Contemporary Cultural Theory PDF

Preview

Summary

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY This page intentionally left blank CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY THIRD EDITION Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt Copyright © 2002 Andrew Milner and Jeffrey Browitt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electro...

Description

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY

This page intentionally left blank

CONTEMPORARY CULTURAL THEORY THIRD EDITION

Andrew Milner and Jeff Browitt

Copyright © 2002 Andrew Milner and Jeffrey Browitt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act. First published in 2002 by Allen & Unwin 83 Alexander Street Crows Nest NSW 2065 Australia Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100 Fax: (61 2) 9906 2218 Email: [email protected] Web: www.allenandunwin.com National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry: Milner, Andrew, 1950– . Contemporary cultural theory. 3rd ed. Bibliography. Includes index. ISBN 1 86508 808 0. 1. Culture. 2. Structuralism. 3. Socialism. 4. Feminism. 5. Postmodernism. 6. Utilitarianism. I. Browitt, Jeffrey, 1950– . II. Title. 306 Typeset by Midland Typesetters, Maryborough, Victoria Printed by South Wind Production, Singapore 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For our partners, Verity Burgmann and Nidia Castrillón, and our children, David, James and Robert Milner and Helen Browitt.

Acknowledgements

We are indebted to our respective partners, Verity Burgmann and Nidia Castrillón, and to our children, David, James and Robert Milner and Helen Browitt, for all the important things. We are indebted too to friends, colleagues and students in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University and to staff at the Monash University Library. Comparisons are always invidious, but special thanks are due to Richard Clarke, Claire Colebrook, Rob Cover, Anthony Elliott, Kathleen Ferguson, Kevin Hart, Hélène Pouliquen, Kate Rigby, David Roberts, Philip Thomson, Gail Ward and Chris Worth. We are also grateful to John Iremonger and Elizabeth Weiss at Allen & Unwin for the enthusiasm with which they supported various stages of the project. Acknowledgement is due to the Faculty of Arts at Monash University, which provided us each with completion grants of A$5000.

vi

Contents

Acknowledgements

vi

1 Cultural studies and cultural theory Defining culture Defining cultural studies Cultural studies and cultural theory Culture and society: anti-utilitarianism and modernity Utilitarianism and its others 2 Literature and society: from culturalism to cultural materialism German culturalism: hermeneutics and historicism British culturalism: from Arnold to Leavis The New Left: Thompson, Hoggart and Williams Cultural materialism New historicism Cultural studies: from Hoggart to Hall 3 Critical theory: from ideology critique to the sociology of culture Marx, Weber and Freud Lukács, Gramsci and the origins of western Marxism The Frankfurt School Habermas: from critical theory to the sociology of culture Zizek: critical theory goes Lacanian Bourdieu: from the sociology of culture to critical theory

1 2 5 10 12 15

vii

21 22 25 32 35 43 48 57 58 67 70 77 82 86

Contemporary Cultural Theory 4

Semiology: from structuralism to post-structuralism Durkheim and Saussure Russian Formalism: from Shklovsky to Bakhtin High structuralism Post-structuralism: deconstruction and genealogy Post-structuralism: Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari 5 The cultural politics of difference Sex, gender and sexuality Nationalism, multiculturalism and postcolonialism Race and ethnicity in black and Latino cultural studies 6 Postmodernism and cultural theory Postmodernism, postmodernity and ‘postwar’ late capitalism Modernism, postmodernism and the popular Celebrating postmodernism: Lyotard and Baudrillard Postmodernism and the intelligentsia Mapping postmodernism: Jameson The politics of postmodernism The illusions of postmodernism 7 Cultural criticism and cultural policy Cultural studies and cultural criticism Culture studies and cultural policy From cultural criticism to cultural engineering Cultural studies and cultural change Criticism and globalisation

92 93 98 102 113 121 128 129 139 152 164

Glossary Appendix: The institutionalisation of academic cultural studies Bibliography Index

224

165 171 175 179 184 190 198 203 205 210 214 217 221

242 245 265

Reader’s note: Where emphasis occurs in quoted material, this is as it appears in the original except where we indicate otherwise.

