Cultural Studies

as Critical Theory
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 Cultural Studies
as Critical Theory

Ben Agger

I~ ~~o~~~;n~~~up
LONDON AND NEW YORK
First published 1992 by The Falmer Press

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© 1992 Ben Agger

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 Contents

Acknowledgments VB

1 What is Cultural Studies? 1

2 Popular Culture as Serious Business 24
3 Marxist Theories of Culture 41
4 The Frankfurt School's Aesthetic Politics 57
5 The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies 75
6 Poststructuralism and Postmodernism on Culture 93
7 Feminist Cultural Studies 114
8 Needs, Values and Cultural Criticism 133
9 Deprogramming the Cult of Cultural Studies 153
10 Cultural Studies as Everyday Life in the Society of the Spectacle 176
Bibliography 197
Index 210

v
For Sarah Rose Agger-Shelton
(born August 3, 1991)
 Acknowledgments

I am indebted to a number of people for their assistance with this project. Doug
Kellner and Tim Luke read the whole manuscript. Their own work has helped
me better understand the possibilities of cultural studies. Ray Morrow shared
some of his work on cultural studies, informing this project with his sense of the
priorities for an applied critical theory. John O'Neill's work, from which I have
learned a great deal, is an important contribution to cultural studies avant la leure.
Jacinta Evans and Ivor Goodson at Falmer helped immensely with this
project, as they always do. Margaret Christie did a great job of copyediting. Kate
Hausbeck, a graduate student in Sociology at SUNY-Buffalo, did timely leg-
work and careful checking on this project. She also helped me prepare the special
issue of Current Perspectives in Social Theory on cultural studies - an activity that
paralleled and informed the writing of this book.
Beth Anne Shelton offered her support of this project, both as colleague and
partner. She patiently indulged me when I read the best parts of this manuscript
aloud to her! Our ongoing discussions and writing about the Marxism/feminism
relationship are an important anchor of my version of critical theory.

Ben Agger
Buffalo, NY
July 24, 1991

vii
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 Chapter 1

What is Cultural Studies?

American and British university campuses are alive with new forms of interdiscip-
linary research. Although these activities are diverse and have multiple foci,
they can broadly be grouped under the general heading of cultural studies. A recent
Chronicle of Higher Education article (,Cultural Studies: Eclectic and Controversial
Mix of Research Sparks a New Movement', January 31, 1990) trumpets this
increasingly high-profile interdisciplinary project, depicting it as an important
trend in scholarship that will probably leave its mark for many years to come. A
later article in the Chronicle (,Protest at Cultural-Studies Meeting Sparked by
Debate over New Field', May 2, 1990) reports heated controversies aired at a
major cultural studies conference. Whether carried out in English departments or
sociology departments, cultural studies challenges traditional assumptions of
disciplinary scholars who plow the fields of cultural research in relative isolation
from one another. This book is about cultural studies, both describing its mul-
tiple valences and arguing for a version of it that fits a certain intellectual and
political agenda.
I devote the first two chapters to a discussion of the multiple forms of
cultural studies as well as of the historical and sociological reasons for the
ascendance of cultural studies. In the next five chapters I examine various theoret-
ical approaches to cultural studies including Marxist theories of culture, the
Frankfurt School, the Birmingham School, poststructuralism and postmodern-
ism, and feminism. My three concluding chapters address the bifurcation be-
tween an essentially apolitical cultural studies and a cultural studies that is more
directly engaged in the political contest over meaning and interpretive perspect-
ive. In arguing for the latter version of cultural studies, I integrate a variety of
the aforementioned theoretical approaches that together comprise an interdiscip-
linary approach to culture.
Throughout this book I resist the tendency for 'cultural studies' to become
another thoughtless slogan, even a whole new academic discipline. Although the
institutionalization of critical insights and practices can often protect them, it also
has the potential for defusing them. Although I consider myself to be a student of
cultural studies, and my work in its various formulations contributes to a broad-
gauged and politically relevant version of cultural studies, I am frustrated by the
mounting tendency to turn cultural studies into a vacuous methodology for
reading culturai texts that has no real political grounding. This is very much the

