Culture 2nd Edition

CULTURE SECOND EDITION ‘Culture’ is a concept that has remained on the top of the agenda within the social sciences fo...

Author: Chris Jenks

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CULTURE SECOND EDITION

‘Culture’ is a concept that has remained on the top of the agenda within the social sciences for two decades. It incites controversy and debate and always appears fresh. In this second edition of Culture, the author argues that to understand the concept of culture we need to locate it within traditions of thought and appreciate its political and ideological bases. He looks at the concept in the context of idealism and materialism, examining its relation to the notion of social structure and assessing its once assumed monopoly within literary study. Culture has been updated throughout, and includes new sections on visual culture, urban culture and subcultures. This comprehensive introduction to the subject remains accessible and stimulating, and will appeal to students of sociology and cultural studies. Chris Jenks is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Brunel University. He has written numerous books on culture, sociology and childhood. He is interested in sociological theory, post-structuralism and heterology, childhood, cultural theory, visual and urban culture, and extremes of behaviour.

KEY IDEAS SERIES EDITOR: PETER HAMILTON, THE OPEN UNIVERSITY, MILTON KEYNES

Designed to complement the successful Key Sociologists, this series covers the main concepts, issues, debates and controversies in sociology and the social sciences. The series aims to provide authoritative essays on central topics of social science, such as community, power, work, sexuality, inequality, benefits and ideology, class, family, etc. Books adopt a strong individual ‘line’ constituting original essays rather than literature surveys, offering lively and original treatments of their subject matter. The books will be useful to students and teachers of sociology, political science, economics, psychology, philosophy and geography. Citizenship KEITH FAULKS

Old Age JOHN VINCENT

Class STEPHEN EDGELL

Postmodernity BARRY SMART

Community GERARD DELANTY

Racism – second edition ROBERT MILES AND MALCOLM BROWN

Consumption ROBERT BOCOCK Culture – second edition CHRIS JENKS Globalization – second edition MALCOLM WATERS

Risk DEBORAH LUPTON Sexuality – second edition JEFFREY WEEKS Social Capital JOHN FIELD

Lifestyle DAVID CHANEY

Social Identity – second edition RICHARD JENKINS

Mass Media PIERRE SORLIN

Transgression CHRIS JENKS

Moral Panics KENNETH THOMPSON

The Virtual ROB SHIELDS

CULTURE SECOND EDITION Chris Jenks

First edition published 1993 by Routledge Second edition published 2005 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004.

© 1993, 2005 Chris Jenks All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Jenks, Chris. Culture / Chris Jenks.—2nd ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. 1. Culture—Philosophy. 2. Social structure. I. Title. HM621.J43 2004 306—dc22 2004008423 ISBN 0-203-44631-3 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-67972-5 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–33867–0 (hbk) ISBN 0–415–33868–9 (pbk)

For Barbara with love

CONTENTS

Notes on the author Preface to the second edition Introduction 1

The origins of the concept of culture in philosophy and the literary tradition

ix xi 1

6

2

The relation between culture and social structure

25

3

Culture, idealism and social action

44

4

Culture, Marxism and materialism

64

5

Cultural stratification

94

6

Cultural reproduction

114

7

Subculture

133

8

Visual culture

153

viii contents 9 Urban culture

173

10 Culture and postmodernism

190

11 Cultural studies: what is it?

205

BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX

214 225

THE

AUTHOR

Chris Jenks is Professor of Sociology and Pro-Vice-Chancellor at Brunel University. His previous books include: Rationality, Education and the Social Organization of Knowledge (Routledge 1976); Worlds Apart – Readings for a Sociology of Education [with J. Beck, N. Keddie and M. Young] (CollierMacmillan 1977); Toward a Sociology of Education [with J. Beck, N. Keddie and M. Young] (Transaction 1977); The Sociology of Childhood (Batsford 1982); Culture (Routledge 1993); Cultural Reproduction (Routledge 1993); Visual Culture (Routledge 1995); Childhood (Routledge 1996); Theorizing Childhood [with A. James and A. Prout] (Polity 1998); Core Sociological Dichotomies (Sage 1998); Images of Community: Durkheim, Social Systems and the Sociology of Art [with J.A. Smith] (Ashgate 2000); Aspects of Urban Culture (Academia Sinica 2001); Culture: Critical Concepts – 4 Volumes (Routledge 2002); Transgression (Routledge 2003); Urban Culture – 4 Volumes (Routledge 2004); Subculture: Fragmentation of the Social (Sage 2004); and Qualitative Complexity [with J.A. Smith] (Routledge 2004). He is interested in sociological theory, post-structuralism and heterology, childhood, cultural theory, visual and urban culture, and extremes of behaviour.

PREFACE

TO THE SECOND EDITION

When this book was first published in 1993 I was, oddly enough, quite pleased with it. It seemed well organized, it was internally coherent and it had a bouncy and inviting style. Clearly a decade of readers has agreed with my original enthusiasm for the text; it has sold very well with Routledge having produced five reprints, including a digital version. Students tell me the work is accessible and instructive and colleagues tell me, among other things, that it is comprehensive and a serious read. The book has been adopted on courses throughout the country and around the world and it has been translated into a number of languages, including Chinese. Perhaps it would have been a good idea to leave it there; it is my natural inclination to move forward rather than back. However, when it was suggested to me that a second edition might be welcome I reread the book and still found it useful, it was not exhausted and its message did not refer to the fashionable ephemera of the 1980s boom in cultural studies but rather to over a century of social, political and philosophical thinking about the mysterious idea of ‘culture’. I believe the work to be a serious history of ideas and an exercise in the sociology of culture. So the time has come to revisit the text, to raise it phoenix-like from the past. To this end I have included three completely new chapters on ‘visual culture’, ‘subculture’ and ‘urban culture’ and I have removed the lengthy case study on cultural deprivation that concluded the first edition. I wanted to remove a further chapter but it was retained ‘by popular demand’ after the publishers had sought advice through peer review. Beyond this I have checked and amended the complete manuscript, converted some of my original sentences into rather more and injected clarity whenever I sensed

xii preface to the second edition fog in the narrative. There are some contemporary examples included and I have converted the referencing from the footnotes that were once the Routledge house style to the Harvard system that we are all now familiar with. I would like to have kept Peter Hamilton’s brilliant photograph from the original cover but, as we cultural theorists know, we have to re-brand, re-logo, shift signifiers, etc. or nobody will be convinced that anything has changed. I hope new readers enjoy this second edition and benefit from it as much as folk appeared to from the first.

INTRODUCTION

Raymond Williams (1976) informs us that ‘Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language’ and while he is never quite good enough to tell us what the other one, or perhaps two, might be, I have no principled, let alone experientially based, reasons to demur on this point. The idea of culture embraces a range of topics, processes, differences and even paradoxes such that only a confident and wise person would begin to pontificate about it and perhaps only a fool would attempt to write a book about it – thus I begin. The concept is at least complex and at most so divergent in its various applications as to defy the possibility, or indeed the necessity, of any singular designation. It is nevertheless real in its significations both in everyday language and in its increasingly broad currency within the fashionable discourses of the modern academy. This last point concerning the contemporary (re-)emergence of interest in the conceptualization of culture, particularly within intellectual circles, is perhaps a good one from which to proceed. Every generation, it is rightly supposed, creates new objects, ideas and meanings – such is

2

introduction

the nature of social change, for better or worse. However, preceding generations, and later the reflexive investigations of historical studies, quite often assert that far from such creations embodying originality they are rather re-invocations of ideas or states of affairs that went before. This is not some crude espousal of a doctrine of eternal returns nor even an argument in support of a theory of the universal properties of social life. What I am recommending is that any such creativity must be understood in relation to its social context. Just so with ‘culture’. It has not been invented in the latter part of the twentieth century; however, the contemporary upsurge in interest centred on the idea of culture must surely tell us something about the times we are living through. Indeed, this is what Chaney (1994) refers to as the ‘cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Part of my purpose in this account of the concept of culture will be to place it within a history of ideas, part also will be to review and synthesize different arguments and perspectives on the topic, and to look critically at the character and status of some of the modern debates around the issue. These caveats are meant, in part, as a warning to the reader that within this text it is not my intention to examine just the vanguard of heady exotica in contemporary ‘cultural studies’. I am a sociologist and I approach culture as primarily a sociological problem. I also believe that the concept of culture has a history and that it does so in relation to traditions of thought; all of which are, in turn, located in social structures. An investigation of such traditions and their social contexts will take us both far and wide: into the realms of European philosophy, with Kant and Hegel writ large, through the classical theories of sociology and cultural anthropology stemming from the beginning of the century, and up to modern hermeneutics, structuralisms and post-structuralisms. We will also, of necessity, take in the contributions of romanticism and literary criticism along with critical aesthetics – all of which have added to the present state of our understanding of and ways of relating to ‘culture’. It is my conscious intention to ground the idea of culture in established theory and thus, I anticipate, to demonstrate the origins, the problematics, the desire and the energy that motivates whatever is most contemporary in the ever-growing body of books and journals dedicated to the topic, and the burgeoning mass of courses and degree programmes located in this area of study. This is no slight on nor denigration of the new. The vigorous emergence of cultural theory over the last decade is both an exciting

introduction

development within the social sciences and an interesting topic for those very disciplines. The traditions of thought that I am seeking to honour and reveal are ‘living’ traditions, they are not presented here as curios or exhibits in a museum. My projected strategy is not based on a stance of ritualistic obeisance to my tradition but on a serious rereading of that tradition animated by both criticism and respect. In this way I shall reveal some unexpected resemblances, homologies and resonances between schools of thought usually regarded as radically different if not openly hostile to one another. The newcomer to the field, or indeed the informed reader, will be quite capable of engaging, at some level, with the most recently published debates and controversies over culture. My purpose here is to present such readers with a map of our existing territory, and a guide to that map in the form of a classification, or a morphology, of the central concepts and ideas in terms of their meanings, origins and overlaps. Once equipped with such a guide the interested stranger can become familiar, a ‘local resident’, and thereby embark on a better informed and more critical appreciation of tomorrow’s news in the study of culture. If this work succeeds it should contrive to render its own classification of ideas already outmoded or inappropriate for the emergent theorist. This point is also attested to by the fact that the contents of this work have evolved and changed to form the second edition. It will also, I trust, have shown this classification as itself a cultural practice involving critical reading, judgement and discernment, and adherence to an intellectual discipline (a symbolic culture). Let me begin with an example I employed in the first edition of this book; it remains worthy of attention because it is still wholly pertinent and the debate it points to has in no sense abated. In a television interview towards the end of 1991 the modern left-wing playwright David Hare referred to ‘the idea that is now very popular . . . that Bob Dylan is just as good a poet as Keats’. He went on to disagree with such thinking and to cite it as an instance of a modern populist ideology concerning the equivalence of all cultural products. Hare’s own position was quite the contrary, indeed he appeared to be rallying the latent elitism within our society that has been silenced by the current overbearing political correctness of a public opinion which, masquerading as democracy, is in fact only the fear, or at worst the inability, to make critical judgements concerning matters of taste and quality. Hare’s view was that culture

3

4

introduction

concerned absolute standards, standards which demand the greatest effort and engagement on the part of its creator and its audience. Culture, from this perspective, does not merely entertain; it enriches and uplifts; it embodies a struggle in its inception and in its apprehension which itself involves the maximization or even the extension of human potential. As such, culture is not to be treated lightly, it cannot be released into a pool of generalities or dissolved within a postmodern mood of relativism. It is not the case that ‘anything goes’; nihilism for Hare is not a viable standpoint. Now, I begin with this instance because of what it points us towards when we address the concept of culture. Interesting as Hare’s views may be, the arguments have been largely prefigured in debates conducted by such eminent figures as Wordsworth and Coleridge, T.S. Eliot and Leavis, and more recently Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart; all of which we shall examine later. However, when Hare made his point public the effect was to reopen a series of strategies for differentiation that exist both within the intellectual field and also the collective consciousness. As John Naughton, critic for UK broadsheet the Observer put it: Much to Mr. Hare’s surprise this entirely unremarkable judgement caused quite a stir. Men with moustaches and pork-pie hats came up to him in the street and exhorted him to keep up the good work. He became the folk hero among taxi drivers and others who think that the country is going to the dogs. It was, they thought, high time that someone made a stand against the prevailing tide of cultural relativism and its doctrine that whatever turns you on is OK. The relativists, for their part, regarded Mr. Hare with angry distaste, and muttered into their muesli. The acrid truth he had uttered left an unpleasant stench in their progressive nostrils. It opened up the terrifying prospect of a return to a state in which rigorous value judgements might become the norm, in which people might say that some works of art were better than others rather than being simply more or less ‘interesting’. (Observer 1/12/91)

What we can hear in this quote, distilled through hyperbole, is a whole series of attitudes, or rather, discourses, about identity and difference within society. We can hear social class, nationalism, political allegiance

introduction

and generation; all in relation to life-styles and finally all in relation to an implicit theory of cultural value. Should we say that the argument here revolves around the opposition between absolutism and relativism? This is certainly an important dichotomy in the history and understanding of culture, and one that occurs in the vocabulary of the contributors to this exchange. Or should we say that this binary is only a mask for the true difference at work, which is between elitism and egalitarianism? Though this may be nothing more than an attempt to politicize a debate about standards. Conversely to ignore such a point could be seen as an attempt to depoliticize an otherwise purely ideological contradiction. This political dimension would also seem to be an important level of consideration in the understanding of culture. But what if we move to a more analytical level and suggest that the real difference at work is one between evaluation and description; culture is a concept that fulfils either one of these tasks. Such a position has been maintained in the justification of the differentiation between the two dominant academic uses of the concept culture. What I shall say at this point is that each of these considerations, and others to follow, contribute to our problematic ‘what do we mean by culture?’ and ‘how is the term used?’ Man does not have a nature, but a history. (Ortega y Gasset)

5

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

1 THE ORIGINS OF THE CONCEPT OF CULTURE IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE LITERARY TRADITION there is no such thing as a human nature independent of culture. Men without culture would not be the clever savages of Golding’s Lord of the Flies thrown back upon the cruel wisdom of their animal instincts; nor would they be the nature’s noblemen of Enlightenment primitivism or even, as classical anthropological theory would imply, intrinsically talented apes who had somehow failed to find themselves. They would be unworkable monstrosities with very few useful instincts, fewer recognisable sentiments, and no intellect: mental basket cases. (Geertz 1965: 112–13)

So what then is this thing called culture? What is this mediation that appears to rob ‘man’ of his nature and locate his action and practices within an endowment of socially produced symbolic forms? Culture itself, whatever its facticity, is also a concept with a history, some of which we shall try and trace in the chapters that follow. It is hoped that we will not

origins of the concept of culture

succumb to any one ‘origin myth’ for, as anthropologists would tell us in relation to primitive cosmologies, such devices only serve to exercise closure, they silence debate and controversy and, usually, justify the existing rationale for the status quo; nevertheless we will ‘dig around’ for sources, albeit competing ones. One compelling account, and one that I shall trade off because it is symbiotic with the upsurge of social theory, is that the idea of ‘culture’ can be witnessed emerging in the late eighteenth century and on into the nineteenth century as part of, and largely as a reaction to, the massive changes that were occurring in the structure and quality of social life (which we might also refer to as the advance of modernity). These changes, at the social, political, and personal levels, were both confusing and disorientating, and certainly controversial. Such changes, through industrialization and technology, were unprecedented in human experience; they were wildly expansionist, horizons were simply consumed; grossly productive, for good and ill; and both understood and legitimated through an ideology of progress. The social structure was politically volatile, being increasingly and visibly divisive. This was a situation brought about through the new forms of ranking and hierarchy that accompanied the proliferating division of labour, combined with the density and proximity of populations resulting from urbanization and the improved system of communications. In one sense the overall aesthetic quality of life, compared with the previously supposed rural idyll, was threatened by the machinelike excesses of industrial society. There was an increasing gap between the creative and the productive, formulated for materialism by Marx as ‘alienation’, and for the romantic-idealist tradition by Carlyle as a loss of the folk purity of a past era. The machine was viewed as consuming the natural character of humankind, a call to be later echoed in the work of the Frankfurt School, Benjamin’s ‘Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, even Marcuse’s sense of ‘one-dimensionality’, and finally the cri de coeur of Baudrillard’s evocation of postmodernism with its horror of simulacra. Whereas we began with ‘culture’ mediating between humankind and nature, it can now be seen to mediate between humankind and Machine. This provides us with several available ‘meanings’ of culture. Another account looks back to classical society. ‘Civilization’, deriving from the Latin civis, is a term descriptive of a state of belonging to a collectivity that embodied certain qualities, albeit self-appointed, which distinguished it from the ‘mass’ or more lowly state of being typified as

