us the experience of Goethe, Luther, Frederick the Great and Bismarck,
so that we can “adjust ourselves to democracy”’ (Mann 1983b: 5).
3 Sunday 5 October, 1918:
My own view is that the worldwide triumph of democratic civilization in
the political sphere is an accomplished fact, and that consequently, if
the German spirit is to be preserved, one must recommend the separation
of cultural and national life from politics, the complete detachment of
one from the other. The thrust of my [Reflections] is against the fusion
of the two realms, against the ‘politicization’ of Germany through the
absolute domination, in the cultural sphere as well, of the victorious
principle of democratic civilization.
(Mann, 1983b: 12)
|
|
20.9 Page 199 |
▲back to top |
176 NOTES
4 The English translation renders clerc as ‘clerk’ – an unhappy decision that
not only does nothing to reduce the idiomatic disturbance but also fosters
a spurious modern association with office and shop workers, and actually
banalizes the sense of Benda’s argument by introducing an ironic
terminological hesitation with no counterpart in his French. Here, in singular
usage, I simply copy Benda’s own term, which presents no greater difficulty
than any English substitute; the English collective noun clerisy perfectly
renders his plural, clercs.
5 For some discussion of Mannheim’s affinities with romantic medievalism,
see Michael Löwy (1979: 87), and also Mannheim (1953: 123).
6 Leavis’s Mass Civilization and Minority Culture was published by the
Cambridge-based Minority Press. The version cited here appeared in the
volume of essays For Continuity (Leavis 1933a). (The English translation of
La Rebelion de las Masas appeared in 1932.)
CHAPTER 2
1 Woolf’s essay, ‘Middlebrow’, which was composed in the form of a letter
‘To the editor of the New Statesman’, remained unpublished in her lifetime;
the posthumous collection of essays in which it appeared, The Death of
the Moth (Woolf 1942) gives no date, merely the editorial information that
the letter was not sent. However, Woolf alludes unmistakably, in the
continuous present, to Arnold Bennett’s reviews of her books in the London
Evening Standard in 1928– 9; and the New Statesman took over the Nation
and its title in early 1931. A date around 1930 seems plausible. (Her mocking
comment on the British Broadcasting Corporation’s ‘control of the air’ bears
comparison with her friend E.M. Forster’s public criticism of radio censorship
in 1931: ‘The Freedom of the BBC’, New Statesman and Nation I (6) (New
Series), 4 April 1931: pp. 209–10.
2 Compare in this regard her novel Orlando (1928).
3 Hélène Cixous insists on an identical discrimination within the notion of
bisexuality in writing:
In saying ‘bisexual, hence neuter’, I am referring to the classic conception
of bisexuality, which, squashed under the emblem of castration fear
and along with the fantasy of a ‘total’ being (though composed of two
halves), would do away with the difference experienced as an operation
incurring loss. ... To this self-effacing, merger- type bisexuality, ... I
oppose the other bisexuality ... that is, each one’s location in self
|
|
20.10 Page 200 |
▲back to top |
NOTES 177
(répérage de soi) of the presence – variously manifest and insistent
according to each person, male or female – of both sexes, non-exclusion
either of the difference or of one.
(Cixous 1981: 254)
4 In The Meaning of Culture, an ephemeral book published in the same year
(New York: Norton, 1929), the novelist John Cowper Powys exalted male–
female complementarity as the most fertile ground of culture. He also insisted
that every young woman in search of culture must have ‘a room entirely
her own’ (pp. 134, 249, 272).
5 See in this connection Raymond Williams, ‘The Bloomsbury Fraction’ (1980:
148–69).
6 The phrase ‘une promesse de bonheur’ is Stendhal’s (Marcuse [1937]
1972: 115).
CHAPTER 3
1 Bloomsbury was, for Eliot, a twentieth-century model of a traditional elite –
and perhaps the last of its kind. See his obituary of Virginia Woolf in
Horizon, May 1941, pp. 313–16.
CHAPTER 4
1 Universities and Left Review appeared in seven issues between Spring
1957 and Autumn 1959. The editors were Stuart Hall, Raphael Samuel,
Gabriel Pearson and Charles Taylor.
2 ULR vol. I, no. 2, Summer 1957, p. 29.
3 Beginning from work in adult education classes in 1949, Culture and Society
was written between 1952 and 1956.
4 Graham Martin’s Universities and Left Review article, ‘A Culture in Common’
(1958: 70–9), was the moment, if there was one, when Culture and Society
was canonized as a founding text for a New Left. The symbolic counterpoint
was Terry Eagleton, Criticism and Ideology, London: NLB, 1976, Chapter
1.
5 ‘Comment’, Politics and Letters vol. I, no. 1, Summer 1947, pp. 32–9.
6 ‘Editorial Note’, Arena I (4).
7 Politics and Letters: Interviews (p. 98). Graham Pechey (1985) has
emphasized the radically disruptive strategy of the book.
|
|
21 Pages 201-210 |
▲back to top |
|
|
21.1 Page 201 |
▲back to top |
178 NOTES
8 Indeed, ‘there are no masses to save, to capture, or to direct’ (Williams
1989: 18).
PART II
CHAPTER 1
1 This caveat should not be misconstrued as a case of ‘empiricism’. ‘[My]
experience of this English addiction to the concrete is that for the most part
they are stuck in it’, Williams wrote in 1961. ‘Experience includes thought,
and thought includes abstraction, and abstraction is in fact one of the
glories of the human mind’ (Williams 1989: 20) However, see also, in this
connection, Catherine Gallagher’s illuminating discussion of Williams’s
reading of money as a cultural form: ‘Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies’
(Gallagher 1995: 307– 19).
2 The Long Revolution ([1961] 1965: 63) differs only in substituting ‘study’
for ‘theory’; see further, ‘Literature and Sociology’ ([1971] 1980: 20), where
that variant formulation recurs.
CHAPTER 2
1 He later used it again, as the title of his 1971 Reith Lectures for the BBC:
Only Connect: On Culture and Communication (Hoggart 1972).
2 London: Hutchinson, 1964; and ‘Liberal Studies’, P. Whannel and P. Harcourt
(eds) Studies in the Teaching of Film Within Formal Education (London:
British Film Institute, 1964), pp. 10–27. See the interview ‘The Formation of
a Diasporic Intellectual’ (1996f: 498).