1
Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

fate of the poststructuralism methodologized into deconstruction in American

literary departments. Indeed, the methodical version of cultural studies that I
eschew owes a good deal to just this sort of Americanized poststructuralism. My
frustration with this approach to cultural studies is intended to be nuanced
enough that I can develop a more politically substantial approach to culture in my
concluding chapter.
One of the central insights of cultural studies is that there is no single or
singular version of it. In a certain sense, cultural studies resists programmatism -
a definitive methodology and a discrete list of critical topics. Culture is found in
every corner of late-capitalist society, undercutting the high-culture/popular-
culture distinction. Thus, cultural studies resists a canonization of cultural pro-
ducts on which it focuses its attention. There is no canon, only a heterogeneity of
cultural gestures, from science to science fiction. This is one of its great
strengths, helping to reverse the tendency for cultural studies to become a
discipline cut off from all the others. Given its interdisciplinary nature as well as
its resistance to canons, cultural studies work is found all over the publishing
terrain - in books cited throughout this study as well as in cross-disciplinary
journals like Cultural Studies, Cultural Critique, Social Text, Canadian Journal
oj Political and Social Theory, Current Perspectives in Social Theory, Representations,
Discourse, Telos, New German Critique, Critical Studies in Mass Communication,
Salmagundi, Media, Culture and Society, Signs, Feminist Studies and many others.
If cultural studies is to be treated as a generic approach, one can talk about at
least eleven common features, recognizing that this commonality contrasts with
the diversity of ways in which actual cultural studies are carried out. It is also
clear that there is no pregiven methodology of cultural studies; I reconstruct
these eleven common assumptions from the interpretive practices in which writers
actually engage. Indeed, it is somewhat foreign to the decentered, theoretically
eclectic tradition of cultural studies to stipulate either underlying assumptions or
a political agenda (see Denzin, 1991). That is a weakness this book attempts to
remedy. I would argue emphatically that cultural studies should be explicit about
its implicit theoretical, political and methodological investments, thus anticipat-
ing the charge that cultural studies is but a hybrid version of cultural interpreta-
tion with no rigorous justification. In some measure, then, my attempt to codify
cultural studies is an attempt to provide it with intellectual legitimacy in the
university, acknowledging that academization can fatally deflect cultural studies
from political engagements.

An Expanded Notion of Culture

Proponents and practitioners of cultural studies imply or suggest explicitly that

'culture' is not equivalent to the received high culture of various literary and
philosophical canons. Rather, culture in the broad anthropological sense is any
expressive activity contributing to social learning. The expansion of the notion of
culture by students of cultural studies affects the ways in which popular culture is
now conceptualized as a broad ensemble of everyday discursive practices that
may well fall outside the traditional parameters of official culture, narrowly

2
 What is Cultural Studies?

defined, and the ways that science is conceptualized as cultural discourse itself.
Cultural studies both renders science self-reflexively discursive in post-positivist
fashion and at the same time engages in a kind of meta-canonization (or, better, a
deconstruction of canon) that opens cultural analysis to all sorts of interpretive
possibilities, all the way from conversation analysis (see Mehan and Wood, 1975)
to film and television criticism (e.g., Ryan and Kellner, 1988; Miller, 1988;
Kellner, 1990).
A good deal of the momentum of cultural studies is provided by the
poststructural turn in anthropology (e.g., Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Marcus,
1988), with its reflexive attention to the impact of anthropological discourse
on the topics and people studied by anthropologists as well as to the ways in
which culture is constituted from the ground up. Within sociology, this ten-
dency, albeit not fertilized by poststructuralism, stems from Harold Garfinkel's
(1967) ethnomethodological version of social phenomenology, with his stress on
the communicative constitution of meaning in everyday life. Since the American
translation of poststructuralism, sociology has also begun to metabolize post-
structural insights into the ways that science itself both frames and reflects
sociological data, thus leading to a deeper, more methodical self-reflection (e.g.,
Lemert, 1979; Brown, 1987, 1989; Agger, 1989b) than the kind originally recom-
mended by Gouldner (1970) and Friedrichs (1970).
It is also clear that much of the impetus behind the expansion of the notion
of culture, and thus the enhancement of the relevance of culture, comes from the
sweeping transformations in information technology after World War Two espe-
cially as these have influenced the huge baby-boom generation, both as cultural
producers and consumers. The television generation received its cultural forma-
tion from situation comedies, variety shows and the coverage of political dis-
asters, as I pursue further in Chapter 9. The ascendance of television, movies and
rock music as formative influences is in contrast to the decline of the influence of
the traditional patriarchal family on children's values and behavior (for better and
worse). Popular culture matters like never before (see Ross, 1989). Vestiges of
traditional high culture like classical music are either dying out because people
under 40 do not regularly attend or are being turned into 'pops' programs.
More things 'count' as culture than ever before because electronic media
have turned the globe into McLuhan's (1989) putative 'global village'. Although
the technological-determinist and modernist implications of this line of argument
must be resisted (and they usually are not, whether in McLuhan (1967, 1968) or
Bell (1973», the televisionization of public life (Luke, 1989) cannot be ignored as
a crucial political factor in late capitalism. The sheer explosion of culture (e. g.,
50,000 books published per year in the US) is matched by what Habermas (1984,
1987b) calls its increasing colonization of the lifeworld as well as psyche of global
citizens. Elite culture is being undermined not least by the 'mechanical reproduc-
tion' that Walter Benjamin (1969) hoped could function to promote political
education and hence liberation. I believe that Benjamin was wrong to conflate the
mechanical reproduction of culture in general with the liberating potential of
particular types of culture - whether The Communist Manifesto or the painting
Guernica. Nevertheless, we cannot somehow bypass the extensive terrain of electri-
fied popular culture in theorizing about and intervening to change the present
social world.