7

8


that of the ‘barbarian’. Such was the ancient Greek and Roman sense of identification with nation and state. In this context the idea of ‘culture’ is not so much descriptive as metaphoric and derives, philologically, from the agricultural or horticultural processes of cultivating the soil and bringing fauna and flora into being through growth. Whereas the former concept, ‘civilization’, is descriptive of a kind of stasis, a membership, a belonging, indeed a status once achieved not to be relinquished; the latter, ‘culture’, is resonant with other ideas of emergence and change, perhaps even transformation. Thus we move to ideas of socialization as ‘cultivating’ the person, education as ‘cultivating’ the mind and colonialization as ‘cultivating’ the natives. All of these uses of culture, as process, imply not just a transition but also a goal in the form of ‘culture’ itself; it is here that hierarchical notions begin to emerge such as the ‘cultured person’ or ‘cultivated groups or individuals’ and even the idea of a ‘high culture’, all of which reduce the metaphoricity of process and begin to coalesce with the original notion of a descriptive state of being not essentially unlike the formative idea of civilization itself. However, we are provided with another set of ‘meanings’ for culture. Sociologists and anthropologists have come to account for the concept of culture in a variety of ways. In its most general and pervasive sense it directs us to a consideration of all that which is symbolic; the learned, ideational aspects of human society. In an early sense culture was precisely the collective noun used to define that realm of human being which marked its ontology off from the sphere of the merely natural. To speak of the cultural was to reaffirm a philosophical commitment to the difference, particularity and supposed plasticity that is ‘humankind’. Animals, even the chattering dolphins, ‘do’ nature, while human beings inevitably transform their world into, and by way of, a series (perhaps an infinite series) of symbolic representations. The symbolic then satisfies and absorbs the projections of human beings into objects and states of affairs that are different, and it also acts as a mediator between these two provinces. We no longer confront the natural as if we were continuous with it, as it is supposed that animals do. We now meet with the natural and, indeed, experience it as preformed, through our vocabulary of symbols which are primarily linguistic but increasingly elaborate, out into other forms like custom, convention, habit and even artefact. The symbolic representations that constitute human knowing are, in their various groupings,


classifications and manifestations, the cultural. The very idea of culture therefore generates a concept which, at one level, provides a principle of unification for the peoples of the world, through time and across space. Culture then, for early anthropology, was the common domain of the human; it distinguished our behaviour from that of other creatures and it provided a conceptual break with the dominant explanatory resource of biological and, latterly, genetic determinism. From this happy state of egalitarian one-ness through the aegis of culture – the very inspiration for cultural anthropology – the story takes a different turn and we move into accounts of diffusion, stratification, hierarchy and relativism, still clinging to the unrevised central concept of culture. Some of these tributaries and their ramifications we shall explore later in the text. The dominant European linguistic convention equates ‘culture’ largely with the idea of ‘civilization’: they are regarded as synonymous. Both ideas may be used interchangeably with integrity in opposition to notions of that which is vulgar, backward, ignorant or retrogressive. Within the German intellectual tradition, to which we shall be repeatedly drawn, a different and particular sense of culture emerged that was to assume a dominant place in our everyday understandings. This was the romantic, elitist view, that culture specified the pinnacle of human achievement. Culture, in this sense, came to specify that which is remarkable in human creative achievement. Rather than encapsulating all human symbolic representation, German Kultur pointed us exclusively to levels of excellence in fine art, literature, music and individual personal perfection. The main body, or in this formulation, the residue of what we have previously meant as culture, was to be understood in terms of the concept of Zivilisation. This distinction, by no means fine, in many ways reflected the dichotomy provided by Kantian philosophy between the realms of ‘value’ and ‘fact’, and was generative of two different ways of understanding and relating to the world. These realms were systematically promoted into an antagonism at one level utterly esoteric and of interest to philosophers only, but at another level the very grounds of the spurious doctrine of racial superiority that provided an impetus to the Holocaust. We will discuss this divide later in relation to idealism and materialism and cultural stratification, but we might here note that such distinctions also gave rise to the belief that the human spirit (perhaps the Geist itself) came under successive threat with the advent and advance of modernity and the inexorable process of material development which, it was supposed, gave

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10 origins of the concept of culture rise to an increasingly anonymous and amorphous urban mass society; thus linking with our initial argument. The impersonal, yet evil, forces of standardization, industrialization and technologies of mass production became the analytic target for the romantic neo-Marxist criticism of the Frankfurt School within their theories of aesthetics, mass communication and mass society, and also in the early sociology of culture propounded by Norbert Elias with his ideas of the ‘civilizing process’. Within the confines of British and American social theory the concept of culture has been understood in a far more pluralist sense and applied, until relatively recently, on a far more sparing basis. Although culture is a familiar term within our tradition and can be employed to summon up holistic appraisals of the ways of life of a people, their beliefs, rituals and customs, we social scientists are rather more accustomed to mobilizing such batteries of understanding into ‘action sets’. That is, we tend to use more specific concepts like, for example, ‘value systems’ (even ‘central value systems’), ‘patterns of belief’, ‘value-orientations’ or more critical notions like ‘ideologies’. Culture to British and American social theorists tends to have been most usefully applied as a concept of differentiation within a collectivity rather than a way of gathering. That is to say that the concept has become artfully employed in, for example, the sociology of knowledge that Karl Mannheim recommended, and also in the spectrum of perspectives on the sociology of deviance – ranging from Parsonian theory through to symbolic interactionism – in the manner of ‘subculture’. A subculture is the way of defining and honouring the particular specification and demarcation of special or different interests of a group of people within a larger collectivity (as we shall see in greater depth in Chapter 7). So just as classical sociology in the form of Tönnies or Durkheim, or indeed Comte, had recognized that the composition of the overall collective life emerged through the advance of the division of labour – by dint of the fragile integration through interdependence of a whole series of smaller, internally cohesive, social units – so also does modern social theory by articulating the specific mores of these minor groups, albeit often as ‘non-normative’ or even ‘deviant’. This dispersion of subcultures is at the base of what we might mean by a ‘pluralist’ view of culture; it is modern and democratic and shies away from all of the excesses of a grand systems theory with all of its incumbent conservative tendencies and its implicit ‘oversocialized conception of man’ (Wrong 1961). Such thinking succumbs, however, to the problem of order. Without a coherent, overall theory of culture


(which still, in many senses, eludes us), it is hard to conceive of how consensus is maintained within a modern society. In response to precisely this problem, contemporary Marxism has generated the ‘dominant ideology thesis’ which supposes that varieties of hegemonic strategies of mass media and political propaganda create a distorted illusion of shared concerns in the face of the real and contentious divisions that exist between classes, genders, ethnic groups, geographical regions and age groups. Such a thesis is by no means universally accepted within the social sciences and in many ways the more recent explosion of interest in and dedication to the schizophrenic prognosis of postmodernisms (and even complexity theory) positively accelerates the centrifugal tendencies of the cultural particles. I will now attempt to summarize some of the above accounts of the genesis of our concept ‘culture’ through a fourfold typology from which we can move on. 1. Culture as a cerebral, or certainly a cognitive category. Culture becomes intelligible as a general state of mind. It carries with it the idea of perfection, a goal or an aspiration of individual human achievement or emancipation. At one level this might be a reflection of a highly individualist philosophy and at another level an instance of a philosophical commitment to the particularity and difference, even the ‘chosenness’ or superiority of humankind. This links into themes of redemption in later writings, from Marx’s false consciousness to the melancholy science of the Frankfurt School. In origin we will see it mostly in the work of the romantic literary and cultural criticism of William Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle and latterly Matthew Arnold. 2. Culture as a more embodied and collective category. Culture invokes a state of intellectual and/or moral development in society. This is a position linking culture with the idea of civilization and one that is informed by the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin (1809–82) and informative of that group of social theorists now known as the ‘early evolutionists’ who pioneered anthropology, with their competitive views on ‘degeneration’ and ‘progress’, and linked the endeavour up with nineteenth-century imperialism. This notion nevertheless takes the idea of culture into the province of the collective life, rather than the individual consciousness.

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12 origins of the concept of culture 3. Culture as a descriptive and concrete category. Culture viewed as the collective body of arts and intellectual work within any one society. This is very much an everyday language usage of the term culture and carries along with it senses of particularity, exclusivity, elitism, specialist knowledge and training or socialization. It includes a firmly established notion of culture as the realm of the produced and sedimented symbolic; albeit the esoteric symbolism of a society. 4. Culture as a social category. Culture regarded as the whole way of life of a people. This is the pluralist and potentially democratic sense of the concept that has come to be the zone of concern within sociology and anthropology and latterly, within a more localized sense, cultural studies. A PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION: ARISTOTLE, LOCKE, VICO, TURGOT AND BENTHAM Although, as one major strand in our modern thinking displays, culture is often understood in relation to achievements within the realms of art and literature, the nearest classical approximation to our present-day view is found not in the study of aesthetics but in moral philosophy. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics reveals an understanding of human excellence, shared normative expectations as evaluative criteria, and a sense of the natural disposition of humankind to such achievement. The work rests on an essential teleology that all things are to be understood in terms of their purposes but their purposes are not wilful, nor merely contingent, they are inherent in the nature of things. The ‘good’ for Aristotle is that which all things aim at and the ‘good’ for humankind is happiness in the form of virtuous action. This is the true realization of human nature and all other conduct falls short of our true potential. The virtue or excellence of a human being is achieved through the maximization of the potentialities of our nature and as people are essentially rational creatures their ‘good’ is found in the activity of the soul in accordance with reason. Although Aristotle is offering a type of naturalism it is in no sense a reductionist argument because it enables the important difference between empirical reality and a sense of the ideal – this is a conceptual gap that is often relevant to the analyses and recommendations of cultural theorists. In our search for origins an unlikely source but, I believe, a genuine one, is to be found in John Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding


(1690). Although he never invokes a concept of culture he does forcefully indicate the predisposition of human consciousness to the assimilation of the baggage of collective knowledge. Of course, Locke’s treatise is more familiarly known as a landmark in the history of British philosophy. It provides us with the tabula rasa, the empty bucket theory of mind, which, once united with Bishop Berkeley’s radical subjectivism and David Hume’s sceptical inductionism, sends us on the arid path to modern empiricism with its compulsive and dogmatic adhesion to the centrality of the senses. However, the critique of the a priori in the first book of Locke’s essay tells a second story. When he shows us that children and halfwits do not appear to conform to the rules of thinking and behaving that are supposedly ‘stamped upon the mind of men’, he is clearing the space for a knowledge that is pluralistic and diffused, but more locally, shared, learned and transmitted. The thought of the eighteenth-century philosopher Giovanni Battista Vico was directly in line with the demands of the Enlightenment project. His New Science (1744) addressed itself wholeheartedly to the range of phenomena gathered by Pope’s dictum that ‘the proper study of mankind is man’. However, whereas the epistemological awakenings of the Enlightenment encouraged the study of human affairs through the objectivities and mechanicisms of the ‘hard’ sciences, Vico’s new science was clearly the precursor of social theory; it opted to investigate human ‘being’ in terms of its own symbolic creations. This investigation, or ‘philology’ as Vico referred to it, would look to what humankind had sedimented through its history, its mode of communication, its belief systems and its legal conventions. In short, many of Vico’s topics for empirical study we would today include as elements in our definition of culture. Although operating with a rationalist scepticism in the manner of René Descartes, who having employed the cogito to prove the existence of ‘self’ then pressed on to prove the existence of God and finally targeted ‘nature’, Vico’s goals were far less ambitious. He left the production and comprehension of nature to God and restricted the new science to knowing the knowable, namely, that which man himself had created; what we have come to call culture. the world of civil society has certainly been made by men and its principles are therefore to be found within the modification of our own human mind.

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14 origins of the concept of culture Because of the indefinite nature of the human mind, wherever it is lost in ignorance, man makes himself the measure of all things. When men are ignorant of the natural causes producing things, they attribute their own nature to them. (Vico 1999)

It is not surprising given the content of these brief passages that certain forms of contemporary structuralism have traced their roots back to Vico also. However, our primary interest in such utterances is that Vico is speaking of the symbolic transformation of the ‘natural’ into the ‘cultural’. The history of human culture and civilization attests to the triumph of the inherent tendencies of the human constitution. Man has ceased to crawl and act like a wild beast because of the creative encoding of his species being. The New Science begins with a series of philosophical assertions on the basis of which human purpose, progress and cultural evolution are assured. They are redolent with a dynamism and a creative potential that humankind, it is argued, projects into that which is other than itself and therefore orders and tames it; the idea resonates with Claude Lévi-Strauss’s view on the practice and function of primitive cosmologies. The resonance amplifies when Vico next turns to an analysis of mythology in order to account human prehistory (itself a myth that prefigures all social theory in a variety of forms, from Durkheim’s ‘primitive hoard’, through Rousseau’s primitive but ‘gentle savage’, to Marx’s ‘primitive communism’). The outcome of this analysis is a theory of social en-culturation, that is, all societies must pass through three stages; the age of Gods, the age of Heroes and the age of Men (a gradient not essentially distant from Comte’s epistemological evolution from theology, through metaphysics to positivism). Corresponding to these three stages are three kinds of customs: belief systems, laws and commonwealths. The human persona transforms, in parallel, from ferocity, through pride into reason. This is surely an early parable concerning culture as the unfolding essence of human goodness. The first clearly recognizable formulation of our concept of culture (at this stage without a name) is provided through the excavations of the anthropologist Marvin Harris into European philosophy. He reveals a succinct passage from the work of Anne Robert Jacques Turgot dated 1750 which states:

origins of the concept of culture Possessor of a treasure of signs which he has the faculty of multiplying into infinity, he (man) is able to assure the retention of his acquired ideas, to communicate them to other men, and to transmit them to his successors as a constantly expanding heritage. (Turgot quoted in Harris 1968: 14)

And this may prove to be a definition that it is hard to improve upon. Jeremy Bentham’s writing in An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789) can be read as a treatise in amelioration, that is a well-meaning ethical foundation for the adjustment of the individual will to the onslaught and ravages of its times. As the exponentially reproductive processes and structures of industrialization began to produce for the population, so also did they produce at the expense of the population. The increasing availability of commodities on the market place of free enterprise was an idea easily offset by the concentrations of human misery that were being routinely invested in their manufacture. Adam Smith’s economic principle of ‘the division of labour’ and its social reality in the reorganization and orientation of human relationships was leading many diverse thinkers to contemplate the erosion of both personal creativity and the human spirit, and also the necessity for a ruling system of cohesion and concerted change. This was clearly giving birth to doctrines of revolution, revision, romanticism and conservation. Bentham’s ‘principle of utility’ which has become diluted into a modern version of keeping everybody happy, is in fact to be heard in relation to a necessary backdrop of pain. He states: Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. . . . The principle of utility recognizes this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and the law. (Bentham 1948)

Thus, given the essential conditions of being, which are as they are, people must adjust to life, gain contentment from it and get on with it. This is a culture of functional utility. So Bentham dedicates the body of his writing to an understanding of human psychology in as much as it brings illumination to our theories

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16 origins of the concept of culture of social control. A major part of his work and interests reveal him as a penologist, seeking to generate the rational bases for an efficient correctional machine in the form of the modern society symbolized through his ‘dream prison’, the panopticon (later adopted by Michel Foucault as an icon of contemporary power). THE LITERARY-ROMANTIC TRADITION: COLERIDGE, CARLYLE AND ARNOLD In dramatic contrast to Bentham and writing perhaps quarter of a century after him we find William Coleridge (1772–1834), not this time in the guise of poet but rather as literary and social critic. He appears to be generating an oppositional theory of the necessity of human self-expression in the face of modernity and thus making a significant contribution to our current understanding of the concept of culture, perhaps inspired by but not prefigured in the mechanics of utilitarianism. Coleridge in his Constitution of Church and State (1837) espouses a romantic vision of the capability of and necessity for humankind to pursue the goal of spiritual perfection. This goal is what he will refer to as ‘cultivation’, that is ‘the harmonious development of those qualities and faculties that characterize our humanity’ (Coleridge 1976). It is in this context that we find the first articulate application of the verb ‘to cultivate’, which until the eighteenth century had been used exclusively in relation to gardening or agriculture, to the organization and development of human worth, self-expression and authenticity. Through Coleridge we attend to the generation and nurture of the symbolic attributes of people that mark them off ontologically and imbue them with a transcendent purpose. Humankind, in this mould, is no longer subject to the vagaries of the natural environment but is rather in touch with an ideal similarly celebrated through the doctrine of Christianity, an ideal of the perfection of the spirit. Cultivation now directs us to a condition of the mind, and culture thus enters the language as an essential disposition of persons. However, to consider this departure within the vocabulary of the social sciences, we are not being offered a metaphysical version of methodological individualism. Coleridge is not pointing to the unique and isolated self as the source of this motivation to achieve perfection, but rather to a condition of the collective. We may have moved from the compulsive external constraints of the utilitarian world to a state of inner being, but an inner being in the context of and as an


instance of the social world. Coleridge is surely writing about the social conditions that will enable the realization of human perfection, within a set of rapidly transforming historical conditions that seem dedicated to instability or at least contradictory to all aspiration towards any positive entelechy. These social conditions are the institutions that provide continuity in a changing world, institutions like the church and the state in the title of his essay. Coleridge suggests that institutions both provide for the possibility of human endeavour and offer support to the initiative and struggles of particular individuals. This unification of individual purpose and collective manifestation would make for a yardstick against which the ‘good’ of human cultivation might measure, and thus resist, the consuming mechanicism of the new industrial order. Two realms thus emerge from this period, the inner, ‘natural’ state of human cultivation, gravitated towards perfection, and the external, material and mechanical metamorphoses that are directed by the inevitable forces of modernity that we call ‘progress’. These realms are coterminous but utterly antagonistic. This somewhat Kantian ‘counteraction’ of forces, as it is referred to by Coleridge, the tension between the inside and the outside, the poet counselling nature even as he is directed by it, is a process generated by the active imagination. He regards the imagination as that ‘essentially vital’ driving force which ‘dissolves, diffuses, dissipates’ the very world that threatens to engulf it. Coleridge was a leading British exponent of this theory of aesthetics that stemmed from the incredibly influential writings of the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804). Such thinking transformed the previously entrenched dualism between the creative artist and nature, prevalent in the eighteenth century, into a complex, circular contingency of infinite counteraction: one might almost suggest an appearance of a theory of dialectics in the act of creation, but certainly an original view of a culture involving the simultaneous deposition and apprehension of symbolic representations. Such representations, be they essays, poems or other artefacts, thus acquired a troublesome epistemological status, which Coleridge referred to as a tertium aliquid. This is an entity which is neither subject nor object but rather ‘an interpenetration of the counteracting powers, partaking of both’. Such elements of what we might call culture are to be regarded as neither idea nor tangible entity, they have a special quality that resides between these two realms.