3 The landmark texts were the collective volume Resistance Through Rituals:
Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (Hall and Jefferson 1976) and Dick
Hebdige’s Subcultures: The Meaning of Style (1979).
4 The motif of a Marxism capable of discovering something new comes from
another Marxist philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre: ‘Marxism possesses
theoretical bases, it embraces all human activity; but it no longer knows
anything’ (Sartre 1963: 28).
|
|
21.2 Page 202 |
▲back to top |
NOTES 179
CHAPTER 3
1 I have modified the verbs for syntactic context.
2 A recent bibliography of Hall’s writings lists a further four versions of this
text (Hall 1973), plus one translation and a retrospective discussion of it
(Hall 1996: 505–14). Reference here is mainly to what is probably the most
widely circulated version (Hall 1980c: 128–38). Described as an ‘edited
extract’, this version, the third, differs from the original in modifying and
clarifying the discussion of semiotic concepts, especially ‘denotation’ and
‘connotation’, omitting punctual reference to Gramsci (though not his
concepts), incorporating elements of a later discussion of Marx, and
introducing a reference to Volo[scaron]inov (1973) Marxism and the
Philosophy of Language. It also omits a discussion of B-movie Westerns, in
which Hall argues that gunfight scenarios are not ‘about’ violence (a staple
official anxiety, then as now) but rather define and implement principles of
masculine decorum (1973: 5–10). None of these textual differences is at
stake in the present discussion.
3 Mythologies (Barthes 1972) appeared in 1957, Marxism and the Philosophy
of Language (Volo[scaron]inov 1973) in 1929.
4 John Kraniauskas (1998: 17) identifies the same conceptual slippage in the
Open University’s multi-volume course-book Culture, Media and Identities
(1997), in which Hall had a leading role: ‘the idea of “production” that forms
part of the circuit of culture is more like work. ... It is ... production without
relations of production’.
5 Indeed, futurist motifs were not foreign to Kulturkritik, as the case of Ortega
illustrates. ‘... the human being has inevitably a futuristic constitution; that is
to say, he lives primarily in the future and for the future’ (Ortega 1932:
131n).
CHAPTER 4
1 Cultural Studies 6, 1, January 1992.
2 Compare Homi Bhabha: ‘Culture only emerges as a problem, or a problematic,
at the point where there is a loss of meaning in the contestation and
articulation of everyday life, between classes, genders, races, nations’
(Bhabba 1994: 340).
3 Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques, ‘People Aid – A New Politics Sweeping the
Land’, Marxism Today, July 1985: pp. 10–14, cited in McGuigan 1992: 38.
4 Tony Bennett (1992: 34) has dismissed Hall’s perception as ‘wistful’: ‘to
|
|
21.3 Page 203 |
▲back to top |
180 NOTES
attribute such a function to an intellectual project which has [been] and
continues to be based primarily in the academy suggests a misrecognition
of its relations to its real conditions of existence that can only be described
as ideological.’ For other criticisms, in different political and theoretical
perspectives, see John Frow (1995) and Alan Sinfield (1997: 19–21).
PART III
1 The sub-title of this section borrows a phrase from Fredric Jameson (1993),
a review essay on Grossberg et al. (1992).
2 Compare her historical fantasy Orlando (1928), in which the androgynous
protagonist cannot forget the man s/he nearly met, who may have been
Shakespeare.
3 As Lukács wrote years later, these were the years in which he and Mann
parted spiritual company, Mann continuing in the romantic–pessimist tradition
that had formed them both (Lukács 1964: 10).
4 Indeed, that problem was Lukács’s own. Just a year earlier he had published
an essay on ‘The Old Culture and the New Culture’, which attempted to
synthesize a romantic critique of ‘civilization’ with his new-found belief in
the redemptive potential of social revolution.
5 See The Long Revolution (Williams [1961] 1965), Part One, and, quite
generally, Marxism and Literature (Williams 1997), where ideas akin to
those of Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (1971) are central.
6 Culture and Society (Williams [1958] 1961: 17).
7 For lucid, scholarly accounts of Freud’s ‘splitting of the ego’ and Melanie
Klein’s ‘splitting of the object’, see Laplanche and Pontalis (1988: 427–30).
8 For two dissenting judgements, see Ang (1992: 11–21) and O’Regan (1992:
395–408). Compare McGuigan (1996: 5), who distinguishes between
‘cultural politics’, to which he would refer Hall’s arguments over black
representation, and ‘the politics of culture’, which includes ‘policy analysis
and policy formulation’.
|
|
21.4 Page 204 |
▲back to top |
GLOSSARY
Authority designates any form of leadership asserted and accepted on non-
coercive grounds – in contrast with ‘power’, which is inherently coercive.
Base and superstructure has long been a standard shorthand reference
for the core thesis of Marx’s materialist conception of history, or historical
materialism. His claim was that economic relations play the fundamental part in
the making and remaking of social relations as a whole. They are ‘the real
foundation’ (he did nor say ‘base’) on which the ‘superstructures’ of politics
and culture arise.
Corporatism (from the Latin corpus, ‘body’) has designated social theories
that model society (or the good society) on the body, seeing it as a complex of
interdependent parts and functions, all making their necessary, mutually non-
exchangeable contributions to the health of the whole. It is accordingly anti-
individualist in temper (the notion of competition between parts of the body is
absurd) and also anti-socialist (the notion of a struggle between the hands
and the head is equally absurd – as are democracy and equality). In corporatist
social schemes, the main constituents of the social body were often named
‘corporations’. Hence the notion of a corporate or corporatist ethics of intellectual
life, in which intellectuals as such are called to a common vocation as spiritual
guides of society as a whole. The logic of corporatism is always, finally,
authoritarian. The familar corporations of the present (say, publishing houses
and universities), with their corporate missions and visions and values, seem
a world away from the corporatist schemes of the 1930s, but they are not.
Discourse is, most simply and generally, language in action. In its strong,
contemporary sense, of which my own usage is a variety, it asserts the
priority of socially formed practices of language over the individuals who
necessarily operate in and through them. A discourse is a more or less
systematic set of forms, topics and procedures that regulates both the object
of utterance – what is ‘seen’ and spoken of – and its subjects – the identities
that ‘we’ assume, consciously or not, in practising it.