3
Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

The Legitimacy of Popular Culture

As I just noted, poststructural reflexivity is responsible for a good deal of the

broadening of cultural analysis to include topics and approaches heretofore
ignored by more traditional aesthetic theorists. Another factor in the broadening
of cultural analysis is the growing legitimacy of popular culture itself as a venue
of critical activity and intervention. Of course, this is a chicken-and-egg phe-
nomenon: the growing legitimacy of popular culture as a thematic topic is
redoubled by the influences of cultural analysts willing to entertain a broad
critical agenda. The rise of journalistic television criticism is only one relevant
example here. Pauline Kael's film criticism in The New Yorker has singularly
expanded the cultural canon and elevated the status of the film critic herself.
The decanonization of bourgeois high culture might well be viewed as a
kind of deconstruction, the inevitable result of a certain tendency for high
culture, by virtue of its very 'height', to come unhinged from the lifeworlds by
comparison to which it has historically been seen as an elevation. It might well be
argued that earlier Romantic concepts of high culture were bound to erode under
siege by the tendencies of what Walter Benjamin called mechanical reproduction
in the realm of culture. And these tendencies (which Benjamin, unlike Adorno,
lauded for their emancipatory potential) had to do with the rise of the 'culture
industry', as Horkheimer and Adorno (1972) called it (see Chapter 4). According
to them, the rise of popular culture both reflects and reproduces the rise of
capitalism; the popularization of culture sedates large groups of people against
their own alienation and at the same time helps check the tendencies of the rate of
profit to fall by priming cultural production and consumption. The television,
video and movie businesses are massive in their own right (Schiller, 1989).
Unlike some of the members of the original Frankfurt School like Hork-
heimer and Adorno, most proponents of cultural studies refuse to devalue the
realm of popular culture as inherently inferior by comparison to earlier forms of
high culture, notably modernism (see Huyssen, 1986). They insist that popular
culture is a legitimate subject of academic inquiry because culture matters; it is
serious business (see Chapter 2) and thus should be taken seriously. There is a
certain populism in this insistence, a refusal to vouchsafe mandarin high culture
in the fashion of the original Frankfurt School. One of the recurring themes in
this book is the interplay between the cultural criticism offered by Frankfurt
School theorists like Adorno and Marcuse, on the one hand, and the cultural
studies approaches of post-Frankfurt theorists and students of culture, on the
other. The Frankfurt sociology of culture is enormously relevant in that it
represents the first significant revision of the Marxist theory of culture, via
Lukacs. One can periodize left-wing cultural theories this way: first, Marx, and
his more or less derivative model of culture as an epiphenomenon of the econo-
mic system; second, the Frankfurt School theorists (through Lukacs) who
accorded culture a kind of relative autonomy largely unforeseen by Marx; third,
the current generation of proponents of cultural studies who push the Frankfurt
theory of culture one step further in order to encompass a larger terrain, and thus
tolerance, of popular culture as a legitimate area of scholarly inquiry as well as
political intervention.
To some extent this periodization oversimplifies a blurry past. Marx held a
more dialectical theory of culture than is commonly presumed by both orthodox

4
 What is Cultural Studies?

economistic Marxists and post-Marxist poststructuralists (e.g., see Horkheimer

and Adorno, 1972). As well, the Frankfurt thinkers, especially Marcuse (1968,
1969), were less impervious to the redemptive possibilities of popular culture
than meets the eye. Adorno's modernist perspective in his Philosophy of Modern
Music (1973c) is somewhat offset by his brilliant essays on radio (1945), television
(1954) and journalism (1974b) composed during and after World War Two.
Finally, certain approaches to cultural studies retain the sense of continuity
between modernism and postmodernism, refusing to jettison Marxism altogether
(e.g., Eagleton, 1976, 1983, 1984, 1986, 1990a, 1990b; Huyssen, 1986; Ryan,
1989). As always, periodization simplifies a nuanced reality in order to generalize
convenientl y.
My main argument in this book is that cultural studies today splits into a
conformist, comfortable version notable for its methodological approach to
cultural reading (see Chapter 8) and a more critical version that can be traced
directly to the inspiration of the Frankfurt School, albeit fertilized with insights
from less mandarin perspectives on culture, especially that of the Birmingham
School (see Chapters 9 and 10). A conformist cultural studies remains atheoretical
and apolitical. The more critical version recognizes that cultural reception, in-
cluding cultural studies itself, must become a form of dehierarchized cultural
production in a new society. I argue for a cultural studies that locates its analyt-
ical activity in an everyday life structured by the dominant discourses of the
quotidian preaching adjustment, acquiescence, accommodation (see Lefebvre,
1971; Brown, 1973). I conceive of cultural studies in its best sense as an activity
of critical theory that directly decodes the hegemonizing messages of the culture
industry permeating every nook and cranny of lived experience, from entertain-
ment to education. In this sense, like Jacoby (1987) in different terms, I want to
deacademize cultural studies, refusing its disciplining into yet another set of
courses, methodologies, journals and conferences utterly cut off from the polit-
ical reality that they purport to address.
In this sense, then, the stress on the legitimacy of popular culture as a
relevant realm of academic investigation helps legitimate a peculiarly apolitical
version of cultural studies. That is no surprise where we recognize that popular
culture is notable for its apolitical character - its transcendence of the old-
fashioned modernist 'isms' (e.g., Bell, 1960) allegedly characteristic of a stage of
capitalism during which high and low culture were more sharply divided. Much
of the cultural studies movement is an effort to professionalize an atheoretical,
apolitical approach to the analysis of popular culture. Cultural studies is the
technical term people often use in order to legitimize their fascination with mass
culture; it gives them a certain academic authority and seems to avoid the more
radical connotations of terms like the 'critique of ideology', which is what
Marxists view as the proper project of cultural analysis and intervention.
Perhaps it is harsh to suggest that baby-boom academics raised on popular
culture now cultivate 'cultural studies' as a way to get tenure while continuing to
watch lots of television. Yet there are numerous cultural studies scholars who
hoard vast video libraries that constitute their data bases (but see Ryan and
Kellner, 1988, for a strongly politicized film critique). They haunt theaters, video
stores and concerts in order to translate their own preoccupation with pop-
culture into a respectable academic exercise. By the same token, perhaps it is
overly self-congratulatory for those of us who imagine ourselves to be radical