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18 origins of the concept of culture Culture, or rather cultivation, was for Coleridge and all subsequent thinking on the topic, a process, ideational but real in its consequences, a goal, an ideal and most of all a condition of the mind in social life. It must be safeguarded, preserved, aspired towards and worked for. Such a dwelling place for the human condition cannot be taken for granted. The mundane inevitability of everyday life is not culture, it is the history of civilization which may be held to account alongside the achievements of cultivation. These two will never be confused again. Culture becomes the counterforce in the face of the destructive tendencies of industrialization and mass society. Civilization becomes the ally of these destructive forces. It is in this way that we can reconcile the demolition of beautiful buildings to make way for supermarkets and high-rise offices with the march of civilization, while we preserve our cultural standards in the tradition of Western architecture. Coleridge further suggests the formation of an elite group within society who shall be charged with the responsibility of upholding and pursuing the necessary ideal of culture. This he refers to as the ‘clerisy’, a secular church. Such notions are alive, yet vestigial, in the modern intelligentsia who, in part, preserve the goodness of the past and project it as a measure of the present through the concepts of tradition and discipline. Culture is now liberated. It may, from this release by Coleridge and with the complicity of critic and aesthete John Ruskin, come to be identified with the arts. It may, from this same emancipatory source, come to be derided as the ideology of the intellectual classes by certain modern thinkers. Whatever, it will no longer be conflated with civilization, it is a parallel process but a different process. The discourse of culture is a relatively new phenomenon in the history of ideas. Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881), the Scottish historian, philosopher and critic, published his influential essay Signs of the Times in 1829, in which he succinctly laid out his views of the state of modernity. Influenced and accelerated by Coleridge’s thought he shared and amplified many of Coleridge’s ideas in the form of social criticism and to this end combined, along with Arnold, to generate a solid foundation from which to appreciate, appraise and uphold the notion of culture. Engulfed as he was, in common with all intellectuals of the time, by the sheer material presence of industrialism and its effects on the environment and, more significantly, on the life-style, creative propensity and patterning of relationships of the populace, he defined his era disparagingly as ‘not an Heroical, Devotional,


Philosophical, or Moral Age, but, above all others, the Mechanical Age’ (Carlyle 1910). The relations of craft and labour were being overcome by the politics and economics of speed and technology. Human labour was becoming routinized and ‘fitted’ to its particular function in the productive process as machines increasingly assumed the creative centre ground in society. A new spirit of political economy was abroad, one which revolved around the idea of ‘capital’ and its accumulation. Wealth was no longer a characteristic of a people but rather a force for dividing and polarizing the nation. Profit became the single, most formative motivating force for human conduct, even in the context of religious practice (a thesis that the sociologist Max Weber would later expound in his work The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism). These thoughts prefigured Karl Marx’s concept of ‘alienation’ and, in fact, elicited positive citation in Marx’s own subsequent writing. Carlyle’s critique was sweeping indeed. He refers this dominant process of mechanization not just to the organization and regimentation of the outside, the physical body, but also to the inside, the thoughts and feelings of the individual, a governing of the soul. It is as if he envisaged the modern person in a context of ergonomics and psychoanalysis! – a romantic vision of loss, but nevertheless a prophetic one. Just as Coleridge had constituted a combative dualism between the achievements that are human culture and the sedimentations that comprise the ‘progress’ of industrialism, Carlyle looked also to the ‘two departments of man’s activity’. These he designated as the ‘dynamic’ and the ‘mechanical’, which I shall later develop as the ‘ideal’ and the ‘material’. The former, which concerns the inner life and the human spirit, is the necessary process of being, but one which, if left as a disembodied vision, leads to a languor of impracticality. The latter, the practice of doing in the world, accrues obvious material deposition. However, the contemporary preoccupation with this outer life leads to a decline of moral sentiment. When writing of the French Revolution as a clash between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ orders in European society, Carlyle states that ‘It is towards a higher freedom than mere freedom from oppression by his fellow mortal, that man dimly aims.’ and this ‘freedom’ must surely be the liberation of a cultural ‘dynamic’ that runs through history. Similarly, as Coleridge had proposed the necessity of an intellectual elite, which he termed the ‘clerisy’, to protect and propagate the excellence of a society, so also Carlyle recommends the leadership and heroism of a

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20 origins of the concept of culture literary class to uphold the ‘good’ and to act as a force of change and renewal in the realm of culture. Carlyle is clear, and this is an important analytic moment in the conceptualization of ‘culture’, that the organization of modern society precludes the integration of ‘culture’ with the everyday activities of the population. A specialist, preservation group is required, though not sustained within modern society, because industrialization has forced the separation of the ‘cultural’ from the ‘social’. The literary elite become not a class-based luxury but an historically forced necessity. Far from making a move in an hierarchical game, Carlyle is putting forward a forceful plea on behalf of democracy and pluralism. He is arguing that what stands as culture should be representative of the collective life of a people, but that this collective life should comprise more than the ugly relationships, mediated by money, that are enabled within the parameters provided by the modern industrial state. ‘Is the condition of the English working people wrong?’ he asks, and his answer is unequivocal. In opposition to the oppressive post-Malthusian suggestions for alleviating the conditions of the working poor, like sexual abstinence, birth control and forced emigration, Carlyle put forward positive and integrative policies for mass, popular education. These policies would serve to reunite labour with thought, the outside with the inside, and reinstate the ‘dynamic’ of culture centrally within the ‘mechanicism’ of the social system. The last of the great British nineteenth-century literary thinkers that I shall address, and perhaps the most important of them all in the context of the culture debate, is Matthew Arnold (1822–88). A contemporary of Carlyle, he too was much concerned with the ‘processual’ character of culture, for as well as being a poet and literary critic, he had a practical concern with the process of education; he was an inspector of schools. Arnold, in common with his intellectual peers, was writing in response to, but also within, the ever-constraining parameters of an industrializing world. All of this group of writers were anxious to record and protest at what they saw as the corrosive effects of industrialism on the contemporary state of humanity but also, and most significantly, on the historically emergent force of human potential. The Victorians, in grand and Gothic style, had made a symbolic international announcement concerning the triumphant excellence of British achievement in the form of the Great Exhibition of 1851. This conspicuous celebration of self-appointed cultural superiority manifested itself through an array of artefacts ranging from


architecture, design and textiles, through steam engines and factory machines to the level of aspidistras and sanitary ware. This must have been an exercise in unconscious, projected bathos matched only by the broad spectrum of audience response and critical appraisal that it received. Henry Mayhew described it as ‘the highest kind of school in which the highest knowledge is designed to be conveyed in the best possible manner, in combination with the highest amusement’ (Mayhew 1985), whereas John Ruskin considered the Exhibition to be made up of the ugly, the transitory, and the banal. What was at stake here was not simply a range of local disagreements over what constitutes good taste but, as Arnold saw it, a serious competition concerning the dominant collective definition of what constitutes ‘culture’ itself. The outcome of this competition would have a significant impact on the future of Western social life and thus Arnold committed himself to a resolution of this struggle and confusion over the realm of the cultural. The culmination of his thoughts and efforts in this endeavour he published as Culture and Anarchy (1869). Arnold was unequivocal in his views. Culture for him is ‘high culture’, it is the best that humankind can achieve, not an average nor a descriptive category applicable to all human thought and production. It refers to the peak, which also provides the aspiration and similarly reveals the potential. Thus he tells us that, ‘Culture, which is the study of perfection, leads us . . . to conceive of true human perfection as a harmonious perfection, developing all sides of our humanity; and as a general perfection, developing all parts of our society’ (Arnold 1965). Prior to this powerful and optimistic assertion Arnold has informed us that his work is a manifesto, but also a remedy, given his diagnosis of the state of his world. Thus he recommends: culture as the great help out of our present difficulties; culture being the pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting to know, on all the matters which most concern us, the best which has been thought and said in the world; and, through this knowledge, turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stock notions and habits. (Arnold 1965)

It is not difficult here to sense the resonances between Arnold’s thinking on culture and education and those of the classical Greek philosopher Plato concerning the socialization of his Philosopher-Kings;

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22 origins of the concept of culture We would not have our Guardians grow up among representations of moral deformity, as in some foul pasture where, day by day, feeding on every poisonous weed they would, little by little, gather insensibly a mass of corruption in their very souls. Rather we must seek out those craftsmen whose instinct guides them to whatsoever is lovely and gracious; so that our young men, dwelling in a wholesome climate, may drink in good from every quarter, whence, like a breeze bearing health from happy regions, some influence from noble works constantly falls upon eye and ear from childhood upward, and imperceptibly draws them into sympathy and harmony with reason, whose impress they take . . . rhythm and harmony sink deep into the recesses of the soul and take the strongest hold there, bringing that grace of body and mind which is only to be found in one who is brought up in the right way. Moreover, a proper training of this kind makes a man quick to perceive any defects or ugliness in art or in nature. (Plato 1988)

The goal is perfection, the politic elitist, but the supposed beneficiary the total collective life. The differences between Arnold and his Hellenic predecessor are, as Arnold indicates, in the historical context of their appeal to perfection. For Plato reason was an emergent, ‘inner state’ of grace, for Arnold it had become transformed into the post-Enlightenment forms of industrialization, it had become ‘external’ and ‘mechanical’. The former espouses a vanguard initiative, the latter a rearguard re-action. Arnold’s work can be heard as polemical and it certainly bears a literary style that Williams (1961) refers to as a ‘soured romanticism’; he nevertheless produces a vivid and arresting analysis of the profound and radical changes that were occurring in the forms of knowledge, the kinds of technologies and the organization of social relationships during that period. However, unlike John Stuart Mill and Carlyle, whose work concerned and reflected upon culture, to Arnold the primary issue of his age was culture itself. The sad and threatening fact of modernity was, for Arnold, that this great heritage and panacea, culture, was in tenuous and feeble hands. The great body of the population, from rich to poor, seemed incapable of registering and thus championing culture as the central quality of being. In his exposition of the class system of his time he finds no heroes and no redemption. The complacent aristocracy, preoccupied with upholding the ongoing system, he designates


‘Barbarians’; the abundant, self-seeking, entrepreneurial middle classes he calls ‘Philistines’ for their over-investment in the external characteristics of a mechanistic system; and the working classes, who Marx would later elect to the status of salvationists, were for Arnold the ‘populace’, either aspiring towards the goals of the Philistines or rendered without potential through drudgery and degradation. The whole of the nation seemed without hope, prisoners of their epoch, mistakenly conflating the material and mechanical benefits of the modern age with the true purpose of being. We are told that ‘Never did people believe anything more firmly than nine out of ten Englishmen at the present day believe that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being so very rich’ (Arnold 1965); however, he acerbically shatters this delusion when he continues that culture tells us to: Consider these people, then, their way of life, their habits, their manners, the very tone of their voices; look at them attentively; observe the literature they read, the things which give them pleasure, the words which come forth out of their mouths, the thoughts which make the furniture of their minds; would any amount of wealth be worth having with the condition that one was to become just like these people by having it? (Arnold 1965)

The future, for Arnold, lies not in the habits and mentality of such a Zeitgeist, but rather in the form of a transcendent ideal of cultural perfection more clearly visible in the classical-Christian tradition and made manifest in the practices of the Renaissance. The purity that culture enables us to express and seek after is not to have its infinity staled by mechanical custom and the routines of the division of labour. The vocationalist demands of utilitarianism are at once dispelled: education is not to be about the training of individuals for the functional requirements of their time and place, it is concerned with the process of growth into the best; and that process is ‘culture’. The choice is clear, between the central value of culture or the valueless disarray of anarchy. Having made the choice, the way forward is through collective action. Arnold did not place the mission of culture in the hands of a special group of guardians like a ‘clerisy’ or a literary elite,

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24 origins of the concept of culture nor did he see it as the private achievement of particular talented or privileged individuals; he saw that culture would be transmitted and become shared through the policies of the state; his life work was concerned with establishing a new national system of general education.

2 THE RELATION BETWEEN CULTURE AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE Social structure is one of the central concepts of sociology, but it is not employed consistently or unambiguously. (Bottomore 1962: 109)

The concept of a social structure is a continuous, yet often implicit, resource for sociological explanations. Indeed, we might go as far as to suggest that ‘social structures’ are that peculiar realm of phenomena, utterly intangible yet real, towards which sociology dedicates its practice. When Durkheim produced the manifesto for the discipline he marked out its territory, named and defined its facticity, and legislated for its most appropriate ‘scientific’ method. This facticity Durkheim called ‘social facts’, which are, themselves, no more than instances or icons of social structures at work. They make reference to orderly, patterned and enduring relationships that hold between elements of a society. These orderly formations exist in their own right, sui generis, so they are objective; they are external, thus not available for change at the will or caprice of particular individuals; and they are constraining or coercive in their impact on individual conduct.

26 culture and social structure It is not possible to choose or think your way out of the pressures that social structures apply to social action. The supposed regularities, functional interrelations, and equilibrium of such structures have led to the sustained application of either ‘organismic’ analogies (as with Durkheim and the school of structural-functionalism) or ‘mechanistic’ analogies (as with Parsons’s cybernetic ‘social system’) being employed in sociological explanations. Social structures, as theoretical devices, plant two problematics at the heart of sociology’s project: (1) as they are both topic and resource for sociological accounts, the work must be teleological – it explains the social in terms of the social; and (2) as they are intangible, but employed causally, all explanations are made with reference to abstractions; it is for this reason that Durkheim himself had to resort to treating judicial codes and suicide rates as external indices of solidarity and integration. What then of the relation between culture and social structure? My immediate response is to draw a clear distinction between the two and then to describe the various ways that theory has articulated the relation between them. However, nothing involving the concept of culture is so clear cut. Just as in many forms of discourse culture/civilization are used interchangeably, so in others culture/society/social structure are conflated, though not necessarily confused; indeed the idea of social structure as a theory of culture has created a major dividing line in the history of anthropological thought that we shall go on to consider. Let us begin by looking at three moments in the sociological tradition (all of which we shall revisit later) that would appear to differentiate culture from social structure. These moments are provided by Durkheim, Talcott Parsons and Marx, and all of them, in their different ways, see culture differentiated from social structure because it is viewed as an emergent process stemming from social action. THE SYMBOLIC AND THE SEMIOTIC VIEWS OF CULTURE Durkheim, having outgrown the blustering empiricism and polemical positivism of his early work, went on to develop a subtle, and almost dialectical, account of the development and maintenance of the social bond. In his later work, which is manifestly concerned with the explanation of primitive religious practice, he is, in fact, arguing for the social genesis

culture and social structure

of epistemological categories – a truly sociological account of mind and knowledge. These are bold excursions into the realm of symbolism, the ‘cultural’, and demonstrations of its relation to the organization of human relationships, the ‘social structural’. Durkheim argues that within simple societies, the precursors of complex modern societies, the differentiation between types of relationships is regulated by the intensity of affective experience. So just as we in complex societies ‘feel closer’ to our own immediate family than to our cousins, but perhaps ‘closer’ to our cousins than to our neighbours, Durkheim informs us that this gradient of intensity is a primary experience of the primitive in relation to the established social groupings in his society, beginning with the oldest formations, the ‘moieties’, and passing through ‘clans’ to the most recent and most immediate relationships within the family and kinship group. Parallel with this ‘affective’ response is a pattern of ‘cognitive’ action in the form of religious practice. All religions, Durkheim tells us, divide the universe into the realms of the sacred and the profane; sacred symbols are condensed, pure, solidaristic and comforting whereas profane symbols are fragmenting and diffuse, dangerous and defiling and, above all, threatening of the sacred. The most primitive of religions also operate through totemism which involves the projection outwards of the group spirit onto an object or animal within the natural world; this natural object, or ‘totem’ then takes on sacred qualities, it becomes the source of identity and recognition of the particular group who selected it, it becomes their ‘emblem’ which they worship and revere. Just as the groups that go to make up a society stand in a fixed relation to one another so now, through their objectification in the form of totems, do the phenomena of the natural world. The compulsions of a coherent belief system thus give rise to a cosmology, and the social structure provides the model for the classificatory system. ‘The first categories of things were categories of men’ (Durkheim and Mauss 1970: 6). These ‘primitive classifications’, Durkheim continues, share all of the characteristics of scientific classificatory systems; they are used to provide order and coherence, they are branching, and they arrange phenomena hierarchically. More than this, we are assured, they have an absolute continuity with modern taxonomies where we still refer to phenomena as ‘belonging to the same family’. Durkheim had already established the autonomy and specificity of cultural symbols in his critiques of both idealist and empiricist