Metaculture, or ‘metacultural discourse’, is the term in which I summarize a
critique of the intellectual traditions of ‘culture’ discussed here. Metacultural
discourse is that in which ‘culture’ addresses its own generality – that is, the
whole domain of meaning – and historical conditions of existence. Its fixed
impulse is to displace politics as a form of social authority in the name of true
and truly general authority, or ‘culture’.
|
|
21.5 Page 205 |
▲back to top |
182 GLOSSARY
Organic has been an inescapable metaphor in European culture since the
Romantics, usually connoting ‘life’, ‘the natural’, ‘spontaneous growth’,
‘wholeness’ and ‘authenticity’, in opposition to such (negative) values as
‘system’, ‘calculation’, ‘schematism’, ‘rational construction’ – all that is connoted
by the equally tenacious metaphor of the ‘mechanical’. This is its sense in the
writing of F.R. Leavis and Richard Hoggart, for example. However, the senses
of the metaphor that predominate in Part II of this volume are quite distinct.
‘Organic’ in Antonio Gramsci’s usage means something like ‘structurally or
constitutionally necessary’. Thus the ‘organic intellectuals’ of a social class
are those without which it could not sustain its distinctive form of life and
practice. They are of and for the class they represent, in contrast with
‘traditional intellectuals’ who appear to constitute an independent social
corporation (see above) in themselves. Likewise, the ‘organic’ aspects of a
historical situation are those which are permanent features of a given form of
society, in contrast with the ‘conjunctural’ aspects, which may be temporary,
or merely ‘accidental’.
Popular is a neutral or positive alternative to ‘mass’, which normally carries
the connotations of homogeneity, mediocrity and passivity in matters of cultural
preference. The relevant contraries are ‘high’ or ‘elite’ or, with a sharper
political edge, ‘dominant’.
Populism in the sense chiefly relevant here is the uncritical endorsement
and adoption of the spontaneous tendencies (actual or imagined) of popular
culture.
Subject in the only sense relevant here denotes the position of perceiving,
speaking/listening and acting that I occupy at any time, the ‘I’ that I am or
become, in a given context of discourse (see above). Discourse creates its
subjects in that it establishes positions for actual individuals in the social order
of meaning.
Symbol occurs in philosophy, linguistics, aesthetics, poetics and psychoanalysis
in many senses, some of them perfect opposites. Here symbolic is used in a
minimal, generic sense, as one word among others designating anything that
makes or bears meaning.
Voluntarism designates any theory or pattern of activity that, implicitly or in
effect, assumes the capacity of willed action to prevail against objective
conditions.
|
|
21.6 Page 206 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adorno, T.W. ([1955] 1981) Prisms: Cultural Criticism and Society, Cambridge,
Mass.: The MIT Press, 1981.
Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster, London: Allen Lane.
Anderson, P. (1976) Considerations on Western Marxism, London: NLB.
—— (1980) Arguments Within English Marxism, London: Verso.
Ang, I. (1992) ‘Dismantling “Cultural Studies”?’ Cultural Studies 6, January: pp.
311–21.
—— (1996) ‘Culture and Communication: Towards an Ethnographic Critique of
Media Consumption in the Transnational Media System’, in J. Storey (ed.)
What is Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Edward Arnold.
Arnold, M. ([1864] 1964) Essays in Criticism, London: Dent, 1964.
—— ([1869] 1932) Culture and Anarchy, J. Dover Wilson (ed.), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1932.
Bakhtin, M.M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, M. Holquist
(ed.), Austin: University of Texas Press.
Bantock, G.H. (1949) ‘Mr Eliot and Education’, Scrutiny XVI (1), March: pp. 64–
70.
Barker, M. and Beezer, A. (eds) (1991) Reading Into Cultural Studies, London:
Routledge.
Barnett, A. (1976) ‘Raymond Williams and Marxism: A Rejoinder to Terry
Eagleton’, New Left Review 99, September–October: pp. 47–64.
Barthes, R. ([1957] 1972) Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers, London: Jonathan
Cape, 1972.
Bee, J. (1989) ‘First Citizen of the Semiotic Democracy’, Cultural Studies 3: pp.
353–9.
Bell, C. (1928) Civilization: An Essay, London: Chatto and Windus.
Benda, J. ([1928] 1969) The Treason of the Intellectuals, trans. R. Aldington,
New York: W.W. Norton, 1969.
—— (1975) ‘Préface de Julien Benda à l’édition de 1946’, La Trahison des
clercs, Paris: Grasset.
Benjamin, W. ([1936] 1970) ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical
Reproduction’, in W. Benjamin Illuminations, London: Fontana, pp. 219–
53.
—— ([1940] 1970) ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in W. Benjamin
|
|
21.7 Page 207 |
▲back to top |
184 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Illuminations, London: Fontana, pp. 255–66.
—— (1970) Illuminations, London: Fontana.
Bennett, A. (1992) ‘Putting Policy Into Cultural Studies’, in L. Grossberg, C.
Nelson and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York and London:
Routledge.
—— (1993) ‘Useful Culture’, in V. Blundell, J. Shepherd and I. Taylor (eds)
Relocating Cultural Studies, London and New York: Routledge.
Bhabha, H.K. (1994) The Location of Culture, London: Routledge.
Birch, D. (1987) ‘Publishing Populism’, Cultural Studies 1 (1), January: pp.
127– 35.
Blundell, V., Shepherd, J. and Taylor, I. (eds) (1993) Relocating Cultural Studies,
London and New York: Routledge.
Bourdieu, P. (1993) The Field of Cultural Production, ed. and Introduction, R.
Johnson, Oxford: Polity.
Bradbury, M. (1956) ‘The Rise of the Provincials’, Antioch Review XVI (4): pp.
469–77.
Brunsden, C. (1996) ‘A Thief in the Night: Stories of Feminism in the 1970s at
CCCS’, in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues
in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 276–86.
Carey, J.W. (1997) ‘Reflections on the Project of (American) Cultural Studies’,
in M. Ferguson and P. Golding Cultural Studies in Question, London:
Sage, pp. 1–25.
Caudwell, C. (1937) Illusion and Reality, London: Macmillan.
—— ([1938 and 1949] 1971) Studies and Further Studies in a Dying Culture,
New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1978) On Ideology, London:
Hutchinson.
—— (1982) The Empire Strikes Back, London: Hutchinson.
Chambers, I. (1986) Popular Culture: The Metropolitan Experience, London:
Methuen.
Cixous, H. (1981) ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, in E. Marks and I. de Courtivron
(eds) New French Feminisms, Brighton: Harvester.