5
Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

theorists of culture to imagine that we are made of more virtuous stuff. After all,
I, too, am interested in the Camera Obscura article on the television show thirty-
something (Torres, 1989). How the study of popular culture can become a mode
of political practice is a topic I reserve for my last chapter. Like all dualities, the
dichotomy of conformist-versus-radical cultural studies deconstructs upon close
inspection. It is not exactly a matter of 'us' against 'them'. Both sides of the
cultural studies divide meet around certain issues of common concern, like these
eleven features of cultural studies theory that I am in the midst of outlining.
Cultural studies is extremely seductive for those of us who grew up with
television and mass movies and recognize their powers of distortion, deception
and suggestion. To some extent, we succumb to those temptations precisely
because culture matters today more than ever, both deepening servitude (adver-
tising is a modal example here, of course; see Williamson, 1978) and suggesting
the promise of liberation. What Habermas (1981b) has called 'new social move-
ments' all pivot around cultural politics, of women and people of color espe-
cially. But cultural studies has its downside: the world is not simply a performance
or text, although all performances and texts, including cultural studies, are
worlds in their own right. It is important to retain the distinction between
cultural critique and cultural performance, even recognizing that cultural critique
is an intervention in its own right.

Culture is Us

As I noted, we baby-boomers are immensely attracted to cultural studies because

we learned our identities from culture. Although we may distance ourselves from
the television shows, movies and magazines that distinctively mark our genera-
tional experiences, shrugging them off in a cynical postmodern way, at some
level we recognize that our experience has been constituted by media. As such,
media politics cannot be ignored or denied, as Gitlin (1980) has shown in his
analyses of the televisionization of the New Left. But this is not merely a
strategic matter. At a deeper level, we are popular culture - we identify ourselves
not only with the generational events that are enormously signifying for us but
also with the production and reception of those events through cultural forms
like television. Indeed, these blur together: as I develop in Chapter 9, the
generational experience of the Kennedy assassination is defined by how we
watched the jarring events on television. Cultural studies would examine the
cultural politics of the Kennedy assassination in terms of how viewers both con-
stituted and were constituted by the events unfolding before our very eyes,
marking us forever.
In this sense, cultural studies brings the world home, much as it is brought
home through its visual and literary reception. The global village, like all vil-
lages, is a familiar place, with a well-known backdrop of habits, norms, facades
and people. The CBS eye is as familiar to many of us as the Statue of Liberty was
to earlier generations of European immigrants to America. We all recognize the
White House or 10 Downing Street in the backgrounds of national news reports
on their front steps. The craggy visage of Reagan and the cosmeticized visage of
Michael Jackson are commonplace to billions. Cultural studies addresses familiar
scenes, taken-for-granted knowledge, the quotidian. It is virtually a study of