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28 culture and social structure epistemologies. Not all societies share the same classificatory systems, which would be the a priori position, but within any one society the system is common which defies the individualism inherent in the empiricist theory of learning. There is a suggestion of a soft Kantian immanence here in the form of society itself, but what Durkheim has opened up is the question of the relation between the social structure and the symbolic order. In order to transpose this relation into the context of increasingly complex modes of differentiation in modern society Durkheim emphasizes the hermeneutic function of symbols rather than the referential function of signs. This distinction between the symbolic and the semiotic views of culture is important in avoiding essentialism and reductionism and is a point exercised by both Basil Bernstein (1971–3) and Geoffrey Alexander (1988) in more modern Durkheimian studies of culture. Parsons, in his major work The Social System, provides a role for culture in legitimating social order and thus provides for its separate existence and yet integration with social structure. The social system is comprised of a social structure and three other sub-systems, all of which are functionally interrelated and one of which is the ‘cultural’. Whereas the economy drives the system and causes it to adapt to its environment and the family preserves and sustains the ‘units’ or the personalities within the system through socialization and care. The cultural system is charged with the prerequisites of goal attainment and integration. Essentially this means that culture has a central role in ensuring the equilibrium and internal homeostasis of the overall system. It has to provide a symbolic environment that is conducive to the social actors moving steadily towards their goals, and it has to maintain cooperation and integration between those same actors given the strains of goal attainment. The cultural, then, is supposed to be redolent with shared beliefs, interests and ideologies which serve to legitimate the social order. Within the realm of the cultural Parsons also sediments a principle of reciprocity, based on obligation, which ordains the relations between the individual and the collective, and thus provides a basis for the formulation of a common culture. Unlike Durkheim’s view of a culture, comprised of constitutive and interpretive symbolism, the account of culture devised by Parsons relies on a singularity and fixity of meaning. Here the realms of goal attainment and integration are organized and directed in relation to a set of unequivocal signs, albeit at the level of abstraction. The members of the social system, the ‘action units’, have their conduct regulated through


a collection of consensual aspirations, that he refers to as ‘central values’, and universal orientations, that he refers to as ‘pattern variables’. The conceptual matrix provided by these two accounts for all the possible needs and choices expressed by the individual. This singularity and fixity of meaning lead to what we mean by a ‘semiotic’ rather than a ‘symbolic’ view of culture. The ‘signs’ are referential rather than hermeneutic. Finally Marx, for whom the social structure is organized in terms of the means and relations of production. Culture, within historical materialism, is clearly reducible to these economic factors, but emergent in the form of class consciousness. This dualistic causality is what we shall refer to as a dialectical conception of culture; the dialectic also ensures the differentiation of culture from social structure, even though there is, in Marxism, a firm sense of dependency, i.e. in terms of cause and effect. The degree of dependency, which is exercised across the idealist–materialist spectrum of neo-Marxisms, reveals the possible liberation of Marxist accounts from the semiotic into the realm of the symbolic. The Marxist view of culture then, which tends to be preoccupied with realism and resistant to the symbolic excesses of modernism, sees it as the expression of a group consciousness. As such it is vociferous in relation to particular sets of interests and directed towards changing institutionalized social and political structures; although stasis is the normal condition of society, given that the dominant ideas of any particular historical period tend to be the ideas of the ruling groups. We will explore this set of ideas further in Chapter 4. CULTURE AND STRUCTURE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL THOUGHT Now we turn to anthropology, a tradition rich in definitions of our concept culture; so we might do well to remember the warnings of Kroeber and Kluckhohn: ‘But a concept, even an important one, does not constitute a theory. . . . In anthropology at present we have plenty of definitions (of culture) but too little theory’ (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1963), but a tradition also divided to the point of antagonism over this relation between culture and social structure. The British social anthropologists tend to think of themselves as sociologists concerned primarily with the social structures and

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30 culture and social structure institutions of primitive societies, or they utilize social structure as a frame for the organization and interpretation of cultural phenomena; most American ethnologists consider culture as the major concept and point of departure and subordinate social structure to it, if they utilize this concept at all, preferring to operate with concepts of culture pattern and culture form. (Eggan 1955: 490)

Let us take a journey through the history and development of anthropology to address the origins of some of these definitions and antagonisms. It would be hard to overestimate the impact that Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution had upon thought and belief in modern Western society during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and, indeed, the influence that it has continued to exercise up until the present day. The implications of Darwin’s thesis spilled rapidly out of the confines of zoological concerns with the adaptation of certain animal species to their particular habitats, and came into collision with Christian theology, over the explanation of human origins. The Church had maintained its power, or at least its moral sanction, over the populace, on the basis that mankind was the spontaneous and benevolent gift of an omnipotent deity and as such should rightly remain subject to his control, through the mediating influence of religious institutions. Even though the successes and excesses of modern science had gone some considerable way towards the secularization of our understandings of natural processes, the question of origins still remained very much an issue of faith. What Darwin provided was an explosion of both the inner and outer horizons of human potential that was much more in line with the desires and achievements of modernity’s project. The theory of evolution formulated the origin of the species ‘homo sapiens’ through a naturalistic reduction to former, and lesser, species of creature. This set a trail that natural science would continue to pursue, backwards, to the more and even more fundamental particles that constitute our physical being; with the biochemists’ DNA of the 1960s becoming one major signpost. Perhaps more significantly – and particularly so in relation to the social and cultural sciences – the destruction of one set of mythologies concerning the beginnings of humankind gave rise to a new mythology concerning its purpose and its destiny. The theory of evolution provided a scientific justification for the ideologies of growth and development that had, once entangled with the capitalist


enterprise, become equated with the ‘good’ of civilization. Darwin rendered these previously covert ‘grand narratives’ of modernity both visible and uncontestable. The ‘thinking and achieving ape’ was now clearly the measure of all things and the Enlightenment project was complete. The condition of modern (Western) history was the best that could be; it was, after all, the pinnacle of human achievement. This realization was utterly political in character (adhering to Lawson’s view that ‘science is true because it is powerful, not powerful because it is true’ (Lawson 1985: 26)), it established a rationale for colonialism, in excess of economic avarice; a fillip to the technological triumph of culture over nature, through the transformation of found-object into product; and the grounds for anthropology as a way of understanding the world. The link between evolutionary theory and anthropology is very important to our contemporary thinking about culture. The original theorists in this field were, in fact, referred to as ‘evolutionists’, and were concerned to investigate the social origins of humankind. Their thoughts were directed to the barbarians of antiquity and beyond to the savages who marked the start of social relations, as we now recognize them. The savage, of course, was an extinct breed but the ‘evolutionists’ found their convenient, modern counterpart in the ‘primitive’ peoples that still populated the relatively distant and exotic parts of the world, like central Africa, South America and central Australia. It was the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan (1818– 81) who produced and elaborated the first hierarchical classificatory scales of human evolutionary civilization. There is no sense in which his schemes can be understood as descriptive morphologies. They are clearly judgemental, and on moral and ethnocentric bases. The continua of human types that he provides are based on a deeply held sense of differential achievement, or what we have come to know as ‘evolutionary stages’. These stages he actually describes as statuses, ranging from the ‘lower status of savagery’ up to the ‘status of civilization’, all based on the society’s means of subsistence. For Morgan the historical process became understood as a linear competition, between alternatively situated groups of people, in which human beings match their innate abilities against the various constraints of their environments. Thus combinations of race and scarce resources give rise to the distributions of modern peoples and their relative levels of civilization.

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32 culture and social structure The latest investigations respecting the early condition of the human race, are tending to the conclusion that mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge. As it is undeniable that portions of the human family have existed in a state of savagery, other portions in a state of barbarism, and still other portions in a state of civilization, it seems equally so that these three distinct conditions are connected with each other in a natural as well as necessary sequence of progress. Moreover, that the status attained by each branch respectively, is rendered probable by the conditions under which all progress occurs and by the known advancement of several branches of the family through two or more of these conditions. (Morgan 1877: 3)

Morgan’s works have, through the ironies of modern interpretation, come to be seen as an influence on Karl Marx and the development of modern socialism but also as an apologia for the development of capitalism. His comparative ethnology in no way implies his personal indifference or antagonism towards what he might have designated as ‘less advanced people’; he was, in fact, an active philanthropist and campaigner on behalf of native Americans. However, his work did provide an authoritative basis for such thinking which is still recognizable within the modern complex of confusions over racism, racial superiority, development and underdevelopment, the politics of the Third World, and even arguments concerning the relative merits of ‘high’ as opposed to ‘low’ culture. Morgan, although working with an implicit concept of the collective, and methodologically comparative, way of life of a people, never realized this as a definition of culture. He had established a model for the anthropological analysis of culture in relation to social structure, but the work of clarifying and refining the concept of ‘culture’ itself was to be left to future scholars. Contemporary with Morgan, but foundational of the English school of social anthropology at Oxford University was Edward Burnett Tylor (1832–1917), a theorist also recognizable as an ‘early evolutionist’. It is generally agreed that the original definition of culture, within anthropology, was provided by Tylor. He informs us that ‘Culture or Civilization, taken in its wide ethnographic sense, is that complex whole


which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (Tylor 1958: 1). This definition is critical in understanding the relationship between culture and social structure because it does not distinguish social organization and social institutions from a general concept of culture. Such a view sets the pattern for a tradition of cultural criticism and appreciation based on very different premises to the philosophical views of Kant and the literary stance adopted by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle and Arnold. These competitive versions of culture find contemporary review in the works of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart, and remain a constant preoccupation of this text. Tylor, in common with many subsequent anthropologists, was preoccupied with the character and content of human belief systems. However, unlike many of his contemporaries, he did not suppose that religious belief was the sole prerogative of ‘advanced’, non-primitive people. Although he held to strict evolutionist views concerning the differential quality and levels of achievement embodied in the cultural representations of different groups of people, he categorically asserted that religion, or a ‘belief in Spiritual beings’, was common to all human thinking. The savage mind, like that of modern man, is confronted with anxiety concerning mortality and the mysteries presented through reverie; we all resolve such conundrums through a notion of the soul. It may be that the primitive confuses spirits with realities, blurs subjectivity with objectivity, and allows a proliferation of deities intolerable to a sophisticated monotheism, but all humankind understands through the capacity for religious symbolism. We can now add to this thesis the views of James Frazer concerning primitive thought. Frazer in his major anthropological, yet highly literary, work The Golden Bough (1890), addressed primitive knowledge, cosmology and forms of explanation. He generated the remarkable conclusion that magic is, in effect, a proto-scientific epistemology based on mistaken principles concerning the relationship between events. Between them, the ‘early evolutionists’, Morgan, Tylor and Frazer, generated certain fundamental propositions concerning the nature of homo sapiens as a social being that are formative in our discussion of the relation between culture and social structure. Above all they provide us with the view that all human history is unified, it follows a common route, a grand human tradition. Informing this is the absolute belief in the universal structure of human consciousness; what we might call the psychic

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34 culture and social structure unity of the human species. And finally they indicate that the concepts of culture and civilization are continuous. These are the three guiding and explanatory axioms of early anthropology which, as I shall now show, waned during the subsequent paradigm of social scientific knowledge, but re-emerged during the 1950s under the auspices of Claude Lévi-Strauss, fashionably disguised as ‘structuralism’ and thus more appropriately linked to the modern engagement with the linguistic character of cultural formations. The understanding of culture within the social sciences now moved in a direction quite contrary to the basic premises of ‘evolutionism’. A new mood was afoot; colonialism, though still rife as a feature of international relations, was coming to be understood as a political rather than a patrician act. Now there was a spectrum of liberalism which had, for some while, tempered the traditional political systems of Western states largely because of its beneficial contributions to the functioning of modern capitalist economies. This liberalism had extended into the doctrines of socialism, with its concerns over justice and equality. While retaining a respect for difference, perhaps through the influence of Karl Marx, powerful ideas about history had emerged disentangling it from ‘natural progress’ or ‘evolution’ and linking it inextricably with material interests that were essentially human. Culture, then, came to be seen not as a sequential manifestation of an inevitably unfolding saga, extending from savagery to the heights of civilization, but rather as what people collectively ‘do’ in their different ways, in different places and at different times. Cultures came to be understood as historically particular, and the relations between different cultures became a matter of inductive generalization rather than deductive reductionism. To put this another way, we might say that, in relation to cultural criticism and appraisal, the dominant paradigm of ‘evolutionism’, which necessarily rested on absolutist beliefs, was replaced by one of ‘historicalism’ based on a commitment to relativism. This swing to relativism, an espousal of the particularity and situationspecific meaning of all aspects of culture and social action, was to dominate anthropology and sociology for at least the next half century, and is, in fact, still current in the modern academy’s political preference for pluralism and difference. In the context of this next, significant, step forward in the understanding of the collective lives of people by social scientists, ‘culture’ continued to be used as a general, overarching term rather than a concept


referring to a specialized or elite segment of their activity or symbolic repertoire. Boas, in America, and, latterly, Malinowski and RadcliffeBrown in England, strengthened anthropology’s commitment to culture being understood as a way-of-life, but their sense differs from Tylor’s original views in their insistence and sustained emphasis on the plurality of cultures as being isolated, discrete, independently functioning, integrally organized totalities, and also in their shift from an attachment to the notion of evolution running through human relations. What cultural unities might exist could now only be constructed with the aid of the elaborate mosaic of data gradually being accumulated from numerous, exhaustive, and often repetitive ethnographies. Ethnography, or ‘fieldwork’, rather than ‘grand theory’, was to set the pattern for much subsequent anthropology and was, indeed, destined to re-emerge as the avant-garde model for methodology in both sociology and cultural studies in the 1980s. This development – which (in its original form) American anthropology knows as the ‘Boas revolution’ – instanced, among other things, a move to an empirically grounded rather than a universal theory of explanation. It also reveals a quantum leap in the politics of social science’s claims for veracity; a modest and self-effacing retreat from speculative universalism to a new faith in the accuracy and ruthless honesty of face-to-face encounters. Finally, we might suggest that it shows an affirmation of the belief in the self-sustaining ‘goodness’ of difference, which finds a further contemporary resonance in the invocation of ‘community’ as a unit of action by the modern-day Social Services. During what we might call its ‘relativism’ period, anthropology, though concerted in one sense, began to fragment in other ways. It lived within, but did not devote itself entirely to, the Tylorian concept of culture. Radcliffe-Brown developed ‘social anthropology’, a powerful subdiscipline, which engaged in the comparative study of ‘social structure’, a concept deriving from Durkheim, which, as we have discussed, pointed to the externality, typicality and constraining influence of particular formations contained within the collective consciousness of a people that compelled them to act routinely in certain integrative and solidaristic ways. At the same time Boas, the true father of American anthropology, and Malinowski in England were extending the existing ethnology and developing cultural anthropology, which studies cultures more in terms of ideas, symbols and artefacts. Both theorists also emphasized comparative and historical perspectives.

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36 culture and social structure A significant division within the new paradigm of historicalism and relativism in the understanding of cultures emerged initially as a result of the competition between W.H.R. Rivers, who was Radcliffe-Brown’s tutor and mentor, and A.L. Kroeber, Boas’s protégé, over the appropriate interpretation of Morgan’s analytic distinction between classificatory and descriptive kinship systems. This seemingly arcane debate gave rise to the two rival anthropological theories of culture that were to set the character of the discipline(s) and establish the identity of their followers almost up until the present day. The two analytic protagonists were the theory of ‘culture patterns’, following the inspirations of Alfred Kroeber, and the theory of ‘social structure’, which was very much the position propounded by Rivers, Radcliffe-Brown and his followers. The division became institutionalized, in this country, as a long and continuing debate between Malinowski as the progenitor of cultural anthropology and RadcliffeBrown as the figurehead of the new social anthropology. The debate even came to symbolize the difference between anthropology and sociology, a disciplinary distinction which has today eroded analytically, only to be re-established substantively in terms of the axis pre-industrial/industrial. THE PATTERN THEORY OF CULTURE The gospel for this approach was provided by Kroeber and Kluckhohn who provided an exhaustive, and exhausting, review and partial analysis of myriad existing definitions and formulations of the concept of culture in an attempt to distil a productive synthesis: Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, of and for behaviour, acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional (i.e. historically derived and selected) ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other as conditioning elements of further action. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 181)

There is no doubt that this formulation was an advance on a prevalent behaviourist, reductionist view that culture was comprised of learned behaviour. Kroeber and Kluckhohn continue:

culture and social structure culture is not behaviour nor the investigation of behaviour in all its concrete completeness. Part of culture consists in norms for or standards of behaviour. Still another part consists of ideologies justifying or rationalizing certain selected ways of behaviour. Finally, every culture includes broad general principles of selectivity and ordering (‘highest common factors’) in terms of which patterns of and for and about behaviour in very varied areas of culture content are reducible to parsimonious generalization. (Kroeber and Kluckhohn 1952: 189)

The ‘pattern theory of culture’, which was also to be seen in the works of Sapir (1956), Benedict (1934), Bateson (1972) and others, argues for the general and recurrent elements of culture to be understood apart from social structure; thus it recommends the study of patterns, form, structure and organization in culture rather than discrete cultural traits and culture content: ‘how patterns of art, religion, philosophy, as well as of technology and science, waxed and waned, acquired their characteristic content and kept rolling majestically along, quite independently of particular individuals’ (Harris 1968: 328). Such a thesis is not ignoring the issue of social structure but regards such deep structural patterns of social organization as entrenched and less amenable to transformation. All levels of culture are treated as subject to patterning but not all to the same degree nor to the same stage of conscious awareness. Fashion was one configuration within culture, that Kroeber produced an analysis of, which has an obvious application to the theory in terms of its modishness. Pattern, then, was an abstraction that enabled the theorist to attend to the commonality of all elements of a culture, while also attending to their particularity in terms of their persistence and complexity. It also allows for an emergence of cultural symbolism not determined semiotically by the constraints of biological nature, the physical environment or a static and compelling version of social structure. The theory enables a coherent movement from religion to diet, from politics to dress, and from mode of production to artefact. The rolling, historical ‘superorganicism’ of Kroeber reduces the role of the individual to that of being the instrument of culture or the vehicle of patterning; here the essentialism is that of the cultural rather than the social structural: ‘The social or cultural . . . is in very essence non-individual. Civilization, as such, begins only where the individual ends’ (Kroeber 1917: 192).