Cormican, L.A. (1950) ‘Mr Eliot and Social Biology’, Scrutiny XVII (1), Spring: pp.
2–13.
Craik, J. (1987) ‘The Road to Cultural Studies’, Cultural Studies 1 (1), January:
pp. 121–6.
de Certeau, M. (1980) La culture au pluriel, Paris: Christian Bourgois Editeur.
|
|
21.8 Page 208 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY 185
Eagleton, T. (1976) Criticism and Ideology, London: NLB.
Eliot, T.S. (1943) ‘Notes Towards a Definition of Culture’, New English Weekly
XXII (14–17), 21 January–11 February: pp. 117–18, 128–30, 136–7, 145–
6, respectively.
—— ([1948] 1962) Notes Towards the Definition of Culture, London: Faber
and Faber, 1962.
Febvre, L. (1973) A New Kind of History, P. Burke (ed.), London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul.
Ferguson, M. and Golding, P. (eds) (1997) Cultural Studies in Question,
London: Sage.
Fiske, J. (1987) Television Culture, London: Methuen.
—— (1996) ‘British Cultural Studies and Television’, in J. Storey (ed.) What is
Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Edward Arnold, pp. 115–46.
Freud, S. ([1927] 1985) The Future of an Illusion, in Civilization, Society and
Religion, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 12, London: Penguin, 1985.
—— ([1930] 1985) Civilization and Its Discontents, in Civilization, Society
and Religion, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 12, London: Penguin,
1985.
—— (1985) Civilization, Society and Religion, The Pelican Freud Library,
Volume 12, London: Penguin.
Freud, S. and Einstein, A. ([1932] 1985) Why War?, in Civilization, Society
and Religion, The Pelican Freud Library, Volume 12, London: Penguin,
1985.
Frow, J. (1995) Cultural Studies and Cultural Value, Oxford: Clarendon.
Frow, J. and Morris, M. (1993) ‘Australian Cultural Studies’, in V. Blundell, J.
Shepherd and I. Taylor (eds) Relocating Cultural Studies, London and
New York: Routledge, pp. 344–67.
Gallagher, C. (1995) ‘Raymond Williams and Cultural Studies’, in C. Prendergast
(ed.) Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams, Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, pp. 307–19.
Garnham, N. (1997) ‘Political Economy and the Practice of Cultural Studies’, in
M. Ferguson and P. Golding (eds) Cultural Studies in Question, London:
Sage, pp. 56–73.
Gilroy, P. (1988) ‘There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics
of Race and Nation, London: Hutchinson.
—— (1992) ‘Cultural Studies and Ethnic Absolutism’, in L. Grossberg, C. Nelson
and P. Treichler (eds) Cultural Studies, New York and London: Routledge,
|
|
21.9 Page 209 |
▲back to top |
186 BIBLIOGRAPHY
pp. 187–98.
Gitlin, T. (1997) ‘The Anti-political Populism of Cultural Studies’, in M. Ferguson
and P. Golding (eds) Cultural Studies in Question, London: Sage.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections From the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans., Q.
Hoare and G. Nowell-Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
—— (1985) Selections From Cultural Writings ed. David Forgács and G.
Nowell- Smith, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies, New
York and London: Routledge.
Hall, S. (1958) ‘A Sense of Classlessness’, Universities and Left Review 1 (5),
Autumn: pp. 26–32.
—— (1973) Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse, Birmingham:
CCCS stencilled Occasional Paper.
—— (1980a) ‘Cultural Studies and the Centre: Some Problematics and Problems’,
in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P. Willis (eds) Culture, Media Language:
Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79, London: Routledge, 1992,
pp. 15–47.
—— (1980b) ‘Cultural Studies: Two Paradigms’, Media, Culture and Society,
no. 2, 1980: pp. 57–72.
—— (1980c) ‘Encoding and Decoding’, in S. Hall, D. Hobson, A. Lowe and P.
Willis, Culture, Media Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies
1972–79, London: Routledge, [1980] 1992, pp. 128–38.
—— (1989) ‘The Meaning of New Times’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques (eds)
(1989) New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
—— (1990) ‘The Emergence of Cultural Studies and the Crisis of the Humanities’,
October 53: pp. 11–23.
—— (1996a) ‘The Problem of Ideology: Marxism Without Guarantees’ [1983],
in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 25–46.
—— (1996b) ‘On Postmodernism and Articulation’ [1986] in D. Morley and K.-
H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London:
Routledge, pp. 131–50.
—— (1996c) ‘Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity’ [1986],
in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in
Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 411–40.
—— (1996d) ‘New Ethnicities’ [1989], in D. Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart
|
|
21.10 Page 210 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY 187
Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London: Routledge, pp.
441–9.
—— (1996e) ‘Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies’ [1992], in D. Morley
and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
London: Routledge, pp. 262–75.
—— (1996f) ‘The Formation of a Diasporic Intellectual’ [1992] in D. Morley and
K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
London: Routledge, pp. 484–503.
—— (1996g) ‘What Is This “Black” in Black Popular Culture?’ [1992], in D.
Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 465–75.
—— (1996h) ‘For Allon White: Metaphors of Transformation’ [1993], in D.
Morley and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural
Studies, London: Routledge, pp. 287–305.
—— (1997) ‘Culture and Power’ (interview), Radical Philosophy 86,
November– December: pp. 24–41.
Hall, S. and Jacques, M. (eds) (1983) The Politics of Thatcherism, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
—— (1989) New Times: the Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Hall, S. and Jefferson, A. (1976) Resistance Through Rituals: Youth
Subcultures in Postwar Britain, London: Hutchinson.
Hall, S., Hobson, D. Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (1980) Culture, Media Language:
Working Papers in Cultural Studies 1972–79, London: Hutchinson;
London: Routledge ( 1992).
Hebdige, R. (1979) Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, London: Methuen.
—— (1988) ‘Banalarama’, New Statesman and Society, 9 December.
Heinemann, M. (1985) ‘The People’s Front and the Intellectuals’, in J. Fyrth (ed.)
Britain, Fascism and the Popular Front, London: Lawrence and Wishart,
pp. 157– 86.
Herder, J.G. von ([1774] 1969) Herder on Social and Political Culture, ed. and
trans. F.M. Barnard, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969.
Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–
1991, London: Michael Joseph.