6
 What is Cultural Studies?

everyday life, albeit frequently the everyday lives of the rich and famous. (As of
this writing, though, one of the most popular American television shows screens
home videos taken by average citizens!)
The first generation raised on television is 'us', baby-boomers born between
about 1947 and 1960. The height of the baby boom was 1957, when the largest
number of children-per-woman was born in the US. Although cultural studies
in the English-speaking world officially began with Richard Hoggart's (1957)
The Uses oj Literacy and the subsequent formation of the Birmingham Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1964 (run by Stuart Hall after 1968), it is clear
that cultural studies is a baby-boom phenomenon, both engaged in by and
addressed to the unique experiences of the television generation. Although cul-
tural studies is not only about television, the sorts of social and personal changes
inaugurated by mass television are the points of departure for this new approach
to the study of culture.
People are fascinated by themselves, especially in this psychologistic age. We
who do cultural studies watch ourselves watching the electronic media. We
refuse the passive, unreflexive roles scripted for us by those who produce this
culture. Instead, we attempt to monitor the changes subtly brought about by our
own exposure to these epochal media. When I remember the early days of the
US space program, I recall not only the events themselves - John Glenn's orbital
flight, the beginning of the Apollo phase of the program, the first moon landing
- but the ways I watched these events on television. In grade school we were
gathered around classroom television sets as we watched the first lift-offs and
participated in the emerging culture of the 'space race'. As with the Kennedy
assassination, perhaps the most notable thing about these developments was the
way we watched them together - our collective experience framing our participa-
tion in these media-ted events.
Cultural studies systematizes this attitude of reflexivity, attempting to learn
from our own experience of watching history. In a sense, the practice of watch-
ing television serves as a useful metaphor here: baby-boomers watch ourselves
watching by examining our own reflection in the screen. We then put these
insights to work in cultural studies, as we make this experience of watching-
ourselves-watch a substantive as well as methodological basis of our research
program. I would argue emphatically that the major constitutional experience of
the 1960s, for those of us who were baby-boomers, was not that we watched
history through television and movies but that we recognized this about ourselves;
we understood how history as what Baudrillard (1983) calls a simulation could be
manipulated by those who wanted to change it.

Culture as Practice

This is the other side of the generational equation. We who watched history
unfold televisually understood that reception (in the technical sense of screen
theory) leads to cultural production - even to political transformation writ large.
Watchers are also potential cultural creators and historical subjects. For example, people
who organized and engaged in the various actions surrounding the Chicago
Democratic Convention in 1968 (see Gitlin, 1980) understood clearly how 'the
whole world is watching' - would be watching, on television and in the print

7
Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

media. The New Left staged its politics on the screen of popular culture. Its
members recognized the formative and thus transformative power of the media,
of culture generally, having grown up with those media. The New Left recog-
nized that culture is practice, affording an opening to history heretofore denied
mere 'receivers' of cultural stimuli.
A good deal of Birmingham cultural studies, as we shall see (Chapter 5),
challenges traditional communication theory for its stimulus-response model of
communication. Instead, reception is recognized to be a very powerful force of
semiotic constitution in its own right, especially where it is theorized (in the way
I just alluded to, above, with regard to the impact of the televisualized space
program). Poststructuralism (Chapter 6) makes much the same point, indicating
some of the common roots of Birmingham cultural studies, on the one hand, and
postmodern and poststructural approaches to culture in the work of the Tel Quel
group and Barthes, on the other. Although, ironically, television renders cultural
consumers passive as never before, the reflexivity that television provokes -
watchers-watching-themselves-watch - also leads to transformative cultural
interventions.
One of the strongest insights of cultural studies is that culture is transacted
between consumers and producers (via distributors). It is not simply laid on
people from above, although typically in capitalism culture is differentially con-
trolled and disseminated by elites. Cultural studies recognizes that receivers are
inherently empowered in the sense that they inevitably participate in the constitu-
tion of cultural meanings; culture is never simply provided from without, to use
Lenin's telling phrase in a different context. To this extent, then, culture can be
remade, even where it is controlled at the epicenter of global capitalism's global
village. There are varying emphases within cultural studies on the extent to
which consumers help constitute cultural meanings and messages. The more
traditionally Marxist cultural studies is, the less emphasis is placed on the active
role of consumers in determining cultural meaning.
In this sense, cultural studies may contrast with the culture-critical themes
of the original Frankfurt School and fall much more in line with certain post-
structural insights stemming variously from Lacan, Derrida, Barthes and Althus-
ser, who suggested in his important essay on ideological state apparatuses (1971)
that ideology is 'lived practice' and not simply imposed from the outside.
Although the modernist Frankfurt thinkers contended that certain cultural inter-
ventions could have political impact, notably modernism (e.g., Beckett, Kafka,
Schoenberg for Adorno), they gave little attention to the self-deconstructing,
self-transvaluing possibilities in mass culture itself. Their (e. g., Horkheimer and
Adorno, 1972) analysis of the culture industry suggested few opportunities for
practical, popular resistance to the dominant cultural ethos imposed from Holly-
wood and New York. This contrast between the Frankfurt and poststructural
perspectives on cultural studies looms large where the interpretation of popular
culture is concerned. The Frankfurt perspective suggests a somewhat resigned cul-
tural politics, where poststructuralism promises a more engaged version of cultural
studies as cultural intervention itself (although poststructuralist cultural studies
splits into methodological and political versions, as I discuss in Chapter 9).
The notion that culture is practice has strong implications for what cultural
analysts study (and for what is legitimated as official culture), a theme I touched
on above in my discussion of the expansion of culture. Cultural studies has

