Simon During | ‘Introduction’ to The Cultural Studies Reader

[Abridged Version of the Text with Subheadings Added]                                   

Culture as Industry

As the old working-class communal life fragmented, attention moved from locally produced and often long-standing cultural forms (pub life, group-singing, holidays at camps, and close-by seaside resorts etc.) to culture as organized from afar – both by the state through its educational system, and by what Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer called the “culture industry,” that is, highly developed music, film, and broadcasting businesses.

Culture as Hegemony: Not Coercion but Consent

The old notion of culture as a whole way of life became increasingly difficult to sustain. From the early 1970s, culture came to be regarded as a form of “hegemony” – a word associated with Antonio Gramsci, an Italian Marxist of the 1920s and 1930s. “Hegemony” is a term to describe relations of domination which are not visible as such. It involves not coercion but consent on the part of the dominated (or “subaltern”).

Cultural Studies: As a Critique of Culture’s Hegemonic Effects

As culture was thought about less as an expression of local communal lives and more as an apparatus within a large system of domination, cultural studies offered critiques of culture’s hegemonic effects.

Culture as ‘Signifying Practices’

At first such critique leant heavily on forms of semiotic analysis. This meant in effect that culture was broken down into discrete messages, “signifying practices” or “discourses” which were distributed by particular institutions and media. To take a rather simplified example: a semiotic analysis of cigarette-smoking among workers would analyze smoking not as a life-practice, that is, in terms of its importance as a rite of passage, its use in structuring the flow of time and so on, but in terms of its being a signifier produced by images like the “Marlboro Man,” which connote masculinity, freedom and transcendence of work-a-day life.

Individuals as ‘Constructs of Ideology’

In the 1970s, a hard form of structuralism did emerge. For this theory, individuals were constructs of ideology, where ideology means the set of discourses and images which constitute the most widespread knowledge and values – “common sense.” Ideology was required so that the state and capitalism can reproduce themselves without the threat of revolution.

State’s Claim to Neutrality is False

Here, as for Hoggart and Williams, the state’s claim to neutrality is false, but this time for more classically Marxist reasons – because it protects the exploitative “relations of production” (i.e., class differences) necessary to capitalism.

Dominant Ideology: Constructs an Imaginary Picture of Civil Life

For Althusser, dominant ideology turned what was in fact political, partial and open to change into something seemingly “natural,” universal and eternal. However, dominant ideology is not limited to politics or economics. Its primary role is to construct an imaginary picture of civil life, especially the nuclear family as natural and, most of all, each individual as “unique” and “free.”

Dominant Social Values Internalised through Identification with Ideology

They identify with ideology because they see themselves pictured as independent and strong in it – as an adolescent boy (or, indeed, adult) might picture himself, in a fantasy, as the Marlboro Man. Dominant social values are internalized through this kind of identification.

The Three Influential Texts in Cultural Studies

The richness of the research promoted by the CCCS during the 1970s makes that research impossible adequately to represent here. But three particularly influential texts – Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour (1977), David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience (1980) and Stuart Hall and Tony Jefferson’s Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain (1976) can rewardingly be described.

Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour: “Counter-school Culture”

First, Paul Willis’s Learning to Labour. Willis used participant observer techniques to describe a group of disaffected boys in a working-class school (the “lads”). He showed how they create a “counter-school culture” in which they reject the official logic which legitimizes their education.

David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience

David Morley’s The “Nationwide” Audience is one of the first ethnographic studies of an audience - the audience of Nationwide, a BBC news-magazine program widely watched through the late 1960s and 1970s, and which broadcasted mainly local stories, somewhat like a US breakfast show. He organized open-ended group discussions between viewers, with each group from a homogeneous class or gender or work background (trade unionists, managers, students etc.). He had to go out into the field to discover what people actually thought about its ideological orientation – that “everyday life” view of the world presented to the audience. The program is “structured in dominance” because it skews and restricts its audience’s possibilities for interpreting the material it claims to present without bias.

Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain

The third, and earliest, book, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Postwar Britain, is a collection of essays, each by different authors, each of which comes to grips with the fragmentation of traditional working-class culture in a different way. In general, the authors accepted that the working class was being split: one section being drawn into skilled jobs that would enable them to live like certain elements of the middle classes, another into deskilled, low-status and often service jobs. However, they argued that jobs of this latter kind were especially taken by disadvantaged youth, who, inheriting neither a strong sense of communal identity nor values transmitted across generations in families, develop subcultures. These subcultures negotiate with, and hybridize certain hegemonic cultural forms as modes of expression and opposition.

Influence of French Theorists on Cultural Studies since the late 1970s

In the late 1970s things changed. Cultural studies came increasingly under the influence of forms of thought associated with French theorists, in particular Pierre Bourdieu, Michel de Certeau and Michel Foucault.

Individuals Live in Institutions [or] Fields

For French theory, individuals live in a setting constituted by various institutions, or what we can call, following Bourdieu, “fields” – families, work, peer groups, educational apparatuses, political parties, and so on. Family life, for instance, depends upon images of the perfect family (mum, dad and a newborn baby, say) and members may feel pleasure when they reproduce that image, even if only for a moment.

Hierarchical Fields: Have a Fixed Purpose

Very hierarchical fields (like schools and offices) are most disciplined and rationalized: in them all activities are directed to a fixed purpose – education in a school, profit in a business. Further, each field has characteristic signifying practices more or less tightly attached to it: the same person may well talk, walk and dress differently at school (or work) to the way they do in the family, and differently again when socializing with their peers.

The Accelerated Globalizing of Cultural Production

Cultural studies’ affirmation of otherness and negation of meta-discourse must be understood also in terms of the accelerated globalizing of cultural production and distribution from the 1970s on.

Cultural Populism

Conceiving of cultural studies as the academic site for marginal or minority discourses had another, very different but no less visible and globalizing consequence, one which took it further from its original attack on mass culture. The discipline began to celebrate commercial culture, in a move we can call, following Jim McGuigan, “cultural populism”.

Transnational Cultural Studies

But perhaps the most profound topical change in cultural studies has been its focusing on cultural flow. Cultural studies’ objects are decreasingly restricted or delimited by distance and locality at all. Cultural studies which addresses such cases is often called “transnational cultural studies.” It’s eroding so-called “postcolonialism,” first nurtured in literary studies, which was so important a feature of the late 1980s and early 1990s intellectual landscape. Much critiqued on the grounds that it prematurely celebrated the end of colonialist relations of exploitation and dependency, postcolonialism increasingly has had to come to terms with “globalization” – a word often heard, rarely clearly understood. What’s globalization, then? Not simply, as it often seems, Thatcherism writ large, globalization is best understood as the development of global markets and capital so as to skew highly capitalized national economies towards service, information, financial instruments, and other high value-added products away from traditional primary commodities and massproduction industries.

“Is globalization reducing global cultural differences?”

This problem is not to be posed in the traditional fashion, i.e. “is globalization reducing global cultural differences?” – the answer to that being increasingly clearly “no, at least not in any simple way” since globalization is articulating all cultures and communities to one another in a process which also makes for new fragmentations and mixes, new niche and local markets; new opportunities for self-expression and alliance.

Engaged cultural studies encourages and takes notice of culture’s capacity to express and invoke less restricted (more “other,” counter-normative) ways of living.

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