Hoggart, R. (1958) The Uses of Literacy, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— (1970a) Speaking to Each Other, I: About Society, London: Chatto and
Windus.
|
|
22 Pages 211-220 |
▲back to top |
|
|
22.1 Page 211 |
▲back to top |
188 BIBLIOGRAPHY
—— (1970b) Speaking to Each Other, II: About Literature, London: Chatto
and Windus.
—— (1972) Only Connect: On Culture and Communication, London: Chatto
and Windus.
—— (1990) A Sort of Clowning. Life and Times vol. II: 1940–1959, London:
Chatto and Windus.
—— (1992) An Imagined Life. Life and Times vol. III: 1959–91, London:
Chatto and Windus.
Jameson, F. (1993) ‘On “Cultural Studies” ’, Social Text 34: pp. 17–52.
Johnson, R. (1996) ‘What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?’ in J. Storey (ed.) What
Is Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Edward Arnold.
Jordan, G. and Weedon, C. (1995) Cultural Politics, Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
Kojeck[yacute], R. (1971) T.S. Eliot’s Social Criticism, London: Faber and
Faber.
Kraniauskas, J. (1998) ‘Globalization Is Ordinary: The Transnationalization of
Cultural Studies’, Radical Philosophy 90, July–August.
Kraus, K. (1984) In These Great Times: A Karl Kraus Reader, ed. H. Zohn,
Manchester: Carcanet.
Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1988) The Language of Psychoanalysis,
trans. D. Nicholson-Smith, London: Karnac Books and the Institute of
Psychoanalysis.
Leavis, F.R (1930) Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, Cambridge: Minority
Press; reprinted in Leavis, F.R. (1933a).
—— (1933a) For Continuity, Cambridge: Minority Press.
—— (1933b) ‘Restatement for Critics’, Scrutiny I (4), March: 315–23.
Lefranc, G. (1965) Histoire du Front populaire, Paris: Payot.
Leroy, G. and Roche, A. (1986) Les écrivains et le Front populaire, Paris:
Presse de la Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques.
Lewis, G. I. (1957) ‘Candy-flossing the Celtic Fringe’, Universities and Left
Review 2 (1), Summer.
Lloyd, D. and Thomas, P. (1998) Culture and the State, New York and London:
Routledge.
Lottmann, H.R. (1982) The Left Bank: Writers, Artists and Politics From the
Popular Front to the Cold War, London: Heinemann.
Löwy, M. (1979) Georg Lukács – From Romanticism to Bolshevism, London:
NLB.
Lukács, G. (1964) Essays on Thomas Mann, London: Merlin Press.
|
|
22.2 Page 212 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY 189
—— (1971) History and Class Consciousness, London: Merlin Press.
McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London and New York: Routledge.
—— (1996) Culture and the Public Sphere, London: Routledge.
McLeish, J. (1957) ‘Variant Readings’, Universities and Left Review 1 (2),
Summer.
MacKillop, I. (1995) F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism, London: Penguin.
McRobbie, A. (1996) ‘Looking Back at New Times and Its Critics’, in D. Morley
and K.-H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies,
London: Routledge, pp. 238–61.
Mann, T. ([1918] 1983a) Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, trans. W.D. Morris,
New York: Frederick Unger, 1983.
—— (1983b) Diaries 1918–1939, trans. R. Winston and C. Winston, London:
André Deutsch, 1983.
Mannheim, K. (1936) Ideology and Utopia, trans. L. Wirth and E. Shils, London:
Routledge and Kegan Paul.
—— (1940) Man and Society in an Age of Reconstruction, London: Kegan
Paul, Trench, Trubner.
—— (1953) ‘Conservative Thought’, Essays in Sociology and Social
Psychology, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Marcuse, H. ([1937] 1972) ‘The Affirmative Character of Culture’, Negations,
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, pp. 88–133.
Marks, E. and de Courtivron, I. (eds) (1981) New French Feminisms, Brighton:
Harvester.
Martin, G. (1958) ‘A Culture in Common’, Universities and Left Review 1 (5),
Autumn: pp. 70–9.
Marx, K. ([1859] 1970) ‘Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy’ (1859) Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works,
London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1970, pp. 180–4.
—— (1973) Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy
(Rough Draft) trans. M. Nicolaus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
—— ([1869] 1976) Capital, Volume 1, London: Penguin, 1976.
Mellor, A. (1992) ‘Discipline and Punish? Cultural Studies in Britain at the
Crossroads’, Media, Culture and Society 14 (4), October: pp. 663–70.
Mencken, H.L. ([1919] 1936) The American Language: An Inquiry into the
Development of English in the United States, New York: Knopf, 1919;
4th edn 1936; supplements 1945, 1948.
Modlewski, T. (ed.) (1986) Studies in Entertainment: Critical Approaches to
|
|
22.3 Page 213 |
▲back to top |
190 BIBLIOGRAPHY
Mass Culture, Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press.
Moriarty, M. (1995) ‘ “The Longest Cultural Journey”: Raymond Williams and
French Theory’, in C. Prendergast (ed.) Cultural Materialism: On Raymond
Williams, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 91–116.
Morley, D. (1997) ‘Theoretical Orthodoxies: Textualism, Constructivism and the
“Ethnography” in Cultural Studies’, in M. Ferguson and P. Golding (eds)
Cultural Studies in Question, London: Sage, pp. 121–38.
Morpurgo, W.E. (1979) Allen Lane, King Penguin: A Biography, London: Allen
Lane.
Morris, M. ([1988] 1996) ‘Banality in Cultural Studies’, in J. Storey (ed.) What
Is Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Edward Arnold, 1996, pp. 147–
67.
Mulhern, F. (1979) The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, London: NLB.
—— ([1990] 1998) ‘English Reading’, in The Present Lasts a Long Time:
Essays in Cultural Politics, Cork: Cork University Press and Notre Dame:
University of Notre Dame Press, 1998.
New Left Review (1977) Western Marxism – A Critical Reader, London:
NLB.
O’Regan, T. (1992) ‘(Mis)Taking Policy: Notes on the Cultural Policy Debate’,
Cultural Studies 6 (3), October: pp. 395–408.
Ortega y Gasset, J. (1932) The Revolt of the Masses, London: Allen and
Unwin.
Orwell, G. (1961) Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 1, London:
Secker and Warburg.
—— (1970a) Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— (1970b) Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 3,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— (1970c) Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 4,
Harmondsworth: Penguin.