8
 What is Cultural Studies?

helped detextualize culture, opening cultural analysis to approaches of cultural

constitution that may not result in traditional literary outcomes, notably the
so-called Great Books. The concept of culture is expanded by students of cultural
studies to include all sorts of oral, vocal and visual expressions that lie outside of
'literature' as defined in the Leavis tradition. This allows postmodernists to
consider architecture as a 'text' of sorts (e.g., Barthes: 'The city is a discourse'),
and feminists to attend to the media-ted representations of women by men (see
Roman and Christian-Smith, 1988). Against the intolerance of mainstream cul-
tural analysis that delegitimates non-literary culture, this approach allows film and
television to become important critical topics (see Miller, 1988). More than
anything else, perhaps, this expansion of the concept of cultural meaning and
practice has revolutionized the approaches of cultural studies proponents in last-
ing ways. It is no longer possible for serious English departments to ignore film
and media studies as important venues of meaning (although some still try!). The
whole notion of textuality has been transvalued by cultural studies. Or, better,
textuality has broadened under the influences of the entertainment and news
industries in ways that make it impossible to ignore them in the halls of academe
(see Altheide and Snow, 1979; Altheide, 1985).

Culture is Conflict (over Meaning)

Cultural studies proponents of all sorts, stemming from Hoggart's (1957) original
analysis of working-class discourse, Raymond Williams' (1958) culture-and-
society perspective, neo-Marxist theories of culture and feminist approaches to
culture, contend that culture is not an undifferentiated system that serves to
integrate society (e.g., Parsons, 1951, following Durkheim) but instead is a
region of serious contest and conflict over meaning. For this reason, cultural
studies proponents do not talk about a single culture but rather about many,
often cross-cutting cultures - cultures of class, race, gender and nation, amongst
others. Indeed, cultural politics is considered an important auxiliary of traditional
class politics, more narrowly defined in economic terms.
Much of the inspiration for this line of analytical reasoning is owed to
Gramsci (1971), who Hall (Hall and Whannel, 1965; Hall and Jefferson, 1976;
Hall, 1978, 1980a, 1982, 1985, 1986, 1988) and the Birmingham School make
central in their own versions of cultural studies. Gramsci's writings on hegemony
and counter-hegemony remain central for most cultural studies perspectives, as
do his comments about the transformational role of intellectuals. Going beyond
Marx's more mechanical understanding of ideology, Gramsci, like subsequent
western Marxists (see Lichtheim, 1961; Agger, 1979), understands culture or
'hegemony' to be a relatively autonomous region of experience and practice with
respect to the capitalist economy proper. Indeed, as the Frankfurt thinkers
demonstrate (e.g., Horkheimer, 1972), a dialectical Marxism quickly jettisons
unidirectional causal understandings of the relationship between culture and
economics in favor of a more unified perspective that they call critical theory.
Hegemony for Gramsci and later western Marxists refers to the ways in which
domination is not only produced from outside everyday life, through the huge
structures of capital, but also from within everyday life by people more or less

9
Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

resigned to their fates as eternal subordinates - even cheerful about the 'goods'
society.
One of the crucial differences between the Frankfurt perspective on cultural
hegemony and the Gramsci perspective more characteristic of the Birmingham
School (as well as the poststructural perspective) is that neo-Gramscians stress the
dialectical properties of culture, notably the tendencies for cultural conflict to
issue in real political change (see Morrow, 1991). Unlike the Frankfurt theorists
who talked about culture as a monolith (e.g., the terms 'culture industry' and
'domination'), the neo-Gramscians of Birmingham cultural studies as well as
poststructuralists stress the potential for cultural conflict to result in enlightening,
even transformative outcomes. The Frankfurt theorists tended to deemphasize
the conflicts within culture itself, wedded as they were to a historical model of
capitalism that stressed its totalizing, totalitarian features (e. g., see Adorno,
1974a).
The inflections here are crucial: I do not believe that issues of culture can be
dealt with a priori; they are empirical matters and must be addressed as such.
Where Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse talked about cultural 'total administra-
tion' or 'one-dimensionality', they were making empirical claims about the
imperviousness of capitalism to radical challenges and not engaging in speculative
metaphysics. Whether or not capitalism today is equally monolithic is an open
question, and one that I address in the course of this book. Some of my earlier
(e.g., 1990) writing stresses the potentials within culture for conflicts to lead to
aesthetic and political resistance and thus overall social change. But I have
carefully tried to document this, refusing to decide this issue speculatively. Even
then, of course, data do not speak for themselves. They have to be both con-
structed and interpreted.
Cultural studies emphasizes that culture is conflict over meaning - over how
to assign value to human existence, expression, experience. Hegemonic culture
attempts to define culture from the top down, in terms of the system's own
needs for legitimation, productivism and consumerism. Counter-hegemonic cul-
ture resists these definitions and instead proposes alternative formulations of the
good life. Conformist concepts of culture (e.g., the kind purveyed by Parsonian
structural-functionalist sociology; see Alexander, 1982, 1985; Alexander and
Seidman, 1990) stress the common sharing of values and meanings. Cultural
studies proponents tend to emphasize the lack of consensus about common
values, stressing the conflictual nature of values and meanings in capitalist, sexist
and racist societies. They add that these conflicts are powerful initiators as well as
symptoms of social change, not to be dispelled or suppressed.
Further, cultural studies proponents seek cultural conflict in surprising
places. Ryan and Kellner (1988) in their book on the politics of mainstream film
in the US stress the oppositional intent and effects behind a number of popular
films, addressing the surfacing discontent experienced by many movie-goers.
Against the Frankfurt School, it is not simply assumed that culture is total
administration (or in Althusser's (1970) terms a 'structure in dominance'); rather,
culture in its heterogeneity and multiplicity is irreducible to official narratives
about it. Those fond of talking about singular values and meanings overlook or
ignore oppositional cultures that spring up in surprising places and take hetero-
dox forms. Feminist cultural studies has been especially helpful in pointing out
the hegemonizing implications of official cultural approaches that equate male