viii

1 Cultural studies and cultural theory

Cultural studies emerged as one of the more significant academic growth industries during the last quarter of the twentieth century, especially in its last decade. It now has separate courses or departments in every continent but Antarctica. If not quite the ‘genuinely global movement’ Simon During describes (During, 1999, p. 11), cultural studies has nonetheless grown into a putatively international discipline, with a serious intellectual presence, stretching beyond Europe, the Americas and Australia, into India, Taiwan and South Korea (see Appendix). For all this apparent ubiquity, the term ‘cultural studies’ remains an unusually ‘polysemic’ sign. At one level, of course, its meaning is obvious: cultural studies is the academic study of culture. The problem, however, is that there is absolutely no agreement as to what exactly we mean by ‘culture’. The latter is one of the most widely used abstract nouns in the lexicon. People worry about the independence of their ‘national culture’, but also about whether they are sufficiently ‘cultured’ as individuals to ‘get on’ in life. They worry about the possibility and desirability of living in a ‘multicultural’ society. Economists and politicians wonder about the ‘culture industries’ and the prospects of ‘culture-led’ economic recovery. In our own profession as university teachers, we worry about culture whenever we worry about the administrative organisation of cultural studies in our university. The odd thing about these worries, however, is that each is

1

Contemporary Cultural Theory worryingly ambiguous. When people think of an independent national culture, they might well have in mind distinctive arts, as embodied both in individual works and in institutions such as art galleries and opera houses. But they might also be thinking more generally about their distinctively national ways of doing things: their cuisine and their eating habits, their religion and their sports. To be ‘cultured’ might mean the ability to spot intertextual references to T.S. Eliot; but it might also mean the capacity to affect an ‘upper-class’ accent. ‘Multiculturalism’ might mean more ‘immigrant’ literature in schools or more foreign films on public television; but it might also mean significant modifications to those distinctively national ways of doing things—curry as well as fish and chips in England, or soccer instead of American or Australian football. A ‘culture-led’ economic recovery probably would have something to do with theatres, film production or higher education; but it might also mean that people would be persuaded to sell their way of life as a drawcard for the tourist industry. As for cultural studies, for some it clearly means the classics, fine arts and the high literary canon; for others it might mean the sociology of adolescent gang warfare and the anthropology of kinship. The problem is that we all mean a great deal more than we know.

DEFINING CULTURE Raymond Williams, the Welsh cultural theorist and late Professor of Drama at Cambridge University, famously described ‘culture’ as ‘one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ (Williams, 1976, p. 76). That complexity is nowhere more apparent than in his own attempts to define its usage. In his first major work, Culture and Society 1780–1950, he drew attention to four important kinds of meaning that attach to the word: an individual habit of mind; the state of intellectual development of a whole society; the arts; and the whole way of life of a group or people (Williams, 1963, p. 16). In the later Keywords, only the latter three usages remained in play (Williams, 1976, p. 80). Later still, his sociology textbook, Culture, reintroduced the first

2

Cultural studies and cultural theory usage, grouping it together with the second and third as ‘general’, and contrasting these with the fourth, more specifically ‘anthropological’ meaning (Williams, 1981, p. 11). Williams distinguished between the word’s physical and human applications; its positive and negative connotations; its use as a noun of process and as a noun of configuration; its politically radical and politically reactionary applications; and so on. He was clear, however, that these confusions and complications belonged to our ‘culture’ itself, rather than to any fault either in his analysis or in the term: ‘These variations . . . necessarily involve alternative views of the activities, relationships and processes which this complex word indicates. The complexity, that is to say, is not finally in the word but in the problems which its variations of use significantly indicate’ (Williams, 1976, p. 81). The range and the overlap of meanings, the distinctions simultaneously elided and insisted upon, are all in themselves ‘significant’ (p. 80). More recently, Geoffrey Hartman, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yale University, has observed that culture is ‘an inflammatory word’, which in some circumstances can even kindle ‘actual wars’ (Hartman, 1997, p. 14). Culture is a good thing, then, but also a dangerous thing. Hartman notes the same complexity that Williams observed, and the way the word’s use proliferates—‘camera culture, gun culture, service culture, museum culture, deaf culture, football culture’—so that it becomes a kind of ‘linguistic weed’ (p. 30). Both Williams and Hartman attempted to trace the intellectual history of the concept. In its earliest meanings, in English and in French, it had referred to the tending of natural growth, either in animals or in plants. Williams dated the word’s extension to include human development from the early sixteenth century in English usage; and its earliest use as an independent noun, to refer to an abstract process, from the mid-seventeenth century (Williams, 1976, pp. 77–8). His version of this history remained overwhelmingly English in focus, leading to Eliot, F.R. Leavis, Orwell and, by implication, himself. Hartman’s version (which includes Williams) is more cosmopolitan and leads to Spengler, Benda, Nazism and Heiner Müller. For Williams, the idea of culture held out the promise of emancipation; for Hartman, ‘the