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38 culture and social structure Unlike traditional sociological explanation, pattern theory does not generate hypotheses beginning with the energizing social structure. In fact pattern theory tends to avoid causal explanations altogether. Its topic, and hypothesis, is a complex network of patterning, through history, which defies a finite starting point. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AS A THEORY OF CULTURE For all of the advances brought about through the ‘Boas revolution’ in anthropological thought its commitment to ‘particularity’ and its consequent jackdaw-like obsession with the accumulation of ethnographic field data led to a gap in theory. The celebration of, and luxuriation in, the rich differences that cultural variability provides left anthropology vulnerable to the predation of an all-encompassing theoretical framework. This was provided by British social anthropology in the form of functionalism, a grand and comprehensive perspective that was to monopolize sociological and anthropological thought for several decades up until the 1960s. Functionalism’s guiding analytic principles were ‘integration’ and ‘interrelation’ and as such culture and social structure came to be viewed as identical, or at least continuous. This brings us to a fundamental axiom of the science of society, as I see it. Is a science of culture possible? Boas says it is not. I agree. You cannot have a science of culture. You can study culture only as a characteristic of a social system. Therefore, if you are going to have a science, it must be a science of social systems. (Radcliffe-Brown 1957: 106)

Alfred Radcliffe-Brown was the dominant figure in this significant conceptual development. His theory derived from Durkheim (indeed, it was his interpretation that established Durkheim’s misplaced reputation as a ‘naughty’ functionalist), particularly the early Durkheim, and suffered from an overdeveloped adherence to the ‘organic’ analogy with the methodological consequences of a comparative social morphology dedicated to the rigid classification of different social structural species and genera, and a social physiology concerned with accounting for their ‘normal’, as opposed to pathological, functioning.

culture and social structure For the further elaboration of the concept (function) it is convenient to use the analogy between social life and organic life. . . . The system of relations by which these units are related is the organic structure. As the term is here used, the organism is not itself the structure, it is a collection of units arranged in a structure i.e. in a set of relations. . . . As the word function is here being used, the life of the organism is conceived as the functioning of its structure. It is through and by the continuity of the functioning that the continuity of the structure is preserved. . . . To turn from organic life to social life, if we examine such a community as an African or Australian tribe, we can recognize the existence of a social structure. Individual human beings, the essential units in this instance, are connected by a definite set of social relations into an integrated whole. The continuity of the social structure, like that of an organic structure is not destroyed by changes in the units. . . . The continuity is maintained by the process of social life, which consists of the activities and interactions of individual human beings and of organized groups into which they are united. The social life of a community is here defined as the functioning of the social structure. (Radcliffe-Brown 1952: 176)

It is not hard to imagine why the organic analogy is not in current use in the social sciences; its exponents, like Herbert Spencer, seemed more concerned to preserve the model rather than employ it as a source of explanation. However, Radcliffe-Brown uses it rigorously in order to justify the application of the concept of ‘function’ in his analyses. RadcliffeBrown produced a theory of social structure which he saw as a network of social relations including persistent social groups, social categories, classes and social roles. It was assumed that each social structural system is a selfsustaining, homeostatic, harmonious functional unit; hence the primacy of interrelatedness. Empirically the work attests to this by examining always the parts, not as they exist in their own right, but rather as they function in relation to the whole. Interrelations and functional interdependence are keys to such analysis. Another major strand to such work is the study of evolutionary structural change, not radical or revolutionary change but the gradual and predictable transformation of one form into another. This is both historical and archaeological, but essentially morphological. Radcliffe-Brown’s theory of social structure, which is also

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40 culture and social structure an inclusive theory of culture, is taken to be universal in its application. Here is a framework requiring no modification when directed towards an understanding of all and any culture both across space and through time. Radcliffe-Brown and his followers dispensed with the concept of culture in their accounts, and also denied that the term referred to an autonomous realm, partly on the territorial grounds that their work addressed the only social reality, that of social structures. This was, however, somewhat disingenuous as their concept also implicitly embraces a strong sense of culture. So, for example, Meyer Fortes writes that social structure is not just ‘an aspect of culture but an entire culture of a given people handled in a special frame of theory’ (Fortes 1953: 23). Nevertheless, the consequence of this posturing was that Radcliffe-Brown is remembered not for his contribution to a theory of culture but rather as the progenitor of an influential social theory which defined the explanatory concept ‘function’ solely in relation to the abstraction ‘social structure’, hence its designation as structural-functionalism. MALINOWSKI AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY Bronislaw Malinowski is deserving of a specific section of his own because he eludes my theoretic categories for organizing the anthropological tradition, that is to say his designations are almost completely transgressive. He was a Polish natural scientist who went on to hold a British chair in anthropology contemporary with that of Radcliffe-Brown, espoused functionalism, and yet clearly delineated culture as distinct from social structure, and thus formed a school of ‘cultural’ as opposed to ‘social’ anthropology sharing many of the concerns of the American tradition. Malinowski’s functionalism was based on the needs of the individual rather than on those of the social system. So when he specifies that culture is made up of the ‘seven basic human needs’, they are factors like nutrition, reproduction, comfort and safety, all located in the individual consciousness rather than that of the group or wider collectivity; they do, nevertheless, contribute in concert to the integration of the whole society. This individualization of cultural response and generation is the kernel of his different perspective and the breakpoint of his functionalism from structural-functionalism.

culture and social structure Professor Radcliffe-Brown is, as far as I can see, still developing and deepening the views of the French sociological school. He thus has to neglect the individual and disregard biology. Functionalism differs from other sociological theories more definitely, perhaps, in its conception and definition of the individual than in any other respect. The functionalist includes in his analysis not merely the emotional as well as intellectual side of mental processes, but also insists that man in his full biological reality has to be drawn into our analysis of culture. The bodily needs and environmental influences, and the cultural relation to them, have to be studied side by side. (Malinowski 1939: 939)

Malinowski often referred to culture as ‘the social heritage’ and revealed a conceptualization closer to that of the English literary tradition than to the more universalist view of, say, Tylor. He did, like Radcliffe-Brown, retain a not-too-deep-seated evolutionism and an articulate sense of cultural superiority. Beyond these considerations in his approach to culture he believed strongly in the necessity of detailed fieldwork and encouraged study on the interface between disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, history and anthropology. A further dimension of analysis emerges again here, whatever the textual differentiation of content, of ‘culture’ versus ‘social structure’, that occurred within the theoretical hegemony of British functionalism(s) they shared a conception of time. This temporal dimension is critical in the study of culture, today as then. Functionalism, through its dependence on stasis, has no practical or theoretical relationship with change. The topic of study is the ‘organism’, or the functioning totality, held in time through the balance of its ‘internal’ mechanisms of interdependency and interrelation. This is what contemporary structuralism has taught us to refer to as ‘synchronicity’. Such a temporal commitment inevitably places limitations upon the phenomenon. Functionalist anthropology restricted itself, by and large, to the study of contemporary non-literate societies. It could not attach itself to their past or to societies that had died out. Such work was left to subsequent developments in the discipline, such as those by Edward Evans-Pritchard (another pupil of Malinowski) who brought in materials from history and archaeology, investigated the tradition of reason in the primitive mind, the social constraints of memory and,

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42 culture and social structure in common with modern-day ethnomethodology, the significance of accounting procedures in everyday understandings. It is . . . a mistake to say that savages perceive mystically or that their perception is mystical. On the other hand we may say that savages pay attention to phenomena on account of the mystical properties with which their society has endowed them, and that often their interest in phenomena is mainly, even exclusively, due to these mystical properties. (Evans-Pritchard 1934: 29)

Subsequently anthropologists, such as Raymond Firth, began to study the same society but at different time periods and develop ideas of ‘accumulation’, ‘inheritance’ and ‘transmission’. If . . . society is taken to be an organized set of individuals with a given way of life, culture is that way of life. If society is taken to be an aggregate of social relations, then culture is the content of those relations. Society emphasises the human component, the aggregate of people and the relations between them. Culture emphasises the component of accumulated resources, immaterial as well as material, which the people inherit, employ, transmute, add to and transmit. (Firth 1951: 79)

Beyond this the newer generations of anthropologists risked the centrality of stability and order in their theory by studying conflict within simple societies. Other studies were directed at rural and peasant societies in the modern-day and even modern urban, non-primitive communities. Such recent initiatives into the realm of the ‘diachronic’, the study of phenomena through time, dissociated anthropology from its seemingly fixed relationship with isolated primitive cultures. The phenomenon under study now becomes increasingly complex; if it is not an issue of geography or stability or primitiveness then what constitutes the identity and difference of each and any culture? This is a problem not just for anthropology but for the sociology of culture and for ‘cultural studies’. What constitutes the boundaries of culture? Much modern work would appear to treat ‘pop culture’, ‘youth subculture’, ‘East End culture’, ‘Azande culture’


and perhaps even ‘postmodern culture’ with an equivalence. The concept becomes what Hartman (1997) refers to as a ‘linguistic weed’, it crops up everywhere. We might suggest that the real differences reside in a conception and analysis of social structure.

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3 CULTURE, IDEALISM AND SOCIAL ACTION It is not my aim to substitute for a one-sided materialistic an equally one-sided spiritualistic causal interpretation of culture and history. (Weber 1965: 183)

Max Weber, a leading theorist of modernity, may be constructively viewed as a culminating figure in a lineage of nineteenth-century German social analysts. This school of thinkers, including such eminent figures as Ranke, Dilthey and Rickert – the latter being a contemporary of Weber – have come to be referred to as the Heidelberg ‘Cultural Philosophers’ and were all, in their various ways, contributing to the debate concerning the constitution and epistemological status of cultural phenomena. To this end their legacy has made a considerable contribution to our contemporary thinking about the cultural realm, a contribution which has some continuities with the English literary tradition, already discussed, but one which is also completely opposed to the once predominant anthropological sense of social structure, previously considered in Chapter 2. This body of ideas proceeds in line with all idealist philosophy, from a strong sense of the a priori, that which is intrinsic to and universal within the human condition.

culture, idealism and social action

The Cultural Philosophers were all working within a set of problematics that find their roots in the overshadowing, yet inspirational, presence of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant, it may be recalled, had, by a different root, exercised a considerable influence on the aesthetics of Coleridge. However, within the German academy Kant was no casual or accidental presence. It would be fairer to say that his ideas grounded all intellectual discourse, such that much thinking in his wake has been designated ‘neo-Kantian’, including that of Weber. Given the combative state of knowledge through and up to the turn of the century, Weber’s tradition is conventionally regarded as being engaged in the epistemological struggle or, to put it at its least contentious, the tension between the knowledge claims of idealism and positivism. Kantian philosophy established and projected the twin, seemingly irreconcilable, concerns of ‘morality’ and ‘science’. These two fundamental elements were suggestive of different realms of existence embodying mutually exclusive conceptions of humankind; on the one hand the pure, ideal creature and on the other the embodied, practical being. This radical dualism in Kant’s thinking is perpetually manifested in the severance between the ‘mind’ and the ‘body’. The mind makes reference to the spiritual character of human existence; this is a major formulation of the Geist of all German idealist philosophy which reaches fruition in Hegel’s transcendental rationalism. The body signifies the natural character of human existence; this constitutes the concrete, factual source of humankind’s empirical being in the world, and, in turn, it provides the material inspiration for positivist philosophies. This dualism in Kant is refashioned by the Cultural Philosophers, Weber included, in terms of the clear distinctions that they draw between the understandings of the ‘cultural sciences’ and the ‘natural sciences’, respectively. This distinction, this major problematic, is set within the context of a further Kantian conceptualization, that is the notion of ‘synthetic a priori truths’. This building block in Kant’s philosophical system refers to statements about the world that are universally and necessarily true (in this sense they are a priori); however, the necessity of such truths cannot be derived from an analysis of the meanings of such truths (in this sense they are synthetic). They are not merely logical deductions or principles, they tell us something ‘additional’ about the world. Classic philosophical examples would be statements such as ‘all events have causes’ and ‘a thing cannot be two colours at the same time’. For Kant there are two sources of

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46 culture, idealism and social action such knowledge, and these have a significant bearing upon the discussion of Weber’s cultural sociology, which is to follow. These two sources are firstly sensibility, which is an intuition of the immanent forms of being, and secondly understanding, which points us to the application of appropriate categories of thought, like space, time and causality. In sequence we can see these sources as heralding Weber’s idea of Verstehen and his idealtype constructs. In the broadest terms then, following Kant, the Cultural Philosophers viewed the individual actor as a free moral agent not appropriately subject to analysis by the generalizing methods of the natural sciences. The epistemological work of Weber and his forebears thus became the clarification of the systematic yet socially constructed character of the concepts of cultural science and the grounding of their construction in the notions of difference and value. How would we summarize Weber’s contribution to our understanding of culture? How useful is Weber’s method as yet another implement for our contemporary work? Yet prior to this we need perhaps ask, to what problem, as Weber saw it, does his cultural scientific methodology provide a solution? It is reasonable to assert that, according to a variety of sources (including the biography by his wife), Weber had no grandiose methodological aspirations. He wrote his now highly regarded essays on methodology (Weber 1949) at a stage of his life that concluded a sustained period of conceptual confusion, non-productivity and psychological disturbance and he regarded them as an act of purification, or perhaps, rather, clarification, of the massive corpus of research and writing that had proceeded this hiatus. To this degree he was unlike Durkheim whose desire was to form a school of sociological technique and practice. Weber really wanted to make clear for others what he believed was the timeless and inevitable strategy for understanding socio-cultural phenomena. Nevertheless, his views provided a justification for a shift in the activities of the cultural sciences and an announcement of their special identity. It did so, in part, by providing a critique of certain classical economic theorists (a tactic also employed by Karl Marx) such as Roscher and Knies. In this sense the methodology essays are wholly pragmatic; they were, for Weber, a means rather than an end. In line with his obsessive and consuming passion for gaining knowledge about the history and culture of human collectivities, Weber’s methodological canons actually enabled or facilitated further research, they did not specify its absolute character.


In this light it has been reasonably asserted by Burger (1976) that in many ways Weber’s methodological ideas were not very original, rather they belonged to the intellectual conventions of the previous Cultural Philosophers. Weber’s concern with the logical status of concepts is quite clearly based on the work of Rickert (1986), whom he openly acknowledged. However, the modern mystery story that we call the ‘ideal type’ and his ideas concerning value-neutrality are both original formulations in our analyses of cultural formations. Weber’s method of cultural analysis set out from certain strongly held views on the nature of social enquiry. He asserted that cultural knowledge should be conceptual in character rather than descriptive and therefore not an attempt at literal representation. This distanced him from his early mentor Ranke who had stated that it is the ‘business of the historian to render the past in all its concrete detail’. Weber wished to locate cultural facticities within the realm of reason, the exercise of mind, the course of action that is uniquely human – what philosophers call ideal. Beyond this it has been well rehearsed that Weber sought to resist the intrusion of judgements of value into the rigorous practice of his social science. This is not to say that Weber failed to recognize the infinitely value-laden character of cultural phenomena themselves, nor was he unaware of the value-laden character of the rejection of values. Culture is the practice of humankind, as is its understanding. Finally he resisted the compelling idea, that stemmed from the obvious and apparent success of the natural sciences, that social, historical or cultural analysis should aspire to the establishment of laws and empirical generalizations. The neo-Kantians held to the view that within the cultural realm of phenomena no essence or noumenal form could be revealed, only appearances or phenomenal forms were available and thus the search for laws relating the existence of essences was unjustifiable. This means that cultural science is different from, but not inferior to, the natural sciences. Rather, the former is challenging to the latter. All scientific activity must seek to produce a knowledge that is objective but they do so by capturing phenomena through their different modes of discourse. Simply stated, both natural and cultural sciences generate realities through their processes of abstraction, so the different character of their realities belongs to the differences in their processes, or methods. Objective knowledge is socially contexted and would thus be varied; it belongs to the shared rules of agreement within a group of scientists (or cultural theorists). This resonates with Thomas Kuhn’s (1970) notion of paradigmatic knowledge.