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 What is Cultural Studies?

culture with the totality of culture, hence ignoring vital women's cultures that
challenge male supremacy in effective ways (e.g., de Lauretis, 1984, 1987;
Mulvey, 1988). As I discuss in Chapter 7, one of the most important political
contributions of feminism to cultural studies lies in its thematization of cultural
practices and traditions suppressed by dominant male culture, including the
cultures of gay people.
In this sense, cultural studies challenges accounts of mainstream culture that
ignore cultural alternatives. A good deal of this work is descriptive and narra-
tional in nature: women's studies scholars and black studies scholars, for example,
bring to light extant oppositional cultures of women, gays and people of color
ignored by the mainstream canonization of legitimate cultural artifacts and prac-
tices. This frequently takes the form of oral histories through which women and
people of color give voice to the cultural traditions, practices and meanings
experienced by members of those groups (but occluded by the dominant culture).
In this sense, these minority approaches to cultural studies deconstruct the cultur-
ally legitimating discourse of traditional literary studies, opening it to voices and
versions that lie outside of canonized white literature proper but that are wholly
legitimate and important in their own terms. This valorization of oral history and
narration has a political downside, as well, where it renounces 'hard' (male)
theorizing about social structures of oppression, an issue I pursue in Chapter 7.

Making Space: The Decentering and Decanonizing of Culture

Just as an expanded concept of culture forces cultural studies to expand commen-

surately, addressing non- or meta-textual forms of expression and experience, so
cultural studies helps decenter cultural meaning and practice. In a sense, these are
two sides of the same coin: where cultural studies addresses non-traditional forms
of cultural expression (e.g., film), so we must also decenter cultural legitimacy in
a way that fundamentally challenges elitism. This is a directly political project, as
I noted in a somewhat different way in my earlier discussion of culture as
conflict. Where cultural studies takes account of non-traditional modes and
venues of cultural expression, from film to fiction, it implicitly places value on
thes'e expressions, denying the monolithic claims of traditional culture on moral
legitimacy and thus critical attention. The decentering of culture is a political act
that contributes significantly to the decentering of power and wealth. It is a
fundamental challenge to the dominant order.
As we will see in Chapters 8 and 9, not all programs of cultural studies view
themselves as political intervention. The decentering and decanonization of
dominant culture are not the intents of a variety of approaches to cultural studies
that view themselves mainly as academic contributions within an expanded
repertoire of literary-critical scholarly activities and mass communication studies.
There is a real struggle going on between proponents of a more politicized cul-
tural studies (e.g., Ryan and Kellner, 1988; Luke, 1989; Ryan, 1989; Agger, 1990;
Denzin, 1991), on the one hand, and more methodological proponents of cultural
studies who view cultural studies as simply an expansion of the traditional
scholarly agenda of the sociology of culture, literary criticism and communica-
tion studies, on the other (e. g., Wuthnow, 1976, 1987, 1989; Bellah et aI., 1985;
Griswold, 1986; Lamont, 1987). The first group wants cultural decentering

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Cultural Studies as Critical Theory

