Cultural Studies

 Cultural studies is by no means a new phenomenon. It has a long history.

 But it has been in the last twenty years or so that cultural studies has acquired prominence as a
distinct network of concerns and approaches.
 Perhaps the most conventional definition of the word “culture” refers to the beliefs,
rituals, and practices of a given social or ethnic group or nation.

Culture vs Nature

 More generally, culture has been used to refer to what is produced by human beings, as
opposed to “nature,” which is something there already, either in the world or in our innate
human constitution.
 In modern usage, culture has sometimes designated the highest achievements of a
civilization as in its literature, science, and art.

Matthew Arnold --) “the best that has been thought and said” in the world.

literature and the arts as the repository of culture, of a complex of aesthetic, moral, and spiritual values
which are threatened by the continued advance of a mechanistic and materialistic civilization devoted
to the pursuit of wealth.

Sociologists and anthropologists entertained a broader view of culture, one which encompasses not
only the high arts but also the various beliefs and social practices of all segments of society.

The way in which we define culture can be hierarchical and even exclusive, not only of other
nations and ethnic groups but even of other social groups - women, workers, ethnic or religious
minorities - in our own society.

It could encompass inquiries in a wide variety of fields such as sociology, anthropology, history,
literature, and the arts.

As applied to the study of literature, cultural criticism is marked foremost by its broad definition of
what counts as “literature”: this includes not only the usual highbrow genres of poetry and drama,
and the more recent middlebrow genre of fiction - which have formed the conventional “canon” or
tradition of literature - but also popular fiction such as thrillers and romances, mass media (including
various kinds of television programs such as comedies, soap operas, and advertising), cinema,
magazines, and music.

Indeed, the conventionally entitled “Department of English” might nowadays more accurately be
termed a “Department of Cultural Studies,” since it sees literature and literary meaning as integrally

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situated and shaped by a larger context that includes many other discourses and wider systems of
meaning.

As well as broadening the conventional definition of literature, cultural criticism tends to ground
the study of literature in a larger framework which can include the economic institutions of literary
production, the ideological context of prevailing beliefs, and broad political issues of class, race, and
gender, and the operations of power.

Hence cultural analysis tends to stress what is specific or unique - in terms of time, place, and
ideology - to a given cultural and literary moment.

Typically, cultural studies has extended its methodology beyond the conventional strategies of
reading and research to encompass field study, empirical observation, interviewing, active
participation, and interdisciplinary collaboration.

F. R. Leavis

 The sociology of literature was “a field that has had much attention in recent years.”
 He had argued that culture is actually in the keeping of “a very small minority” which
constitutes “the consciousness of the race ... at a given time.”
 This minority keeps alive “the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition.”
 And what is in its keeping “is the language, the changing idiom, upon which fine living
depends
 By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such a language.” Leavis goes so far as effectively to equate
culture and language, affiliating both of these with an intellectual elite, a large part of whose
function is to preserve the past.

It is evident that much of what falls under cultural studies could easily be classified under various
other labels such as Marxism, structuralism, New Historicism, feminism, and postcolonialism.

Indeed, the field of cultural studies has been influenced by structuralism’s emphasis on examining a
text as a set of semiotic codes operating within a wider complex of social codes.

It has been even more heavily influenced by Marxist thought, and some Marxists might argue that it
borrows much of the methodology of Marxist analysis without the political commitment characteristic
of (and necessary to) Marxism.

For example, it might show how a particular novel depicts class relations, without this analysis being
part of any practical political enterprise.

Pepi Leistyna who see their theoretical study as integral to a program of political action.

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It is perhaps the tradition of Marxist thinking which has been the most pronounced in giving the term
“culture” a political valency, viewing it as a part of the ideological process whereby the ruling class
foists its own values on the rest of society.

In this tradition, culture has been viewed as an instrument of domination or oppression.

Frankfurt School

 In this vein, the Frankfurt School saw modern mass culture as reduced to a bland
commercialism.
 The School (the Institute for Social Research at the University of Frankfurt) was
interdisciplinary, with an emphasis on cultural studies and critical theory.
 Leading figures of the School included Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno, Herbert Marcuse,
and Walter Benjamin, who all produced analyses of modern culture, drawing on Marxist and
sometimes on Freudian theory.