3

Contemporary Cultural Theory fateful question’ as to whether a truly ‘generous’ idea of culture is possible remains only ‘precariously’ open (Williams, 1963, pp. 322–3; Hartman, 1997, pp. 192–3). For Hartman, the most crucial of the various distinctions in the term’s meaning is that between ‘culture’ as a general ideal, ‘a “republic of letters” in which ideas can be freely exchanged’, and ‘a culture’ as ‘a specific form of embodiment or solidarity’; he believes there is a crucial need to protect the former against the latter (Hartman, 1997, pp. 36, 41). For Williams, the most crucial distinction was that between the term’s use in the humanities and in the social sciences. The concept of ‘culture’, he explained: became a noun of ‘inner’ process, specialized to its presumed agencies in ‘intellectual life’ and ‘the arts’. It became also a noun of general process, specialized to its presumed configurations in ‘whole ways of life’. It played a crucial role in definitions of ‘the arts’ and ‘the humanities’, from the first sense. It played an equally crucial role in definitions of the ‘human sciences’ and the ‘social sciences’, in the second sense (Williams, 1977, p. 17).

Culture, then, may be counterposed to society, as ‘art’; but the two words may also be defined nearly coextensively, as everything that is left over after politics and economics. There is a clear parallel between Hartman and Williams here, since ‘culture’ is to ‘a culture’ as ‘arts’ is to ‘a whole way of life’. But where for Hartman the key distinction runs between a generality and a particular, a general public sphere and a singular subculture, for Williams it ran between two generalities, the arts and the whole way of life. Note the wider significance of this: while for Williams society still remained a generality, or a commonality, for Hartman it has already become a multicultural plurality of particulars. We shall return to the competing claims of what Williams termed the ‘common culture’ and politico-social multiculturalism in the chapters that follow. For the moment, however, suffice it to note that this is an issue of quite fundamental significance, not simply for academic cultural studies, but also for the future of our society and our culture.

4

Cultural studies and cultural theory The available definitions of the term ‘culture’ are many and various then, and we shall have cause to consider them in more detail in later chapters. But let us now offer our own working ‘non-definition’ of ‘culture’ as referring to that entire range of institutions, artefacts and practices that make up our symbolic universe. In one or another of its meanings, the term will thus embrace: art and religion, science and sport, education and leisure. By convention, however, it does not embrace the range of activities normally deemed either ‘economic’ or ‘political’. This threefold distinction, between the economics of the market, the politics of the state and the culture of what is sometimes referred to as civil society, has been a recurrent motif in modern social theory: it occurred, for example, in Karl Marx as the distinction between mode of production, political superstructure and social consciousness (Marx, 1975, p. 425) and in Max Weber as that between class, party and status (Weber, 1948). But it is clear that in each case, as in a whole range of parallel instances, consciousness/status/culture (ideology/discourse etc.) are largely residual categories, defined as much as anything by their negative property of not being economics or politics. As that which is neither work/class/exploitation nor war/ power/oppression, culture becomes ‘the heart of a heartless world’, to borrow Marx’s description of religion (Marx, 1975, p. 244). But just as religion in the abstract translates in practice into religions in the bitterly contested plural, so too culture readily translates into cultures. Hence its almost talismanic status during the so-called ‘culture wars’ of late twentieth-century United States, where it could denote simultaneously both the canonical high ‘culture’ of established academic tradition and the ethnic, sexual, generational and gendered ‘counter-cultures’ of the ‘new social movements’.