to have overtly political aims, empowering the culturally disenfranchised into

both expressive and political action; the second group wants cultural dec entering
simply to expand the cultural canon so as to give academics a larger range of
critical topics within the general model of value-free cultural interpretation (e.g.,
the so-called Yale School of American deconstruction is perhaps the most pro-
minent example of this depoliticized, methodological approach to cultural studies).
For the former group, cultural decentering serves political ends, whereas for the
latter group cultural decentering makes available new interpretive techniques like
deconstruction with which to read texts and cultural practices in value-free ways.
I will argue later that deconstruction, once methodologized into yet another
approach to literary criticism, defeats its own purpose by succumbing to the
same objectivism it so deplores in the New Criticism (Ransom, 1941). Decon-
struction, following Derrida, shows convincingly that all readings are 'interested'
in Weber's sense. One might best ask: decentering for whom? and for what?
As in everything political, the lines between these two seemingly opposite
versions of cultural decentering are clearer in theory than they are in practice.
Even the methodologized deconstructive version of cultural studies that simply
wants to expand the horizon of cultural and critical experience beyond official
Great Books per se makes a political contribution of sorts, notably in decanonizing
official culture. Even to suggest that certain non-mainstream figures and works
have been left out of the literary and analytic canon is heretical, as Bloom's (1987)
book evidences. The neoconservative assault on hairy, hip, leftish holdovers from
the 1960s, who, it is argued, have single-handedly destroyed the traditional
liberal arts curriculum, continues to gather momentum: colleges and universities
are 'going back to basics', led by administrators and faculty armed with Bloom
(1987) and Hirsch (1987) among others. But this neoconservative onslaught on
the campus left (and center) is being contested vigorously by faculty, students
and administrators who refuse to return to the good old days when the liberal
arts canon consisted only of old-white-male authors and artists. They argue that
the liberal arts should be broader than in the past, including works, authors and
creators from among women and people of color - the subterranean or counter-
classics.
The attempt to expand the canon per se, regardless of the degree of theoret-
ical self-consciousness involved, is political action. At least, it challenges the
preponderance of the dominant canon and the educational institution that admi-
nisters it. It makes curriculum a contested terrain, one of the central contributions of
the version of cultural studies advocated in this book. Indeed, as I will show
below, the point of production of cultural studies is largely the university. Pro-
ponents of cultural studies attempt to challenge both traditional curricula and
modes of scholarly evaluation in order to make space for alternative voices and
versions. This activity of making space helps open the university to people hereto-
fore closed out of it. In itself, this activity of making space is political work of the
kind supported by many working in cultural studies today.
Differences arise over how extensive this academic deconstruction ought to
be. As I discuss below, some proponents of cultural studies would not rest only
with decentering and decanonizing curricula; they would argue for the wholesale
dedisciplining of academic departments and specialties. They contend that the
rebuilding of curricula outside of more extensive changes in the structure of
academe matters little; it is only a beginning. Indeed, they argue that it is

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 What is Cultural Studies?

relatively easy for universities to coopt non-mainstream voices by including them

in the prevailing curriculum, expanded to accommodate women and people of
color. More radical cultural studies people argue that cultural studies' impact on
the university ought to involve more than the politics of curricula - debates over
reading lists, in effect. Cultural studies could become the basis of a new interdis-
ciplinary critical theory that raises it to a higher, more politically self-conscious
level (see Klein, 1990). But that is the argument of my concluding chapter. I am
getting ahead of myself.

Production, Distribution, Consumption

Just as English department curricula have begun to change in light of the decanon-
ization of literature and detextualization of culture generally, so the social
sciences have begun to have an impact on an emerging cultural studies. This
impact has mainly involved the analysis of interlocking, interdependent cultural
institutions comprising the production, distribution and consumption of cultural
commodities (e.g., see Schiller, 1989). My (1990) earlier book on literary political
economy suggests the direction of this sort of work; in that study I considered
how the political economies of trade publishing and academic writing have
significant impact on what I call the 'decline of discourse'. Cultural studies, in its
emphasis on culture as practice, helps us situate the creation of cultural artifacts in
complex social and economic spaces within which creative activity is con-
ditioned, even determined.
Some of this new empirical and theoretical activity has affected the way
academics view themselves. Brodkey (1987) and I (1989b, 1989c, 1990) have done
studies of what Brodkey calls 'academic writing as social practice', employing a
variety of cultural studies insights and methods in order to examine the rhetorical
features of academic discourse. A good deal of this reflexive approach to our own
writing (also see Richardson, 1988, 1990a, 1990b, 1990c, 1991) stems from the
major influence of poststructuralism on the analysis of discourse. As I remarked
earlier, this sort of reflexivity is being carried out within and across disciplines
(e.g., McCloskey, 1985; Marcus and Fischer, 1986; Agger, 1989a; Klein, 1990).
All of this work together suggests that one of the crucial contributions of cultural
studies lies in its heightening of the literary self-awareness of academics trained
for years to view their prose and research writing as hollowly ritualistic. Instead,
we learn, academic writing is a peculiar language game (Wittgenstein, 1953) that
participates in the transaction of power, notably in the way in which authorial
self-consciousness is either repressed or marginalized in science writing.
This is only one of the many ways that the sociological, political-economic
and deconstructive examination of various cultural rhetorics helps differentiate
cultural studies from more traditional approaches to the interpretation of culture
(e.g., Leavis, the New Criticism; see Eagleton, 1983). It is hopeless to decontex-
tualize cultural expression, especially where the culture industry is big business.
Moreover, deconstruction instructs us that language itself is a con-text of sorts,
imposing a particularly determinate meaning on those who attempt to 'use'
language (but who end up being used in turn). Cultural studies broadens inter-
pretive focus to include extra-textual aspects of a work's context (or, as I call it
throughout this book, con-text). It does so dialectically, eschewing both the

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