Cultural Studies by Toby Miller (Introduction pages- 1-5) An Analysis.
Cultural studies are dynamic in nature. It accumulates theories from various disciplines like Marxism, feminism, queer theory and the post colonial. It has become popular in the humanities blending and blurring textual analysis of popular culture with social theory and focusing on the margins of power rather than reproducing established lines of force and authority. Instead of focusing on canonical works of art, governmental leadership or quantitative social data, cultural studies devotes time to sub cultures, popular media, music, clothing and sport. It focuses on how culture is used and transformed by “ordinary” and “marginal” social groups. It sees people not merely as consumers but as potential producers of new social values and cultural languages.
Cultural
Studies is a tendency across disciplines rather than a discipline itself. The
proof is evident in cultural practitioners’ tendency to avoid definitions,
insist on differentiation and sustaining the conventional credentials for
reasoning and research. The main concern of Cultural Studies is the
reproduction of culture through structural determinations on subjects versus
their own agency and this method is popularly termed as historical materialism.
It is animated by subjectivity and power- how human subjects are formed and how
they experience cultural and social space. It takes its agenda and mode of
analysis from economics, politics, media and communication studies, sociology,
literature, education, the law, science and technology studies, anthropology
and history with a particular focus on gender, race, class and sexuality in
everyday life and mixing textual and social theory for progressive social
change.
The
political significance of popular cultural practices can be exemplified through
subcultures. Subcultures signify a space under culture which shows a shift away
from culture as a tool of domination to culture as a tool for empowerment. This
move tries to find out how the socially disadvantaged individuals contest their
subservient position. Historical and contemporary studies conducted through the
1960s and the 1970s on slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits and the working class
emphasized non compliance with authority. For e.g., the UK research in this
area, had its agents like truants, drop outs, magazine readers. The trends it
focused on were Teddy boys, punks, bikers, skin heads, school students, teen
girls etc. These were people who deviated from the traditional norms. Such
research focused on the significance of collective style and how they subverted
achievement-oriented, materialistic, educationally driven values and appearance
of the middle-class. The assumption was that the subordinate groups adopt and
adapt signs and objects of the dominant culture, reorganizing them to
manufacture new meanings. It reversed members’ status as consumers. They became
producers of new fashions, inscribing alienation, difference and powerlessness
on their bodies. The decline of British economy and state across the 1970s was
exemplified in punks’ use of rubbish as a decoration: bag liners, lavatory
appliances and ripped and torn clothing. But then commodified fashion took over
and even when media denounced that punks were social devils, the fashion and
music industries were sending out spies in search of new trends in market.
Founding Fathers
Richard
Maxwell lists out four founding fathers of British cultural studies. All of
them are post war English based intellectuals. They were Richard Hoggart, E.P.
Thompson, Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall. These men were University
Professors and Adult educators of the left wing who wanted to understand the
culture and sensibilities of industrial workers.
Hoggart
was a left leavisite who favoured the upliftment of the working class through
literary study. He also gave importance to their popular pursuits seriously. His
classic work “The Uses of Literacy” appeared in the 1950s. He became a
celebrated member of various review bodies into public culture, a star defense
witness at the trial of penguin books
for publishing “Lady Chatterley”, and in the mid 1960s the founder of the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies(CCCS) at the University of Birmingham.
Thompson’s
key contribution came through his work, on the history of English working class
(1968). It focused on the view of the past from “below” rather than from
“above”. It abstained from theory and focused on ordinary people’s accounts of
their lives. It strongly opposed structuralist Marxism which had entered
British Cultural Studies of the 1970s under Louis Althussar(1977). Thompson was
also actively involved in the British campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
throughout 1960s and 1980s.
Hall
started as a left leavisite and worked as the deputy of Hoggart in CCCS for
some years and ultimately taking over it. He investigated state stereotyping and
ritualistic resistance. Later he shifted towards Foucauldianism and Post
colonial focusing on Cultural Studies’ relationship to Sociology and Media
Studies. He always sought a means for analyzing signs, representations and
ideology.
Williams
tries to make sense of cultural change and power dynamics. He has provided the
largest body of theory for ongoing cultural studies work through a wide array
of works focusing on literary history and theory, media and communications,
culture and society. He models a hybrid between critical political economy and
cultural studies. Williams opposes the idealist conceptions which believe that
culture is a march towards perfection measured by universal values that are
basic to human condition. He also questions documentary conceptions of culture
that record artistic work to preserve specific insights and highlight them
through criticism. Instead Williams proposes that we concentrate on the ways of
life and values of particular communities at particular times, noting benefits
and costs in how they are represented.
Cultural Materialism
William’s
method is popularly termed as Cultural materialism. It works on Karl Marx’s
insight that people manufacture their own conditions of existence, but often
without a conscious or enabling agency. Social practices make a way of life and
change it over time. This insight directs us away from historical and
contemporary culture that gives importance to aesthetic civilization, the
experiences of rulers and religion. Instead we should engage culture by reading
its products and considering their circumstances of creation and circulation.
Williams calls art and society as “project” and “formation” respectively. They
mix with no primacy accorded to either term. The relations of culture, their
twists, turns and changes are part of the material life of the society.
Cultural
materialism emphasizes material culture (buildings, cars, films, fashion,
sculpture and so on) with socio-historical change, explaining how culture
produced by ordinary people, is repackaged and sold to them. Williams divides
culture into dominant versus residual and emergent forms according to Antonio
Gramsci’s (1971) model of hegemony. The social order makes dominant culture
appear normal and natural with residual cultures which comprise old meanings
and practices which are no longer dominant, but still influential and emergent
cultural practices which are either propagated by a new class or incorporated
by the dominant as part of the hegemony. Williams terms it as the “structure of
feeling” that explains or develops the quality of life. To conclude, Williams
views of culture insists on the importance of community life, the conflicts of
culture, the social nature of culture and the cultural nature of society.