—— ([1936] 1970d) The Road to Wigan Pier, London: Penguin, 1970.
O’Shea, A. and Schwartz, B. (1987) ‘Reconsidering Popular Culture’, Screen
28 (3), Summer.
Pechey, G. (1985) ‘Scrutiny, English Marxism, and the Work of Raymond Williams’,
Literature and History 11 (1), Spring: pp. 65–76.
Pocock, D.F. (1950) ‘Symposium on Mr Eliot’s Notes (III)’, Scrutiny XVII (3),
Autumn: pp. 273–6.
|
|
22.4 Page 214 |
▲back to top |
BIBLIOGRAPHY 191
Powys, J.C. (1929) The Meaning of Culture, New York: Norton.
Prendergast, C. (ed.) (1995) Cultural Materialism: On Raymond Williams,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Preston, P. (1987) ‘The Creation of the Popular Front in Spain’, in H. Graham
and P. Preston (eds) The Popular Front in Europe, London: Macmillan
Press.
Rustin, M. (1989) ‘The Trouble With New Times’, in S. Hall and M. Jacques
(eds) New Times: The Changing Face of Politics in the 1990s, London:
Lawrence and Wishart.
Samuel, R. (1994) Theatres of Memory Vol. 1: Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture, London: Verso.
Sartre, J.-P. (1963) The Problem of Method, trans. H.E. Barnes, London:
Methuen.
Schwartz, B. (1989) ‘Popular Culture: The Long March’, Cultural Studies 3 (2),
May: pp. 250–5.
Shiach, M. (1989) Discourse on Popular Culture: Class, Gender and History
in Cultural Analysis 1730 to the Present Day, Cambridge: Polity.
Sinfield, A. (1997) Culture and Authority, São Paulo, Working Papers in British
Studies, 3.
Spender, S. (1953) ‘Comment: On Literary Movements’, Encounter 1 (2): pp.
66– 8.
Steele, T. (1997) The Emergence of Cultural Studies 1945–65: Cultural Politics,
Adult Education and the English Question, London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Storey, J. (1996) What Is Cultural Studies? A Reader, London: Edward Arnold.
Stratton, J. and Ang, I. (1996) ‘On the impossibility of a Global Cultural Studies:
“British” Cultural Studies in an “international Frame” ’, in D. Morley and K.-
H. Chen (eds) Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies, London:
Routledge, pp. 361–91.
Thompson, E.P. (1961) ‘The Long Revolution’ and ‘The Long Revolution – II’,
New Left Review 9 and 10, May–June and July–August: pp. 24–33 and
34–9, respectively.
Trilling, L. (1939) Matthew Arnold, New York: Norton.
Valéry, P. (1948) Monsieur Teste, trans. J. Mathews, New York: Knopf.
—— (1963) History and Politics, ed. J. Mathews, London: Routledge and
Kegan Paul.
Volosinov, V.N. ([1929] 1973) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New
|
|
22.5 Page 215 |
▲back to top |
192 BIBLIOGRAPHY
York: Seminar Press, 1973.
White, L.A. (1975) The Concept of Cultural Systems, New York and London:
Columbia University Press.
Williams, R. (1957) ‘Working Class Culture’, Universities and Left Review 2 (1),
Summer: pp. 31–2.
—— ([1958] 1961) Culture and Society 1780–1950, Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1961.
—— ([1961] 1965) The Long Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.
—— (1977) Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (1979) Politics and Letters: Interviews With New Left Review, London:
NLB.
—— (1980) Problems in Materialism and Culture, London: Verso.
—— (1981) Culture, London: Fontana.
—— (1983) Towards 2000, London: Chatto and Windus.
—— (1989) Resources of Hope: Culture, Democracy, Socialism, edited by R.
Gable, London: Verso.
Williams, R. and Hoggart, R. (1960) ‘Working-class Attitudes’ (a conversation),
New Left Review 1, January–February: pp. 26–30.
Williamson, J. (1986) ‘The Problems of Being Popular’, New Socialist 41,
September: pp. 14–15.
Woolf, V. ([1929] 1977) A Room of One’s Own, London: Grafton.
—— (1942) The Death of the Moth, London, Hogarth Press.
—— (1967) Collected Essays, vol. 4, London: Hogarth Press.
Women’s Studies Group, CCCS (1978) Women Take Issue: Aspects of
Women’s Subordination, London: Hutchinson.
Wright, P. (1985) On Living in an Old Country: The National Past in
Contemporary Britain, London: Verso.
|
|
22.6 Page 216 |
▲back to top |
INDEX
A Room of One’s Own (Woolf) 30–3
Adorno, T.W. 26, 174
agricultural economy 16
Agrupación al Servício de la
República 23
Althusser, L. 103, 110, 125
Anderson, P. 100, 135
androgyny 32, 34–5, 43, 162
Ang, I. 133, 134, 137, 140
anthropology xvii–xviii
anti-fascism 46–8
Arena 68
Arnold, M. xvi, 27–8, 34–5, 50, 54,
166
art 79–80;
and reality 80
Arts Council 50
Association of Revolutionary
Writers and Artists 46
‘aura’, of works of art 46
Austen, J. 34
The Australian Journal of Cultural
Studies 133–4
authority xix, 21, 79, 130, 151, 156,
164–6, 181
banality 139, 141, 144–5, 147
Bantock, G.H. 54
Barker, M. 134, 141, 148
Barnett, A. 65
Barthes, R. 102, 112
base-superstructure paradigm 85–
9, 103, 104, 108, 124–5, 126,
164, 181
BBC 51, 101