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48 culture, idealism and social action Knowledge, for the Cultural Philosophers, was always a state of mind, it was not a correspondential copy of reality – whatever that might be. Culture can thus be treated not as a deposition, or a reflection, or a superstructural representation of a material state; it is autonomous, as it is a course of action. Cultural phenomena have a content that emerges through human intention, certain sensations or impressions are given to us through the character of our relation to the world. We then place a form upon our impressions by imposing a category of thought or an idea upon them. Thus ‘facts’ emerge as a confluence of sensation and significance, and they assume the status of a segment, singled out and held apart from the undifferentiated mass of reality. Facts, as the elementary simples of knowing, are thus constituted in the mind. They are intentional acts not constant features of an orderly universe. Experience is potentially limitless or infinite, that is, the universe is continuous in its unavailability. Confronting this, the human mind is finite. The action of knowing thus saves the universe from its randomness, it places order upon chaos. Methodology, for Weber, within the social and cultural sciences, is an adherence to consensual principles of selection and abstraction. Without a sustained, consistent methodology subjective knowledge(s) would proliferate because of the idiosyncratic nature of human difference. Seen in this way, objectivity for the cultural sciences becomes not the establishment of a set of absolute ‘correct’ facts but the reflexive assurance of the selection of the same facts for all practitioners. Objective knowledge is, therefore, inter-subjective, it is part of a social context, and that context is always an object of its concern. The distinction that Weber and the Cultural Philosophers draw between ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’ sciences is based on the logical status of the concepts that the different spheres of understanding operate with. Human beings overcome the burden of infinity through the selection of facts, and the different criteria employed in the selection of facts signifies the location of the understanding as being either ‘natural’ or ‘cultural’. So the selection of the common elements of events gives rise to the general concepts of the ‘natural’ sciences (these are the concepts that ignore individual difference), and the selection of the unique elements of events gives rise to individual concepts, which are the particular concepts of the ‘cultural sciences’. Both Rickert and Weber accept the validity and efficacy of the laws of


nature that are elucidated through the natural sciences but hold the reservation that they do not exhaust all that we need to know. This is in large part due to the fact that they are essentially material, they are static and they presume determinacy. In relation to cultural phenomena they would abuse the volatile and emergent qualities of such socially and historically contexted processes and events. The work of the Cultural Philosophers is thus in favour of individual, particularistic concepts, ideas which speak of intentionality and autonomy, and they therefore place culture firmly in the sphere of action. I shall demonstrate this point in a moment in connection with Weber’s thesis on the origins and growth of modern capitalism, but at this stage we may usefully pursue his methodology of cultural analysis. A clear threat to any method that seems to espouse a particularistic individualism is that it lays itself open to a proliferation of subjective relativisms – what is there to prevent the emergence of as many accounts of a phenomenon as there are theorists producing the accounts? Well, in one sense, nothing at all. However, knowing, like other social and cultural phenomena, is also a collective course of action constrained by convention, tradition, reason and morality. There is a collective consciousness, or perhaps a complex inter-subjectivity, which applies to knowing just as it does to all courses of action. Thus, the way cultural theorists will make discriminations between things is located in space and time. Their method will make reference to general cultural values which are the contemporary practical evaluations embedded in the social institutions constituting the structure of the epoch. This is a truly sociological point. Secondly, cultural analysis escapes relativism by assessing its topic not in terms of distinctly private and idiosyncratic values, but rather in terms of historically ‘relevant’ values. This idea of value relevance is sometimes treated by more contemporary commentators on Weber as an exercise in empathy. In this way cultural knowledge, for Weber, can be scientific because it is rigorously and reflexively constructed, but it is always a mental image (an intention, a ‘metaphor’ almost) rather than a literal copy of reality. Cultural phenomena are constructed in thought; empirical data are mastered through the imposition of value – but this is the delicate interpretive work of Verstehen, not the mechanical grasping, collecting and replicating of Begreifen that typifies the methods of positivism and the natural sciences. For Weber, then, cultural phenomena are constituted through human values and their understanding further requires the

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50 culture, idealism and social action imposition of judgements of value. So when Weber tells us that ‘in action is included all human behaviour in so far as the actor attaches a subjective meaning to it’ (Weber 1949: 27), he is referring to the individual members of society doing what is intended or purposive rather than that which is instinctual or reactive. But he is also referring to the practice of the other members of their society (perhaps the theorist of culture) in placing a meaning upon an action to render it meaningful and coherent rather than nonsensical and random. This latter activity of making sense of others Weber crystallizes in terms of his methodological concept of the ‘ideal type’. The ‘ideal type’, as a device employed in the interpretation of culture, involves the analyst’s projection of typical values and motivations into the supposed ‘inner states’ of the actors under scrutiny. But, of course, there is more to the ‘ideal type’ than this. Despite Weber’s protestations concerning the non-originality, the taken-for-grantedness and the almost ‘natural’ character of ‘ideal type-ing’ as a way of understanding collective human conduct, the idea remains elusive and confounding of generations of students of socio-cultural life. Weber was using the ‘ideal type’ as a way of resolving the contradictory epistemological demands of idealism and positivism, and the alternative forms of explanation in terms of particularity or generality. Because of the essential dimension of subjectivity in the act of making sense, Weber recognized that the individuality of cultural concepts derived from the unique pattern in which the elements comprising the phenomenon occurred. He then attended to the issue that despite the uniqueness of each particular account of an aspect of culture, the definitional characteristics or the basic elements of such phenomena appear constant – although in each particular instance they are present in different degrees (so when we say ‘capitalism’, and perhaps imply slightly different things, we still all know what is being talked about). This recognition leads directly to the formation of the ‘ideal type’. The ‘ideal type’ can be seen as an attempt to introduce a collective, comparative element into cultural analysis. The concept endeavours to solve the methodological problem of aspiring towards cultural ‘generalizations’ without the introduction of the general concepts characteristic of the natural sciences. It clarifies the relation between universal laws and historical descriptions, and helps to establish the epistemological status of the latter. Weber distils the essence of the ‘ideal type’ concept in four, often cited, passages from The Methodology of the Social Sciences:

culture, idealism and social action The term ideal-typical is applied to categorizations of, and statements about, relations between actors and action elements in terms of, or by reference to, the presence of one or a few maxims in the minds of actors according to which they orient their thoughts and actions. An ideal type is formed by the one-sided exaggeration of one or several viewpoints and by the combination of a great many single phenomena existing diffusely and discretely, more or less present and occasionally absent, which are compatible with those one-sidedly emphasized viewpoints, into an internally consistent thought-picture. In its conceptual purity this thought-picture cannot be found empirically anywhere in reality, it is a utopia. . . . Ideal types are statements of general form asserting the existence of certain constellations of elements which are empirically only approximated by the instances of the class of phenomenon to which each type refers. [The ideal type] . . . is a thought picture which is neither the historical reality (i.e. its content is not a complete reproduction of concrete reality) nor even perhaps the ‘true’ reality (i.e. it does not present, in an absolute sense, the ‘essence’ of reality), whose purpose is even less to serve as a schema in which a part of reality should find its place as an instance (i.e. it is not a true general concept) but it has to be interpreted as a purely limiting concept for the comparison with and scrutiny of reality for the purpose of emphasizing certain significant parts of empirical reality. (Weber 1949)

From these dense and often convoluted definitions we may elicit that the ideal type is essentially an heuristic device, a conceptual aide to thinking which certainly does not seek to exhaust its phenomenon. It is in no sense an hypothesis (though it may have some role in hypothesis formation), which would be the original proposition in a path of enquiry, and it does not serve to extract the lowest common denominators of an historical situation. So it is not an inductive generalization. Beyond this it relinquishes all claims to establishing an ‘accurate’ description of concrete reality. The ‘ideal type’ would seem to become defined in terms of what it

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52 culture, idealism and social action is not. Rather than the ‘ideal type’ being comprised of an assembly of elements that are common to any particular empirical phenomenon, it attempts to elucidate the ‘significant’ and ‘characteristic’ features of that phenomenon, that is, those features that produce it as ‘meaningful’ and ‘relevant’ within its specific historical context. So, for example, Weber assembled the peculiar qualities of bureaucratic organization at the turn of the century in terms of rationality and efficiency; a modern ideal type of bureaucracy might seek to highlight dehumanization and inefficiency. ‘Ideal types’ make reference to the autonomous symbolism of a phenomenon within a culture. The epistemological status of an ‘ideal type’ is quite extraordinary; while it is made recognizable through an agglomeration of variables perceived differentially within the empirical world, it is, actually, a fiction, an imaginary leap, or what Weber chooses to call a utopia. Such a utopia nevertheless has to fulfil certain criteria of plausibility, it has to be internally coherent and also not defy common sense. All cultural phenomena, though often formidable in the constraint they exercise, are nevertheless fragile in that they are generated and maintained by virtue of acting members of a society placing and sustaining their own values within them. That is to say that any cultural representation is contingent upon the condition that it either reflects, or embodies, the ideas and interests of the people to which it has any semiotic significance. The state of a culture then makes reference to the shared individual unconscious held by a people. This is a very diffuse concept but it enables us to reconcile the multiplicity of possible meanings that derive from how any particular aspect of culture appears to different actors and likewise the multiplicity of different courses of action that may all contrive to give rise to a particular aspect of culture. Social life and the practice of understanding of social life both contain strategies (later to be considered under Harold Garfinkel’s ethnomethodologies) which contrive to bring off a sense of uniformity and singularity in relation to our knowledge of cultural events. We create types, typifications or ideal pictures, and Weber’s ‘ideal type’ is an attempt to regularize such a strategy in the methodology of the cultural sciences. When Weber instructs us that we should create a ‘one-sided exaggeration’, he is pointing to our calculated, reflexive disregard of the myriad possible motives or inner states of people that may have given rise to an aspect of culture. Instead we are invited to act as if only a limited number of possibilities were at work, and to see what stems from an emphasis on those variables. An acceptance of this


principle allows for the non-contradictory possibility of having a proliferation of ‘ideal types’ concerning, what commonsense might regard as, the ‘same’ phenomenon. This is wholly appropriate for a cultural science where the different social theorists or historians work from within intellectual perspectives and value positions that are only ideologically exclusive. Furthermore, as different viewpoints are always emerging, it is inappropriate to attempt to achieve an exhaustive system of ‘ideal types’. Within this mood of quiet liberalism, however, it must be reiterated that these different viewpoints are not randomly arrived at, they make reference to the practical values in the mind of the particular theorist – so ‘ideal types’ are intended, they have a purpose within a committed value position. The ‘ideal type’ may be seen as a device within a cultural science that operates at a level in excess of mere description, it is far more general in character. However, the ‘ideal type’ is formulated in relation to an historical or cultural purpose. It is as if the method should catch the spirit of the social process, and perhaps no more than this could be claimed for it. Weber is adamant in his modesty when he affirms that ‘the exact relation between the ideal type and empirical reality is problematic in every single case’ (Weber 1949: 68). Although Parsons (1951) accuses Weber of creating a ‘mosaic atomism’, a kind of collective assembly of essential reductions, this is itself an unjustifiable reduction. The ‘ideal type’ serves its purpose by parading and manifesting its unreality. Weber was concerned with understanding, the act of transformation, his contemporary controversy was with how a cultural science should abstract inductively from empirical reality. As an heuristic device the ‘ideal type’ seeks to get the work done, it helps to provide working models, substantively based models, and models that have a rigorous character. Let us now turn to Weber’s own ideal-typical analysis of the dominant culture of modernity, which he sees in the ‘elective affinity’ and mutual acceleration occurring between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of modern capitalism. This analysis is to be found in his major work (Weber 1965), which many modern Marxist commentators, such as Zeitlin (1968), Lewis (1975) and Hirst (1976), have read as an ideological justification and apologia for capitalism in the name of reason. This stems from a particular materialist view of human relations (that we shall consider in greater detail in the next chapter), which, although it assigns culture an

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54 culture, idealism and social action active role in institutionalizing and legitimating the organization of society, tends to reduce this role to that of reproduction. Absent from the classical Marxist position, and central to Weber’s, is an understanding of how culture not only sustains and reproduces social relationships, but also how it is instrumental in the production of the organizational forms of those relationships and the processes of their transformation through history. For Weber, culture is not reducible to the status of superstructure, that is, a reflection or expression of the underlying material structures. Rather culture is better understood as an autonomous basis of social order which is actively engaged in the practice of structuring social relationships in public and recognizable ways. Viewed from this position, and this is a vital contribution to our modern understanding of the concept, culture has a logic of its own. It is in these terms, with culture being viewed as producer, as well as reproducer, of social relationships that Weber analyses both the emergence and institutionalization of capitalism within Western society as part of the rationalization of modernity, both in general and in particular. This is a point made forcibly by Walsh when he states that: What Weber points to, as being essentially noticeable, about modern capitalism is that it is a form of economic activity which is conducted in terms of a particular mentality which is essential to its nature. There is, then, a culture of capitalism – what Weber calls the Spirit of Capitalism – that is intrinsic to capitalist organization and without which it cannot work as a form of economic activity. (Walsh 1992)

The ‘spirit’ that Weber refers to is motivating and constraining, and yet intangible and not reducible to the notable set of emergent structural conditions such as the growth and centralization of commerce, the expansion of urbanization into cities, the dispossession of the peasantry from the land, the emergence of financial institutions and a social group to service them, and, most significantly, the growth and polarization of a system of stratification organized primarily around the issue of the ownership of the means of production. The spirit of capitalism is not just a functional accompaniment to a burgeoning economic system which will map the destinies of generations to come, but, according to Marx, within a structure of social relations that is alienating, intolerable and constantly threatened by the fracturing of its contradictions. The spirit of capitalism


is operating at a different level. It is not just the legitimating buttress of a particular set of market relations, rather it provides a way of being that is both rational and moral, and also manifests itself at the level of individual psychology. Just as Durkheim had seen the integrative potential in a modern economic division of labour through a heterogeneous solidarity based on interdependence, so Weber sees the spirit of capitalism not as producing a grand historical lie or distortion of the purpose of human being, but instead he views it as producing a viable and all-embracing creed or purpose for being in the modern world. Entrepreneurs are driven to accumulate profit by a ‘salvation anxiety’ concerning their telos, and the working masses are driven to productivity by the self-affirming ethic of hard work (which ‘never hurt anyone’ and is good for the soul), the very purpose of being (a proposition agreed by Marx, outside of the conditions of exploitation). This spirit, the mentality of modernity, this shared set of values, establishes equilibrium at every level within the social system, despite the constant, and allegedly inherent fractures of the material base. Clearly, in Weber’s view of culture, this Zeitgeist is imbued with both autonomy, and longevity. The rationality of modern capitalism, ‘which rests on the expectation of profit by the utilization of opportunities for exchange, that is, on formally peaceful chances of profit’ (Weber 1965: 103) is not simply the recommendation for a potentially Hobbesian war of each against all within a philosophy of avarice. It is part of a wider cultural complex that is held in check by an ethos of reciprocity of expectations based on honesty, frugality, punctuality and industriousness. This Protestant ethic, experienced by all as a ‘calling’, motivates honest labour as an expression of individual virtue and efficiency. The ‘calling’ is universal for Weber. As he says, it consists of ‘an obligation which the individual is supposed to feel and does feel towards the content of his activity no matter in what it consists’. The point of Weber’s thesis is not, as some have supposed, to either justify the development of capitalism and its modes of stratification, nor to reduce an explanation of its development to the ascetic demands of certain branches of European non-conformist Protestantism. Rather, he is providing a persuasive basis for the understanding of dominant contemporary cultural formations in terms of the central efficacy, autonomy and generative force of ideas in action: a truly idealist explanation. Culture is immanent within human conduct and the patterns of action that emerge

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56 culture, idealism and social action through its intersubjectivity. Culture is never simply a reflection of prestructured social relationships and the economic interests enshrined in them but, on the contrary, an agent in their production and maintenance. Weber has brought us further towards what Frisby and Sayer (1986) describe as ‘society as an absent concept’. The socio-cultural realm is not a tangible material force, nor a reflection of such materiality; it resides in action, choice and value, all of which are subjective, intersubjective and volatile – but real, tangible and material in their consequences. A further interesting twist here is the relationship between Weber’s thought and that of Jürgen Habermas, who is seen by many to be a critical Marxist thinker of the Frankfurt School. However, Habermas never fully assumed the basic Marxist propositions concerning the relation between the base and the superstructure. He actually generates a peculiarly ‘Weberian’ version of Marxism. All of Weber’s key ideas on Western rationalization and his mapping and theorizing of the different ideal types of rational action are crucial to Habermas’s work. When Habermas upholds Enlightenment reason in the face of the slide towards postmodernism via a ‘legitimation crisis’ he can be clearly understood as picking up Weber’s earlier concerns rather than expanding the Marxist corpus. Culture as social action, an idea stemming in large part from Weberian thought, provides the ontological basis for a whole tradition of analysis within the social sciences; and one populated by an interesting diversity of bedfellows. The most obvious links between Weber’s ideas and contemporary thought are provided for by the social phenomenologist Alfred Schutz, and also by the pre-eminent American sociologist Talcott Parsons, equally famous for his ‘general theory of action’ and for his ‘social systems theory’. SCHUTZ AND A SOCIAL PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE LIFEWORLD Alfred Schutz was born at the very end of the nineteenth century in Vienna, studied law and social theory and became preoccupied with the logic and methodology of the human sciences. He subsequently determined to establish a firm philosophical basis on which to interpret and accurately describe social interaction. It is within the finite provinces of meaning provided through interaction that culture becomes established and is reaffirmed. This is a culture without structural fixity and based on interpretation and