In collaboration, Adorno and Horkheimer produced an incisive critique of modern culture that was to
prove seminal for cultural studies: Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944).

In an important chapter called “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” they argue
that culture under monopoly capitalism imposes a sterile uniformity on everything: “Films, radio and
magazines make up a system which is uniform as a whole and in every part.”

Moreover, the movies, magazines, popular music, and television shows produced by the culture
industry no longer even pretend to be art:

“The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they
deliberately produce” (DE, 121).

Radio and television are democratic in the negative sense that they turn their audiences into passive
listeners and “authoritatively subject them to broadcast programs which are all exactly the same”.

Part of the reason behind this is that the institutions of culture are weak and must appease the real
holders of power invested in powerful sectors of industry such as steel, petroleum, and electricity.

The “ruthless unity” in the culture industry does not allow anyone to escape its hierarchized
classifications: everyone must behave in accordance with “his previously determined and indexed
level, and choose the category of mass product turned out for his type”.

Indeed, the “whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.”

The illusion is created that the outside world is a “straightforward continuation” of what is presented
on the screen.

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Real life becomes indistinguishable from the movies which leave no room for imagination or
reflection, confronting the spectator with a “rush of facts,” precluding any space for sustained thought.

Everything, according to Adorno and Horkheimer, is appropriated stereotypically for mass mechanical
reproduction, leaving no room for style as anything but imitation; the constant pressure to produce
new effects merely increases the power of existing conventions.

The true work of art’s struggle with style, engaging the risk of failure in its search for identity and
meaning, is lost in mass culture whose inferior products rely on its similarity with others, on a
surrogate identity.

Today, everything is reduced to this barbarized notion of style, as absolutely imitative, and which
signifies merely obedience to the social hierarchy.

All cultural products alike ultimately serve to remind people of the “triumph of invested capital”
and to ensure that the “might of industrial society is lodged in men’s minds”.

In general, the culture industry serves to control people’s consciousness, impressing upon them their
own powerlessness, stubbornly refusing to engage their ability to think independently, equating
pleasure with complete capitulation to the system of power, reducing individuals to mere expendable
copies of the identities manufactured by the media and film, presenting the world as essentially
meaningless and governed by blind chance (rather than by such virtues as merit and hard work).

The culture industry can offer no meaningful explanation of life, and in fact the ideologies it promotes
are deliberately vague and noncommittal.

In these ways, mass culture discloses the fictitious character of the individual in the bourgeois era.

Of course, in this system, even art is a commodity; what is new is that it admits to this status, and its
very alleged purposelessness or lack of utility is subsumed in a wider usefulness or exchange-value
defined by market forces:

“The work of art, by completely assimilating itself to need, deceitfully deprives men of precisely that
liberation from the principle of utility which it should inaugurate”.

In contrast with the views of the Frankfurt School, Marxists such as Antonio Gramsci have also seen
culture - in the development of a working-class counter-culture - as an instrument of possible
resistance to the prevailing ideologies.

In fact, this dual valency of the term “culture” - as a mode of ideological domination and resistance to
such domination - has come to characterize many of the cultural critics’ analyses of cultural
phenomena. Another way of expressing this would be to say that cultural critics tended to view
“culture” as a site of ideological struggle.

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The view of culture as oppositional or potentially subversive was developed in England by figures
such as Raymond Williams, one of the founders of the New Left movement, the historian E. P.
Thompson, and the socialist Richard Hoggart, who in 1964 founded the Centre for Contemporary
Cultural Studies at Birmingham University.

Leading figures in the Centre included Stuart Hall, whose essay “Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical
Legacies” will be considered shortly, and Dick Hebdige, known for his book Subculture: The Meaning
of Style.

As well as analyzing the subversive nature of youth cultures, critics at the Centre examined the
ideological function of the media and issues in education.

