Unit 4. Culture and politics

1. Work with a partner to discuss the following questions.

* Appendix 3 p. 153

1. What is the political significance of cultural practices?

2. How can politics influence culture?

3. Does culture somehow influence the polity?

2. Read the text quickly and find the answers to the questions from exercise 1.

Cultural studies is a tendency across disciplines, rather than a discipline itself. 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, commingling textual and social theory under the sign of a commitment to progressive social change.

Even though cultural studies can be understood as a kind of intellectual magpie, that which differentiates it from other subject areas is its connections to matters of power and politics and in particular to the need for social and cultural change. For Hall, what is at stake is the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics. That is, to an exploration of representations of and for marginalised social groups and the need for cultural change. Hence, cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Here, knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes.

The forms of power that cultural studies explores are diverse and include gender, race, class, colonialism, etc. Cultural studies seeks to explore the connections between these forms of power and to develop ways of thinking about culture and power that can be utilised by agents in the pursuit of change.

Cultural studies has come of age; it has achieved sufficiently wide popular recognition to become a butt of jokes in the media, and denunciation in the daily press, which suggests that it has touched a nerve somewhere in the body politic.

In fact cultural studies has been criticised from all sides over a number of issues:

- Some say that it is too political. Others that it is not political enough.

- It has no method. It has no object of study. It has no discipline. Or - it is too institutionalised academically.

- Too academic; not activist enough. Or - too activist; not scholarly enough.

- It celebrates when it should criticise. Or - it criticises when it should undertake policy research for external clients.

At stake in such debates are important questions about the power of intellectual work in society and in the development of public policy. Cultural studies can’t supply definitive answers to the intellectual, cultural and philosophical questions of the day, but it has proven a lively field of debate and dialogue. People from many different academic backgrounds, political persuasions and philosophical speaking positions have tried to address them in such a way that practical strategies and ways of acting in the world - whether that's the academic or the real world - can be improvised and implemented, as well as theorised and thought through.

Because of its position as a crossroads or bazaar for the exchange of ideas from many directions, cultural studies has been at one and the same time a motley confusion of difference, and an ambitious intellectual enterprise, seeking nothing less than to rethink received truths and remake inherited frameworks of explanation. On the ground of difference, debate and disagreement, it has sought to build a new consciousness.

Cultural studies is itself a symptom - not least in having such an ambition - of widespread doubt and disillusion about the continuing ability of inherited truths to command assent. The wonderful promises of the modern era - progress, science, truth, reason, plenty, comfort, security - looked very battered indeed in the years after the Second World War. Holocaust, Cold War, Mutually Assured Destruction, police states, Stalinism, Vietnam: no one was innocent, nothing was plain and simple, fear and desire infested reason and truth, progress created its own terrorists. Cultural studies was a symptom of the urgent and profound need to think seriously and in a sustained way about such matters, and how they connected with unprecedented personal freedoms and affluence at least in the developed world, new opportunities in education and cultural expression, and expanded horizons of experience for young people, women, people of colour, and many other social groups and identities.

Cultural studies has always been an unfolding discourse, responding to changing historical and political conditions and always marked by debate, disagreement and intervention. For example, in the late 1970s the centrality of class in cultural studies was disrupted first by feminism's insistence on the importance of gender, and then by black- students raising questions about the invisibility of ‘race’ in much cultural studies analysis. It is simply not possible now to think of cultural studies and popular culture, for example, without also thinking about the enormous contribution to the study of popular culture made by feminism. In the early 1970s, such a connection would have been far from obvious.

The political significance of popular cultural practices is perhaps best exemplified in subcultures. Subcultures signify a space under culture, simultaneously opposed to, derivative of, and informing official, dominant, governmental, com­mercial, bureaucratically organised forms of life - a shift away from culture as a tool of domination and towards culture as a tool of empowerment. This move wants to find out how the socially disadvantaged use culture to contest their subservient position. Historical and contemporary studies conducted through the 1960s and 1970s on slaves, crowds, pirates, bandits, and the working class emphasised day-to-day noncompliance with authority. For example, UK research into Teddy Boys, Mods, bikers, skinheads, punks, school students, teen girls, and Rastas had as its magical agents of history truants, drop-outs, and magazine readers - people who deviated from the norms of school and the transition to work by entering subcultures. Such research examined the structural underpinnings to collective style, investigating how their bricolage sub­verted the achievement-oriented, materialistic, educationally driven values and appearance of the middle class. The working assumption was that subordinate groups adopt and adapt signs and objects of the dominant culture, reorganising them to manufacture new meanings. Consumption was the epicenter of such subcultures; paradoxically, it also reversed members' status as consumers. They become producers of new fashions, inscribing alienation, difference, and powerlessness on their bodies.