‘multiple realities’ emerging through social action; another firm instance of what we have described as a symbolic view of culture. statements . . . of T.S. Eliot and . . . of Goethe, show the poet’s insight into the fact that within a finite province of meaning of the work of art the interrelationship of the symbols as such is the essence of the poetic content and that it is unnecessary and may even be harmful to look for the referential scheme which the appresenting elements of the symbolic relationship would symbolize, if they were indeed objects of the world of everyday life. But their connection with these objects has been cut off; the use of the appresenting elements is just a means of communication; whereas poetry communicates by using ordinary language, the ideas symbolized by this language are real entities within the finite province of meaning of poetical meaning. (Schutz 1971: 346–7)

The single major influence on Schutz’s work was the philosopher Edmund Husserl (also mentor to Martin Heidegger), who introduced him to the ‘science of the subjective’, the new phenomenology, which was to provide a critique of the objectivism of all post-Socratic Western philosophy. Husserl provided Schutz with the three primary strands of his intellectual development through the theory of intentionality, his notion of intersubjectivity (which he incorporated with his reading of Weber), and the concept of the Lebenswelt. The conditions were set for Schutz to aspire to a grand reconciliation of Weber’s ‘Verstehen sociology’ and Husserl’s ‘transcendental phenomenology’. His work has endowed us in our approach to culture, first of all, with an attention to the centrality of consciousness; his concept of ‘intentionality’ affirming that consciousness is always consciousness of some thing, thus pointing to a dialectical theory of knowing, the provision of a sense of ‘other’ and, more significantly, to the constitutive practices of subjectivity through action. Secondly, Schutz centres his analyses not on the isolated subject, but on the meeting place between subjects, the cultural, the realm of intersubjectivity; which Weber had previously explored with his notions of choice, with his typologies of rational action and through his dictum that: We shall speak of ‘action’ insofar as the acting individual attaches a subjective meaning to his behaviour – be it overt or covert, omission or

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58 culture, idealism and social action acquiescence. Action is ‘social’ insofar as its subjective meaning takes account of the behaviour of others, and is thereby oriented in its course. (Weber 1968: 27)

Finally, Schutz invites us to re-examine the original constitution of the life-world which human beings take for granted in their ‘natural attitude’, through such devices as an assumed ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ and an ‘interchangeability of standpoints’, and which the social analyst rarely topicalizes, but which is an active site of culture regarded as a social process emergent from intentional social action. Schutz’s theoretical initiatives are taken forward and developed in the work of Thomas Luckmann and Peter Berger which addresses the social construction of all cultural realities. TALCOTT PARSONS AND THE GENERAL THEORY OF ACTION Parsons, whose theory of the social system we considered earlier in relation to the concept of social structure, was attempting to provide a unifying scheme for the social sciences through a theory of action. He was also, however, concerned with a clarification of the concept of culture as the very context of social interaction. Perhaps the point may first be discussed briefly in relation to the problem of culture. In anthropological theory there is not what could be called close agreement on the definition of the concept of culture. But for present purposes three prominent keynotes of the discussion may be picked out: first, that culture is transmitted, it constitutes a heritage or a social tradition; secondly, that it is learned, it is not a manifestation, in particular content, of man’s genetic constitution; and third, that it is shared. Culture, that is, is on the one hand the product of, on the other hand a determinant of, systems of human social interaction. (Parsons 1951a: 15)

Weber’s ideas were clearly formative for Parsons, although the theoretical end product is less identifiable with its origins than in the case of Schutz. Parsons was educated at Heidelberg and despite having just missed Weber’s teaching he was much influenced by the neo-Kantian tradition and its insistence on establishing immutable categories as a basis for social


and cultural understanding. The beginning of theorizing for Parsons is twofold, being located in the problem of order, which led him to systems, and also in the problem of control, which led him to the idea of social action. It is no simple matter to pin down an explicit definition of action in Parsons, but Guy Rocher has attempted to distil one for us: Social action . . . is all human behaviour motivated and directed by the meanings which the actor discerns in the external world, meanings of which he takes account and to which he responds. So the essential feature of social action is the actor’s sensitivity to the meanings of the people and things about him, his perception of these meanings and his reactions to the messages they convey. (Rocher 1974: 28–9)

This resonates with Weber’s definition but in Parsons’s hands the concept transforms into an extreme level of abstraction. Within Parsons’s theory of action the fundamental social object is the ‘unit actor’ which, in combination with at least one other social object, comprises the ‘action set’ or ‘interaction’ between ego and alter. Interaction inhabits the cultural field which is made up of cultural, or what he sometimes calls symbolic, objects. Social action is dependent upon its location within culture, it is (as shown in the above quote) essentially meaningful and therefore conducted through symbolism. Only by way of signs and symbols can the actor relate to his world; through symbolism he can assess, make judgements within and attempt to exercise some control over his environment. Without the cultural, the symbolic, for Parsons, there would be no interaction. It is both the medium of relation and the glue which cements people together in communication. If human action is always and everywhere supposed to exhibit the properties of a system, then such systems are, in effect, intrinsically cultural, they are potentially infinite symbolic universes within which all conduct acquires meaning and is ascribed meaning by both ego and alter. Cultural objects are symbolic elements of the cultural tradition, ideas or beliefs, expressive symbols or value patterns so far as they are treated as situational objects by ego and are not ‘internalized’ as constitutive elements of the structure of his personality. (Parsons 1951a: 4)

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60 culture, idealism and social action As Parsons’s reasoning unfolds we begin to recognize a continuity in meaning that sustains at all levels within the social system from the individual unconscious, the individual consciousness, the collective consciousness and even the system’s functional prerequisites. This stable, unitary isomorphism ensures that the age-old sociological problem of order is held in check by the consensual complementarity of perspectives throughout the institutions of society and its culture. The most fundamental theorem of the theory of action seems to be that the structure of systems of action consist in institutionalized (in social and cultural systems) and/or internalized (in personalities and organisms) patterns of cultural meaning. That this is not a proposition obvious to common sense is attested by the long and complex history of behaviouristic and other reductionist theories of human behaviour. (Parsons 1961: 342)

What Parsons here refers to as a ‘theorem’ accounts for the reciprocity of the collective and individual perspectives by demonstrating that they are both grounded in culture patterns which are, in turn, realities within individual consciousness and the collective world of symbolism. Parsons’s obvious reification of the system set a problem of the demystification of action for his student Garfinkel who, applying inspirations from Schutz, set out to invert the Parsonian project and investigate ‘the awesome mystery within’, the daily affirmation of cultural reality through the mundane taken-for-granted practices of social action. Parsons’s work nevertheless remains a remarkable statement within the idealist tradition. He clearly espoused a sense of culture as action and he defined himself as an ‘incurable theorist’. GEERTZ AND INTERPRETIVE ANTHROPOLOGY Clifford Geertz is a contemporary American anthropologist who directly identifies himself with the verstehende tradition in the social sciences and locates the idea of culture firmly within the context of ongoing, interpretive social action; on the parts of both social actor and social theorist. He quite clearly understands culture as a symbolic network which, paradoxically for my classificatory scheme, he refers to as the ‘semiotic’ in the following quote.

culture, idealism and social action The concept of culture I espouse . . . is essentially a semiotic one. Believing, with Max Weber, that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun, I take culture to be those webs, and the analysis of it to be therefore not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning. It is explication I am after, construing social expressions on their surface enigmatical. (Geertz 1975: 5)

Geertz, through his concern with active mental process, has much in common with the canons of classical idealism, though he attempts to render such distinctions defunct. His ethnographic practice, which is his work, rather than his speculation, is very much embedded in the lived contexts of human societies as opposed to what he sees as a dominant modern intellectual attitude: ‘anthropologists have shied away from cultural particularities when it came to a question of defining man and have taken refuge instead in bloodless universals’ (Geertz 1975: 43). His symbolic, mentalist approach relies very much on the description of what he sees as the layers of mediation; like mood, motivation and conception; between the systems of symbols and the facticities of everyday life. In this way he ranges through accounts of all aspects of culture from kinship, religion and politics to economics, addressing the social action of mind, both in the form of the conscious and the unconscious. This last phenomenon, the unconscious, puts him in a relation with psychoanalysis and structuralism, but again he marks out his difference, which is in terms of method. Geertz recommends the study of cultural phenomena through an engaged empirical fieldwork, an ethnography which is not a series of techniques but a relationship, an attitude. He seeks: ‘the enlargement of the universe of human discourse’ (Geertz 1975: 14) through an understanding of the meaning of a symbol or cluster of symbols for the people who are using them (what we used to call emic as opposed to etic analysis), a practical sense of location. This all stems from his important belief that culture is not a source of causality but a context of intelligibility. Geertz calls his method ‘Thick Description’, which goes beyond a description of ‘what occurred’ to the infinitely incompletable task of explaining the structures of signification within which ‘what occurred’ meaningfully took place. This has become a highly influential and non-formalistic methodology in both anthropology and cultural sociology.

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62 culture, idealism and social action The enthusiasm and optimism with which he puts forward his programme is quite compelling, and very much at odds with reductionist or essentialist accounts of culture. Cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete. And, worse than that, the more deeply it goes the less complete it is. It is a strange science whose most telling assertions are its most tremulously based, in which to get somewhere with the matter at hand is to intensify the suspicion, both your own and that of others, that you are not quite getting it right. But that, along with plaguing subtle people with obtuse questions, is what being an ethnographer is like. (Geertz 1975: 29)

LÉVI-STRAUSS AND STRUCTURALISM This might be regarded as only a marginally appropriate location for a discussion of structuralism, but then so, perhaps, would any other placement within my classificatory scheme. Structuralism does not escape my categories, such as to justify a chapter of its own, and it is considered later as a theory of cultural reproduction, so I will attempt to contain it here on the grounds of its clear continuity with the tradition of philosophical idealism, the backdrop to all the approaches to culture and social action treated above. The cultural anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss did not assimilate his neo-Kantian concerns within the context of the German academy but instead through the auspices of the two French scholars who he cites as formative in his thinking, namely Émile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss. Durkheim’s ‘social Kantianism’ or ‘soft idealism’ we previously addressed in relation to the symbolic versus the semiotic views of culture and social structure. His collaborator and heir, Marcel Mauss, advanced the idealist elements in accounting for social action through his sense of ‘collective representations’; these were more generalized and reciprocal psychological dispositions common to all humankind. He provided working examples of these two-way senses of escalating obligation and vocabularies of motivation through his study entitled The Gift. This extremely influential work focused on the moral economy of potlach. The universality of human cognitive action is central to Lévi-Strauss’s thought. Whatever the incessant variability of the forms of human culture


both across space (the ‘synchronic’) and through time (the ‘diachronic’), it is asserted that the human mind has always worked in the same way. Social action in the formation, reproduction and even adaptation of actual cultures is, for the purposes of structuralist analysis, a surface manifestation of a series of deeply interiorized master patterns at the deep structural level of cognition. Particular cultures, then, are socio-historically specific transformations of an unconscious, universal and immanent rule-system. The determinism is diffused through the specificity of the transformations. His method is both linguistic and geological in the way that it seeks to excavate fundamental layers, or strata, of meaning. Whether we are looking at Lévi-Strauss’s analysis of kinship systems through the exercise of the incest taboos that regulate the exchange of women, Noam Chomsky’s account of ‘linguistic universals’ in direct relation to the infinite flexibility of any child’s capacity to acquire any language, Jacques Lacan’s realms of the ‘imaginary’, the ‘symbolic’ and the ‘real’ at work in the process of psycho-social development, or Jean Piaget’s investigations of the genetic epistemology that ensures the commonality and regularity of ‘the child’s’ stages of cognitive development, we are in fact looking past the transitory representations that make up modern culture back to Descartes’s positioning of humankind at the hub of the universe and then returning through Kant’s location of that ‘hub’ within the a priori continua of space, time and inevitably causality. Structuralism enables us further to address the ‘homologies’, resonances, or similarities in configuration, between otherwise discrete cultural phenomena. We detect a seamless continuity between Roland Barthes contemplating the cultural significance of a meal in relation to the choice and chain provided through a restaurant menu, Jacques Lacan unscrambling the mis-transformations of schizophrenic parole in the face of the collective (and oppressive) meanings of la langue, and Lévi-Strauss taking us through the unique production of a piece of orchestral music as the scored combination of melody and harmony. All of these binary metaphors are interchangeable. Structuralism is, on reflection, a grand representation of the relation between culture and social action and a major contribution to contemporary idealist thought.

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4 CULTURE, MARXISM AND MATERIALISM Life is not determined by consciousness but consciousness by life. (Marx and Engels 1970: 47)

Like it or not Marx has provided a major element in contemporary thinking about society and culture. Indeed, one might go as far as to say that all subsequent theorizing about culture has to be read and understood in relation to what Marx and his interpreters have deposited for us. In the case of art it is well known that certain flourishing periods are not by any means proportionate to the general development of society, hence to its material foundation, the skeleton, as it were, of its organization. For example the Greeks as compared with the moderns, or Shakespeare. In the case of certain art forms, e.g., the epos, it is even recognized that they can never be produced in their universal epochmaking classical form once artistic production as such has begun; hence that within the artistic world certain important formations are possible only at a primitive stage of art’s development. If this applies to the interrelation between the various modes within the sphere of art, it is

culture, marxism and materialism even less surprising that it should be the case in the relationship of the entire artistic realm to the general development of society. (Marx 1953: 30)

The work of Karl Marx, perhaps more than the writings of any other social theorist, illustrates the tropes and paradoxes of theorizing. Even though, it might be argued, Marx’s thought is challenged only by that of Jesus Christ and Sigmund Freud for the status of being the leading influence upon people’s lives within the modern world, his is not a solitary message. It is certainly the case that there are far more versions of Marx available to us, through interpretation, than the one voice that we meet on the page. There are early and late Marx, humanist and scientific Marx, materialist and idealist Marx, structuralist, crude, Leninist Marx and so on. My point, in the context of a monograph on culture, is not to attempt to arrest this proliferation of versions, nor to point to the ‘true’ reading of Marx. Rather I hope to demonstrate that although I shall, in this chapter, cite Marx as the prime source of thinking about culture in relation to materialism, this too is only one formulation (albeit a somewhat predominant one) and his work may equally well be seen as contributing to the debate over culture and social action, stratification or social structure. I will proceed to an analysis of various neo-Marxisms, from Gramsci and Lukács, to Goldmann and Benjamin, and, of course, to the work of Raymond Williams, and assess their varied contributions to our understanding of culture. Some of these are theories directly related to the material base, while others, following the influence of Hegel and phenomenology, move far more towards a semi-autonomous view of culture; to the point, almost, of excising them from this category. Nevertheless, I shall justify this grouping on the grounds of each of the theorists contained here, demonstrating a primary allegiance to Marx in their thinking. Let us begin by viewing Marx as the origin of this tradition of relating to cultural phenomena. Initially I want to view his work in relation to the classical epistemological dichotomy between idealism and materialism which, in the context of philosophy and social theory, has provided for the problem of knowledge being typically addressed through either a theory of practical reason, or through a theory of pure reason. The former, a theory of practical reason, stresses that humankind lives within a preconstituted, real world, which has an intrinsic, factual ‘truth’ status. Such a world impinges on the individual. The activity of ‘knowing’ is, then, the

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66 culture, marxism and materialism receiving of information from an external world. Humankind lives in a subservient relation to both culture and nature. We seek knowledge through the passive contemplation of objective structures. Such a deterministic theory is a variety of materialism. A theory of pure reason, on the other hand, is premised on the centrality of humankind as a form of consciousness. That is to say that such a theory is concerned with the selflegislating capacity of the individual imposing itself upon the world. The act of ‘knowing’ transforms from a passive ‘taking’ or receiving process, to an active ‘making’ or constituting process. Such an unrestrained view of the mind would clearly instance a version of idealism, such as we considered in the previous chapter. In the former theory matter precedes mind and in the latter, mind precedes matter. Matter in each case may be understood as the deposition of representations that we would regard as the ‘cultural’. Let us pursue Marx’s method towards an understanding of culture. One of Marx’s conventionally characterized virtues is that he synthesized the dichotomy between materialism and idealism. His complexity derives from his inability to stabilize such a synthesis and from the compounding of his antecedent influences. His work was informed by the rationalist idealism of Hegel, in terms of his sense of the ‘pure consciousness’; and also by the materialism of Feuerbach (among others), in terms of his ideas of ‘nature’ and the ‘material base’. This complexity is further compounded by his then having explicitly criticized, if not rejected, both such philosophies. This is not meant to imply that Marx was a mere compilation of influences or theoretical antecedents – his significance, and lasting contribution, derives from his innovation as a theorist as typified in the method that we now refer to as ‘historical materialism’. Marx’s corpus is widely referred to as materialistic, which is in part its intent and in part a legacy of Engels’s subsequent mechanistic interpretation of his writings. Whereas Marx formulated the dialectic as a way of addressing a world, Engels, particularly in the Dialectics of Nature, produces it as a blueprint method for analysing the world. The concept of nature for Engels, as for Feuerbach and the British empiricists, was conceptualized as inanimate, compelling and opaque matter. It was the form that preceded mind or consciousness; thus mind was seen as the product of matter. For Hegel, on the other hand, nature was constructed as the ‘spirit’ in a state of self-estrangement. Reason and ideas were rooted in humankind and there was no necessary external existence, that is, nothing was eventually

culture, marxism and materialism

alien to human consciousness and being. Hegel saw the idealist–materialist dichotomy as reflecting the master–slave patterning of relationships to the world – the former involved the imposition of ideas and the latter implied a structure imposing limits. Such a split in the possibilities of human consciousness between ‘subject’ and ‘object’ provided Marx with the grounds for his concept of ‘alienation’. Marx’s work, when viewed as inverting Hegel’s thesis, can be read as having a primary concern with an engaged consciousness and the ultimate creative possibility of human self-emancipation or authenticity. Marx produces this through his concept of ‘sensuousness’. He considered that nature cannot be discussed as if it were separate from human action. This is because nature, as a potential object for human cognition, has already been effected by previous human contact, and must continue to be provided for, or apprehended, by further human action in the form of theorizing. Thus Marx tends to speak of ‘humanized nature’ or ‘sensuousness’ rather than of objective factual data. It is as if all ‘nature’ pulsates with the productive endeavour of humanity. The chief defect of all hitherto existing materialism (that of Feuerbach included) is that the thing, reality, sensuousness, is conceived only in the form of the object or of contemplation, but not as sensuous human activity, practice, not subjectively. Hence, in contradistinction to materialism, the active side was developed abstractly by idealism – which, of course, does not know real, sensuous activity as such. Feuerbach wants sensuous objects, really distinct from the thought objects, but he does not conceive human activity itself as objective activity. (Marx 1970: 121)

Marx’s analyses operate with the notion of reality as Wirklichkeit, i.e. as implying the initial creation of the world by human labour, and its continued production or shaping by the same means. In relation to this he directs us to the essentially conservative nature of both the classical doctrines of materialism and idealism – of Feuerbach’s materialism he notes, in The German Ideology, that if the world is not the product of human thought and labour then how can we begin to change it; and of Hegel’s speculative idealism Marx shows us that as such theorizing is utterly unreflexive about the grounds of its own production then, implicitly at least, it must accept those grounds as givens.