Bee, J. 140
Beezer, A. 134, 141, 148
Bell, C. 28–9, 34
Bell, V. 28
Benda, J. xx, 4, 11, 13, 19, 20, 21,
47, 77, 156, 161, 169;
anti-fascism of 46;
intellectuals (clercs) of 7–9, 12,
167–8
Benjamin, W. 45–6, 47, 142
Bennett, A. 176
Bennett, T. 179–80n
Bhabha, H.K. 179n
Birch, D. 135
bisexuality in writing 176–7n
black cultural engagement 120, 172
black identity 120, 121, 123–4
Bloomsbury Group 28–9, 50
Bourdieu, P. xiii
Bradbury, M. 51
Brontë, C. 33
Brunsden, C. 104
Cambodia 100
capitalism xiv, 3, 17, 19, 43–4, 89,
92, 114, 163–4, 165
Carey, J.W. xviii, 133, 136
Carlyle, T. 67
Caudwell, C. 43–4, 45, 46, 47, 85
Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies (CCCS) 93, 98–106
Chambers, I. 138, 142–4, 145, 147,
149–50, 162
Christian Council on Faith and the
Common Life 23, 52
cinema 45–6
Civilization and Its Discontents
(Freud) 25, 26–7, 30
civilization-culture dualism xv–xvi,
4, 5, 16, 20, 25–9, 77, 170
Cixous, H. 176–7n
class 15, 40, 91, 121, 122, 125,
127, 129
|
|
22.7 Page 217 |
▲back to top |
194 INDEX
class consciousness 10
class interests 11, 104
class privilege 53
class struggle 19, 29, 104
classlessness 55
clercs (intellectuals) 7–9, 12, 20,
167
Coleridge, S.T. 34, 67, 90
Comité de Vigilance des
Intellectuels Anti-fascistes 46
communication 81, 82, 111–13
communism 3, 17, 27, 46, 66
Communist Party 62, 64, 67, 68, 83,
100, 146
community 15
conjuncture 103, 125, 128–9
connotation 112–13
consumption 157
contingency 128, 129
Cormican, L.A. 54
corporatism 181
Council for the Encouragement of
Music and the Arts 49–50
Craik, J. 135
creativity 79–83, 90–1
The Critic 65
cultural materialism 83–90
cultural politics 169–74
cultural principle xvi, xvii, 22, 44
Cultural Studies xv, xviii–xx, 77–
151, 155–60, 161, 162–3, 167–8,
169–70, 174
Cultural Studies (journal) 134, 140
culturalism 108–11, 114, 115
culture industry 139, 166
Culture and Society (Williams) xvi,
65–9, 83, 108, 160, 166
culture-civilization dualism xv–xvi,
4, 5, 16, 20, 25–9, 77, 170
de Certeau, M. 140
democracy 5–6, 9, 73
determinism, economic 126, 164
diaspora 121
Dickens, C. 36
discourse xiv, 181
dominant culture 85–6
Dreyfus Affair 7, 8
Eagleton, T. 82
economic determinancy/
determinism 126, 164
economic relations 163–5;
base-superstructure formula of
85–9, 103, 104, 108, 124–5, 126,
164, 181; see also capitalism;
Marxism
education 6, 10, 17, 23, 24, 49, 51,
101
Einstein, A. 23
Eliot, T.S. xvii, xx, 24, 51–4, 55, 65,
79, 143, 161, 162
elitism 53
emergent culture 85
encoding and decoding 111–14
Englishness 136
ethnicity xx, 104, 119–24, 172
ethnographic studies 101, 102
existentialism 129
expressivism 129
fans 143
fascism 3;
anti-fascism 46–8
Febvre, L. xv
feminism 104, 127, 134, 142
Ferguson, M. 132
Fiske, J. 140–1, 157
football fans 143
Fordism 119
Forster, E.M. 28, 35, 47, 95
Foucault, M. 115
France 4–5, 6
Freud, S. xiv, xx, 23, 25–8, 30, 42,
43
Frow, J. xviii, 133
Fyvel, T.R. 56
|
|
22.8 Page 218 |
▲back to top |
INDEX 195
Garnham, N. 132
gender 28–35, 104, 121, 122, 132
Germany 4–5, 6–7
Gide, A. 47
Gilroy, P. 104, 123, 136
Gitlin, T. 150, 158–60
globalization 133, 137
Golding, P. 132
Gramsci, A. 103, 104, 105, 106,
125, 128, 138, 147, 148, 171,
182
Grossberg, L. 134, 149, 150
Hall, S. xviii, xx, 62, 98–131, 134,
135, 138, 139, 141, 144, 145–7,
148, 150, 162, 164, 172, 173,
174
Hebdige, R. 144–5, 147, 162
Heinemann, M. 48
Herder, J.G. von xvi–xvii, 174
‘highbrow’ 29, 30
Hill, C. 67
historical materialism 84–5, 89, 163,
181
Hobsbawm, E. 3
Hoggart, R. xx, 56–60, 64, 93–8,
99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 107, 108,
136, 139, 182;
on popular culture 56–9, 78, 96–7;
The Uses of Literacy 56–9, 62–3,
68, 78, 94
Howards End (Forster) 35, 95
humanity xvi–xvii
Huxley, A. 47
dentity 119–24, 170; black 120, 121,
123–4; national-racial 4, 136
deology 104, 126, 163, 171; culture
as 109
ndustrialism xiv, 16, 17, 20
nstitutionalization 133
ntellectuals 20, 166–7; of Benda 7–
9, 12, 167; of Mannheim 9–12;
organic 105–6, 145–8, 168, 182;
traditional 105, 147, 148
nterests, class 11
International Congresses for the
Defence of Culture 47
rony 6, 145
Jacques, M. 114, 346
Jameson, F. 134
Jane Eyre (Brontë) 33
Jefferson, A. 138
Johnson, R. 133, 148–9, 151
Jordan, G. 172–3
Keynes, J.M. 28, 50
Khrushchev, N. 61–2
Kipling, R. 39
Kojeck , R. 52
Kraniauskas, J. 179n
Kraus, K. 40
Kulturkritik xix, xv–xvii, xx, 3–73,
77, 78, 95, 105, 132, 137, 151,
155, 161–2, 166, 167, 168, 169–
70, 174
Laclau, E. 126
language 16, 18;
of Orwell 40–2
Lawrence, D.H. 43, 143
League of Nations, Committee on
Intellectual Cooperation 22
Leavis, F.R. xx, 4, 19–20, 21, 34–5,
43, 82, 90, 95, 156, 161, 182;
on crisis of ‘minority culture’ 15–18,
79, 94, 119;
‘movement in education’ 23, 24;
Scrutiny group 23, 40–1, 50, 51, 54,
78, 98, 151