DEFINING CULTURAL STUDIES The culture wars provide a suitable occasion to proceed from culture to cultural studies, since part of what was at stake in their still unresolved outcome is precisely the status of the new

5

Contemporary Cultural Theory ‘proto-discipline’ in American higher education. As currently constructed, cultural studies still remains deeply indebted to the pioneering work of the Birmingham Centre. Founded in 1964, as a graduate research unit under the directorship of Richard Hoggart, then Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, the Centre became the intellectually pre-eminent institutional location for cultural studies, both in Britain and internationally, for most of the 1970s and 1980s. Anthony Easthope, late Professor of English and Cultural Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, judged the Birmingham Centre’s work the most important ‘intervention in cultural studies in Britain’ (Easthope, 1988, p. 74). Lawrence Grossberg, now Professor of Communication and Cultural Studies at North Carolina, agreed that: ‘there remains something like a center—to be precise, the tradition of British cultural studies, especially the work of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies’ (Grossberg et al., 1988, p. 8). Graeme Turner, founding editor of the Australian Journal of Cultural Studies and now Director of the Centre for Critical and Cultural Studies in Queensland, echoed this view: ‘the Birmingham Centre . . . can justifiably claim to be the key institution in the history of the field’ (Turner, 1996, p. 70). It is tempting, then, to look to Birmingham for a model of what is meant by ‘cultural studies’. Once again, however, the sign appears radically polysemic, for there was never a single Birmingham model, but rather an inescapable plurality of competing and often contradictory models. The unusually polysemic quality of ‘cultural studies’ attaches as much to the term ‘studies’ as to ‘culture’ or ‘cultural’: not only is there no clear consensus over what to study, but also none over how to organise this study. The various senses of ‘cultural studies’ seem to cluster around four main sets of meaning: as inter- or post-disciplinary; as a political intervention into the existing academic disciplines; as an entirely new discipline, defined in terms of an entirely new subject matter; and as a new discipline, defined in terms of a new theoretical paradigm. Cultural studies was clearly intended by Hoggart, in the initial proposal to establish the Centre, as essentially interdisciplinary in character, but with literary studies as its single ‘most important’ element (Hoggart, 1970, p. 255). A quarter of a century later, this continued

6

Cultural studies and cultural theory to be his view: ‘the student should have an initial discipline outside Cultural Studies,’ he would write, ‘an academic and intellectual training, and a severe one’ (Hoggart, 1995, p. 173). The modish notion of a ‘post-disciplinary’ cultural studies, canvassed in the early issues of the International Journal of Cultural Studies, appears to differ only very slightly from Hoggart’s sense of the interdisciplinary (cf. Hartley, 1998, pp. 5–8). There is a real difference, however, in the conception of cultural studies as a kind of political intervention, associated above all with Hall, Hoggart’s immediate successor as Director at Birmingham. For Hall, the ‘seriousness’ of cultural studies was inscribed in its ‘political’ aspect: ‘there is something at stake in cultural studies,’ he insisted, ‘in a way that . . . is not exactly true of many other . . . intellectual . . . practices’ (Hall, 1992, p. 278). Similarly ‘political’ conceptions recur throughout the cultural studies literature. According to During, this politically ‘engaged form of analysis’ constitutes one of the discipline’s most obviously distinguishing features (During, 1999, p. 2). The third conception sees cultural studies as an entirely new discipline defined in terms of a new subject matter: that is, the study of popular culture. America’s culture wars were substantially matters of race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, but insofar as they also brought cultural elitism into conflict with cultural populism, they clearly touched on this issue. For cultural elitists such as Harold Bloom, Professor of Humanities at Yale University, cultural studies has threatened to substitute ‘Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock’ for ‘Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth and Wallace Stevens’ (Bloom, 1994, p. 519). For cultural populists like Grossberg, this is precisely its promise. There can be little doubt that cultural studies did indeed emerge by way of a quasi-populist reaction against the elitism of older forms of literary study. All three of the disci...