In America, the Marxist critic Fredric Jameson saw modern mass culture as essentially post
modernistic in its form; Janice Radway wrote on the popular form of the romance novel in her widely
selling Reading the Romance (1984), and examined the institutional workings of middlebrow fiction
in her subsequent A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-
Class Desire (1997).

In the first of these, Radway argues that women who read popular romances see this activity as
“combative and compensatory,” helping them to carve out a “solitary space” in the midst of domestic
lives where their attention is always otherwise focused on the demands of others.

Romance reading supplies women “vicariously with the attention and nurturance” which they
lack; and romance “opposes the female values of love and personal interaction to the male values
of competition and public achievement,” demonstrating the triumph of the former.

Clearly, in projecting such a Utopian state, women are reading romances “not out of contentment
but out of dissatisfaction, longing, and protest”.

And this Utopian imagining creates a kind of female community.

But if viewed from a more external perspective which broadens to include social and historical
contexts, it emerges that this community is abstract, since individual readers never combine to share
their experiences or to challenge their mutual separation or to implement changes in the public world.

The Utopian projection leaves unchallenged “the very system of social relations” which gave rise to
the romance.

Romance reading gives the reader “a strategy for making her present situation more
comfortable without substantive reordering of its structure”.

A further danger is that the fictional world of romance reinforces conventional categories and
oppositions such as that between the private and public worlds, between the values of love and

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those of status and wealth; that fictional world also perpetuates the idea that women belong in
the private, domestic sphere.

On the positive side, it seems clear that reading romances does change some women, making them
more assertive of their rights and possessive of their time.

While Radway acknowledges the enormous power of contemporary forms of mass culture, she insists
those who are committed to social change should not ignore such “minimal but nonetheless
legitimate” forms of protest as are enshrined in the reading of romances: we must not only
understand these Utopian longings but encourage them and bring them to fruition.

Whereas Radway locates in the reading of popular fiction a space of resistance to patriarchal norms,
other critics such as Susan Bordo, in her Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the
Body (1993), emphasize the profound and imposing impact of popular culture on women’s self-image
and cosmetic practices, showing how much of their alleged freedom to form themselves is illusory.

In Russia, the Marxist Volosinov had already seen the linguistic “sign” itself as the site of
ideological and cultural struggle.

And in France, the (then) structuralist Roland Barthes had analyzed various aspects of popular
culture in terms of its use of linguistic codes.

Many cultural critics, such as John Fiske, have drawn on semiotics to analyze elements of popular
culture.

In his Television Culture (1987), Fiske argues that the techniques and codes employed by
television mold our perceptions but he rejects the idea that audiences are wholly passive
consumers of ideological meanings, arguing instead that a text “is the site of struggles for
meaning that reproduce the conflicts of interest between the producers and consumers of the
cultural commodity.

A program is produced by the industry, a text by its readers.”

The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu saw his work as politically motivated, opposing globalization
and cultural forms of oppression.

His work in general attempted to understand how the human subject was positioned in larger social
structures, and he saw aesthetic judgment as integrally located within such structures.

In summary, then,

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  Cultural studies might be characterized by its broad definition of literature as including
all aspects of popular culture,
 its situation of literature as a set of semiotic codes among broader social codes,
 its view of culture as an instrument of subordination or subversion, as a site of
ideological struggle, its commitment to broadly left-wing political aims, and its generally
empirical, interdisciplinary, and collaborative methodology.

Raymond Williams (1921-1988)

Many of the concerns of modern cultural studies can be traced back to Raymond Williams’
groundbreaking work Culture and Society 1780-1950, published in 1958.

Here, Williams cited five words which, in the last two hundred years or so, had “acquired new and
important meanings”: industry, democracy, class, art, and culture.

During this period, “art” and “industry” came to denote institutions rather than merely skills or
qualities, “class” acquired political significance, and “democracy” lost its negative connotations
(of mob rule and disorder).

The word “culture” - the most complex of those listed, in Williams’ eyes - answered to the changes
in all of these terms. Previously, it had meant something like “nurturing” or “training.” Its meaning
expanded to denote, first, a general state of mind, associated (as in Arnold’s use) with the idea of
perfection; then the general