Leavis, Q.D. 56, 95
Lefranc, G. 46
Leroy, G. 47
levelling down 16, 119, 168
Lévi-Strauss, C. 102
|
|
22.9 Page 219 |
▲back to top |
196 INDEX
Lewis, G.I. 63
The Lion and the Unicorn (Orwell)
38
iterary criticism 17, 18, 94, 96, 102
iterature 18, 93–7
The Long Revolution (Williams) 69,
79–83, 86–8, 89, 90, 91–2, 108,
109
Lottmann, H.R. 47
lowbrow’ 29, 30
Lukács, G. 163–5 168, 171
Lyotard, J.-F. 115
McGuigan, J. 132, 138, 139–41,
149, 157–8, 159
Machiavelli, N. 9
MacKillop, I. 18
McLeish, J. 63, 83
McRobbie, A. 140, 149, 150
Mairet, P. 52
The Making of the English Working
Class (Thompson) 108–9
Mann, H. 6, 47
Mann, T. xx, 4–7, 8, 10, 12, 13, 19,
20, 21, 22, 25, 43, 47, 77, 145,
156, 161, 163, 175n
Mannheim, K. xx, 4, 9–12, 13, 19,
20, 21, 23, 53, 161, 168
Marcuse, H. 44–5, 46, 47, 166, 169,
171
Marx, K. 84–5, 163, 165, 167
Marxism xx, 42–6, 66, 67, 83–92,
99, 100, 103–4, 107–8, 109,
124–31, 134, 135, 142, 162, 163
Marxism Today 114
mass civilization xx, 3–21, 156
materialism: cultural 83–90;
historical 84–5, 89, 163, 181
meanings 102–3, 111–13; ‘common’
82; dominant or preferred 112,
113; negotiated or corporate 113;
oppositional 113
mechanical reproduction 46
media analysis xx, 110, 111–14
media industry 157; see also
television
Mellor, A. 133
Mencken, H.L. 40
metaculture xiii–xiv, xx–xxi, 148–51,
155–74, 181–2
‘middlebrow’ 29, 30
‘minority culture’, crisis of 15–18,
79, 94, 119
modernity xiv, 3–21, 77
Modlewski, T. 135, 140
the Moot 23, 24, 52
Moriarty, M. 88
Morley, D. 132, 140, 149, 150
Morpurgo, W.E. 50
Morris, M. xviii, 133, 135, 138, 140,
141–2
Morris, W. 66, 67
Mulhern, F. 18, 20, 23
the nation 135–6, 137
national identity 4, 136
nationalism xvii, 7, 136, 137
Nelson, C. 134
the new, valorization of 117–18,
161–2, 168
New Labour 146
New Left 62, 107, 135, 136, 148–9,
150, 157
New Left Review 99, 100
The New Reasoner 62
New Times 114–19, 146, 151, 162
news broadcasting 101
Nietzsche, F. 6
oppression, of women 31–2, 104
organic/organicism 105–6, 145–8,
167, 182
Ortega y Gasset, J. xx, 4, 12–15,
19, 20, 21, 23–4, 95, 131, 161,
179n
Orwell, G. xx, 35–42, 43, 58, 95,
96, 117, 119, 161, 162
Osborne, J. 61
O’Shea, A. 135
|
|
22.10 Page 220 |
▲back to top |
INDEX 197
overdetermination 103, 125
Paris 1968 100
paternalism 72–3
patriarchy 31
Plato 9, 80
pluralism 73
Pocock, D.F. 54
politics xix–xx, 5, 8, 9, 156, 159,
165; cultural 169–74; and
identity 123–4; of metaculture
148–51
Politics and Letters (journal) 65,
67
Pontalis, J.-B. 180
popular culture 78, 104–5, 132–51,
157–8, 169, 170; Eliot on 55; Hall
on 122–3, 129–30; Hoggart on
56–9, 78, 96–7; Orwell on 36–40,
42
Popular Frontism 46–7, 48, 67
populism xx, 92, 134–41, 157–8,
169, 182
post-Fordism 114, 115–16
power xix, xviii, 109, 148, 173
Powys, J.C. 177n
Preston, P. 23
psychoanalysis 25, 26, 42, 144
publicity industry 18, 157
race 121, 122, 132
racial identity 4
racism 104, 120
Radway, J. 134
Reith, Lord 50–1
Renaissance tradition 80
representation, politics of 120, 133
repression 26
reproduction, mechanical 46
residual culture 85
The Road to Wigan Pier (Orwell)
38, 58
Roche, A. 47
romanticism 7, 19, 66, 80, 94
Ruskin, J. 67
Rustin, M. 146
Samuel, R. 136, 172
Sartre, J.-P. 129, 178n
Saussure, F. de 102
Saville, J. 62
Schwartz, W. 135, 137
Scrutiny group 23, 40–1, 50, 51,
54, 78, 98, 151, 168
sexuality 121, 122; see also
bisexuality
Shakespeare, W. 34, 40–1
Shiach, M. 138
signification 171; structures of 111–
14; theory of 102–3
social class see class
socialism 17, 27, 39, 92, 165
socialist humanism 62
Spender, S. 51
sport culture 143
Stalin, J. 61–2
standardization 16, 18, 119, 168
Storey, J. 139, 140
Stratton, J. 133, 134, 137
structuralism 102–3, 107, 110
student radicalism 100
sub-cultures, youth 101
subjectivity 114–19, 170
sublimation 26
Suez crisis 61
Surrealists 43
technology 20, 45–6
television 101, 111, 140, 157
temporality 159–63
Thatcherism 146
Thompson, E.P. 62, 67, 72, 82,
107, 108–9, 136
tradition 4, 6, 15, 17, 20, 45, 118
Treichler, P. 134
|
|
23 Pages 221-230 |
▲back to top |
|
|
23.1 Page 221 |
▲back to top |
198 INDEX
universalism 7, 19
Universities and Left Review (ULR)
62
The Uses of Literacy (Hoggart) 56–
9, 62–3, 68, 78, 94
utopianism 92
Valéry, P. 22, 23, 166–7
Vietnam 100
violence, in political practice 163,
171
Volo[scaron]inov, V.N. 112
voluntarism 129, 131, 182
White, L.A. xvii, 79
Williams, R. xvi, xx, 63–73, 79–92,
93, 104, 107, 124, 135, 136,
139, 164; Culture and Society
xvi, 65–9, 83, 108, 160, 166;
The Long Revolution 69, 79–83,
86–8, 89, 90, 91–2, 108, 109
Williamson, J. 135, 138
Willis, P. 102
Wilson, C. 61
women, oppression of 31–2, 104
Woolf, V. xx, 28–35, 42–3, 161–2
Wright, P. 172
wars of liberation 100
Weedon, C. 172–3
welfare policy 49
Whannel, P. 99
youth sub-cultures 101
Zola, E. 8