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68 culture, marxism and materialism It had not occurred to any one of these philosophers [the Hegelians] to inquire into the connection of German philosophy with German reality, the relation of their criticism to their own material surroundings. (Marx 1970: 41)

Avineri (1968) tells us that Marx saw that the constructive feature of human consciousness cannot be limited to mere cognition. Cognitive action must be seen as the whole process of the development and evolution of reality; the practice of getting acquainted with reality reflexively involves the action of shaping, formulating and changing reality. This is Marx’s notion of ‘praxis’ and is instructive in understanding a Marxist approach to culture. A strain or persistent problematic within Marx derives from his desire to envisage the conditions providing for the spontaneous and creative generation of praxis by people ‘for themselves’. What, then, are the origins of praxis; what gives it birth? Having generated, in his own work, a method that, as it were, straddled or rather transcended the restrictions of the classical epistemological dichotomy between idealism and materialism, Marx was at pains to indicate the constraints that the bourgeois consciousness, and its positivistic knowledge, place upon the attainment of a life of praxis for all people. Consequently his dual concern with a description of consciousness and with a vision of a future ‘possible’ society lead him to theorize about imperfect modes of consciousness in terms of the concept of ideology. This, as we know, has become a pre-eminent concept in the understanding of culture and the analysis of cultural representations. It will be useful, at this point, to look at Marx’s thesis contained in The German Ideology, as it is fundamental to what we now regard as a materialist view of the causal relation between any set of concrete state of affairs and the ideational, symbolic, or cultural manifestations that accompany them, or indeed, provide for them. In this major work Marx fulfils a twofold intention: at one level he dissociates himself from the system of Hegelian speculative philosophy that pervaded his day, and at another level he provides his original view of history. The former of these levels acts as a practical demonstration of the latter; that is to say that he instances the connection between his contemporary German philosophers and the particular social structure from which they emerged as a demonstration of ‘the German ideology’. This ideology involves a distortion of the


philosophers’ views about their world because of their relationship to the sources of power and property in that world. The German Ideology is a dynamic and poetic work which contemporary structuralist Marxists, following Althusser, have described as polemical, humanistic and itself ideological – indeed, a work to be dismissed as preceding the ‘epistemological break’ that generated the true scientific Marxism. However, the richness and inspiration of the text lies in its proliferation of formulations of the relationship between ideas and the material life. This is nowhere better demonstrated than in the classic quote, vivid in its metaphoricity: The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics etc. of a people. Men are the producers of their conceptions, ideas, etc. – real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside-down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process. In direct contrast to German philosophy which descends from heaven to earth, here we ascend from earth to heaven. That is to say, we do not set out from what men say, imagine, conceive, nor from men as narrated, thought of, imagined, conceived, in order to arrive at men in the flesh. We set out from real, active men, and on the basis of their real life-process we demonstrate the development of the ideological reflexes and echoes of this life-process. The phantoms formed in the human brain are also, necessarily, sublimates of their material lifeprocess, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises. Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain a semblance of independence. They have no history, no development; but men,

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70 culture, marxism and materialism developing their material production and their mental intercourse, alter, along with this their real existence, their thinking and the products of their thinking. Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life. (Marx 1970: 47)

Although the images and allusions within the passage provide, in some senses, an unstable or inconsistent account of the relation between the base and the superstructure, they point, overall, to a greater weight being given to the significance and efficacy of the material factors as the primary realities and the ideas and belief systems as being both secondary, and emergent from them. This reading of a materialist reduction is further supported by Marx’s later discussion of the historical stages of social development, in terms of the different ‘forms of production’ like ‘primitive communism’, ‘feudalism’ and ‘capitalism’ itself. The modes of thought in each of these epochs emerge out of the relations that are established between people according to the economic division of labour. The way of life, or culture, of a people is, then, determined by economic forces; but, of course, it is more subtle than this. A culture is organized in relation to sets of interests within society and dominant interests are the articulation of power. Power, in turn, is rarely manifested as naked physical force, but is mediated through the existing systems of stratification within society (in relation to class, gender, race, ability, age and so on) which are, in general, taken for granted by most of the people, most of the time. In relation to culture Marx is telling us about the connection of ideas with the predominant system of stratification. The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance. The individuals composing the ruling class possess among other things consciousness, and

culture, marxism and materialism therefore think. Insofar, therefore, as they rule as a class and determine the extent and compass of an epoch, it is self-evident that they do this in its whole range, hence among other things rule also as thinkers, as producers of ideas, and regulate the production and distribution of the ideas of their age: thus their ideas are the ruling ideas of the epoch. (Marx 1970: 64–5)

Through the concept of ideology which, as we shall see, has taken on many modern forms in pursuit of a theory of culture, Marx talks of the ideas of the ruling classes as legitimating and disguising their domination. Ideologies can be regarded as forceful explanatory devices which served, and continue to serve, a number of functions within the tradition of culture and materialism. Ideologies were, for Marx, phenomena in their own right; that is to say that as they were made up of sets of beliefs about the world, which nevertheless produced a distorted account of that world, it was essential that they be understood. This he achieved by relating their distortions to material reality, ‘from heaven to earth’, he contrasted ‘appearances’ with ‘essences’; for example, the relation of ideologists to the ownership of the means of production. For Marx, ideologies began from a partial view of the world and were, significantly, unconscious of those beginnings. Indeed, their persuasiveness resided in the fact that they remained unaware of their own presuppositions. This, of course, is a feature of ideology that has altered dramatically in the context of a modern, commercial, technological culture that is largely organized through mass communication. Modern ideologists, like propagandists and advertisers, are only too conscious of the distortions that they artfully seek to propound, and modern theory has had to keep up with them through concepts like ‘hegemony’. In Marx’s view, ideology mediated and refracted reality through a network of existing categories that were selected by the dominant group and acceptable to them, and we can witness here the manner in which political rhetoric, medical care, economic policy and educational knowledge are all conducted in terms of the discourse of the ‘experts’. Successful ideological categories do not simply enable the purposes of an elite, or a select group within a culture; more significantly they disempower the majority through mystification, ignorance or feelings of inadequacy. Ideologies, then, generalize special and limited interests; they make the interests of some appear congruent with the interests of all. When

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72 culture, marxism and materialism someone informs you that something is ‘for your own good’, this is usually the time for the ideological detector warnings to sound the alarm! Another critical feature of ideological knowledge, within the context of an analysis of culture, is its capacity to generate a practical sense of consensus – a particularly important function in the context of a dispute over whether culture is the whole way of life of a people, or just the symbolic heritage of excellence in the appreciative possession of a select group, or whether, indeed, a quasi-compatibility can be achieved between the two. Ideologies strive for consensus in as much as they play a significant part in maintaining order without force, by securing the assent of the oppressed, the exploited, the underclass, the needy and those dispossessed of cultural capital. This, they achieve, through a sophisticated and multi-layered network of iconography. They proliferate with images: images of the dominant classes for themselves, as ‘preservers of standards’, ‘guardians of the cultural heritage’, ‘upholders of reason, or civilization’, etc.; images of the dominant classes for other groups, as ‘those who know best’, ‘those with our best interest at heart’, ‘those committed to the good of all’, etc.; images of other classes as perhaps ‘less able’ and ‘in need of leadership’; and images of those classes for themselves: ‘I may not know much about art, but I know what I like.’ This iconography is not simply constituted through a series of labels that people take off when they go to school, apply for jobs, attend art galleries or exercise their vote. These images become a cognitive style, they become part of the way that people interpret their own conditions, and thus such images restrict a people’s scope for conceiving of alternatives. The culture that liberates the few through the enlightenment of their higher education, or through their life ‘as a journey to Mozart’, becomes simultaneously the prison and the exclusion of the many. Having said this it should not be forgotten that Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky all had fairly ‘high-art’ tastes and were more in favour of ‘raising up’ mass standards rather than destroying high culture. Marx also talks of ‘all’ classes having ideas, some, perhaps, having revolutionary ideas; and that all class ideas, as ideologies, strive to present particular interests as being identical with the interests of all. In this instance, by providing ideas as weapons within the class struggle, Marx may now be heard as saying that ideas, and not just the material base, have a causal efficacy. The central point, however, is the acknowledgement of the force of dominant thought systems and their relation to material conditions in


any historical period. Classes are, of course, real, but at another level they may be viewed as metaphors for particular language games and forms of discourse within a culture. A bourgeois culture is an instance of the form of consciousness within a community that conceptualizes humankind, and its knowledge, as ordered by objectivities, or material structures that are other than and in excess of itself. Such a community might know the price of everything and the value of nothing, it would view knowledge as a possession, treat art as property and regard the artistic enterprise in terms of profit and loss. Its discourse, and the metaphors of its culture would be those of the market place. Seen in this way, the communist utopia is never simply reducible to a concrete structural state of affairs located in a future time; it speaks rather of a reflexive community of people wedded to practical reason, authentically realizing themselves as theorists, that is, as constructors of worlds. The contemporary Marxist critic Slavoj Zizek develops the concept of ideology further. His rather pessimistic account of our descent into the maelstrom of global capitalism advises that the cultural critic should analyse ideology with an eye ‘to designate the elements within an existing social order which – in the guise of “fiction”, that is, of “Utopian” narratives of possible but failed alternative histories – point towards the system’s antagonistic character, and thus “estrange” us to the self-evidence of its established identity’ (Zizek 1994: 7). Although sociology has largely treated such ideas as ideology, class domination, and economic determinism as concrete descriptions of real states of affairs, in the manner of positivism, what is, in part, being recommended here is that such notions may be treated as Marx’s analytic rules for assembling worlds. So, for example, the importance of ‘ideology’ in the understanding of culture can be seen not as the impersonal effects of the force of ideas upon the individual, but rather, we might regard it as Marx’s formulation of a meaningful environment constructed in terms of a typical actor within materialism. Ideology thus assigns a rule of relevance to the conduct of actors. Perhaps the next major development in the chronology of Marx’s method, or Wissenschaft, is to be found in the Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy of 1857, leading to its ‘scientific’ fruition in Das Kapital. In the former work Marx distinguishes two sorts of concepts: those that are historically located and related to contemporary realities, and those that, through their abstraction, are universal and uncluttered by the

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74 culture, marxism and materialism particulars of any historical moment (like population). Traditional political economy begins its analysis with these abstractions and cannot therefore, Marx asserts, ever aspire to account for the real material conditions of an epoch. His method, in contradistinction, recommends a synthesis of the real and the historically located in order to arrive at a constructive, materialist unification of theory/practice; this he characterizes as ‘the correct scientific method’. For Marx, the real world remains external to the intellect so long as a purely theoretical attitude is adopted to it. Marxist analysis regards ‘reality’ as the precondition of understanding and also as the point of origin of both perception and imagination. Thus thought is an act of transformation, an act of production within which concepts are formed. For Marx the appropriate scientific concepts are the products of historical conditions; certain transformations are possible only under certain historical conditions. Concepts achieve their full validity only under the historical conditions of their occurrence; this we can see as a clear assault on the positivism of social theory that attempts to operate with contextfree categories of analysis. This attack on positivism is crucial to Marx’s epistemology and clearly underlies his criticism of classical political economy. He states: ‘Economists explain how production takes place in the above mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical moment that gave them birth’ (Marx 1956: 100) and here he is demanding that the theorist should ground his own accounts of the world in real, material conditions. He concludes: ‘Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions of the social relations of production’ (Marx 1956: 105) and so also, we might add with an attention to this point in his method, are the categories of cultural analysis! Finally we should look to Marx’s magnum opus Das Kapital as the completion of his methodological project; what Althusser regards as the birth of the ‘mature’ and ‘scientific’ Marxism. This is a massive work containing sporadic references to methodology and the theory of ideology one of which, referring to ‘Wages’, I use later in an analysis of cultural reproduction. Here I shall address the section on ‘Commodity Fetishism’ which concerns the appearance/reality distinction. This distinction is central to a Marxist approach to cultural representations. Where the productive base of a society is concerned with making commodities for exchange in the market place, social relations form between the producers based on an assumed relation between the commodities. (e.g. producer


of high value goods [head] having superior status to producer of low value goods [hand]). These social relations, Marx tells us, take on a ‘misleading appearance’. This appearance has to do with the imagery of the products, that is, the way that they present themselves to the producers. All commodities are assigned values in the market, all commodities are connected to one another according to those values, and the producers have a social relationship according to those values. However, these values, that we routinely take for granted as objective, are, themselves, bound to no perceptible property of the commodities. These appearance values pass themselves off as the social relations between commodities in the market place, but the ‘real’ value of a commodity can only be the expression of human labour spent in its production. The ‘true’ relation, disguised by the supposed relation between things, is the social relation between producers. The appearance is an ideological mystification of the real, essential relation. The Marxist analysis of culture always looks beyond to the hidden relation which preserves the status quo. LUKÁCS: REALIST AESTHETICS AND THE TOTALITY Let us move now to the input of the original corpus of Marx’s materialist method to the contributions of certain neo-Marxists to our understandings of human culture. Any Marxist who is at all concerned with philosophical problems necessarily starts out from the anthropocentric view of history which Marx and Engels inherited from Kant and the German Enlightenment generally: man stands at the centre of the man-created world of society, and this ‘world’ includes the sphere of art which reflects a particular dimension of the human spirit. (Lichtheim 1970: 53)

Thus Lichtheim introduces us to the aesthetics of George Lukács, the Hungarian philosopher, whose creative period of political and cultural analysis extended from the beginning of the century until the late 1960s. Lukács went on to work in Vienna at a time when Freud’s theories were paramount, when the logical positivists were an active and influential group, and when Wittgenstein’s first monumental treatise on linguistic philosophy was emerging; Lukács remained wholly untouched by each of

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76 culture, marxism and materialism these movements. Lukács has been described as ‘the Marx of aesthetics’, a soubriquet not wholly without grounds but one that in many senses maligns his life project. He cannot be pigeonholed as merely a philosopher, in the sense of a speculative armchair theorist, and he cannot be read as disposing his intellect solely in the pursuit of artistic representations, a seemingly elitist activity. Lukács was a theorist of immense complexity; although Hungarian in origin and occupying much of his time actively involved in Hungarian politics and their academy, most of his education and maturation as a thinker took place in Germany, where he encountered, and was greatly influenced by, German romanticism in the form of Dilthey, Rickert, Simmel and Max Weber; many of the scholars, it will be noted, who appear under my category of ‘Culture, idealism and social action’ (Chapter 3). It was here, through his own grounding in Hegel (a lifelong driving force) that he developed his critique and resistance to both neo-Kantian idealism, and also the irrationalism of Nietzsche; all of this was to form a backdrop to his later dismissals of bourgeois modernism for its individualism and decadence. What this period also produced for him was a primary, and typically European, commitment to metaphysics, a resistance to positivism and a sense of his theorizing as social and essentially political; all sources of his central concept of a ‘totality’. These passionate allegiances, exclusions and contradictions figure strongly in his ideas. Concurrent with and, for him, utterly integrated with his intellectual development was his intense involvement in, and contribution to, the development of European Socialist culture. He was a political activist playing a leading role in the unsuccessful Hungarian Revolution of 1919, a Communist Party member and, for a period, a Commissar. Such was his influence and the level of his recognition that his History and Class Consciousness caused disquiet at the highest levels of the Soviet hierarchy because of its Hegelian origins and its unholy amalgamation of Leninism with ideas derived from Rosa Luxemburg, it was denounced as ‘deviationist’; Lenin had occasion to rebuke him for his ‘ultra-leftist’ actions; and eventually under the vicious, suspicious and retributive regime of Stalin he was drawn, through fear for his life, to publicly modify and reformulate many of his views into a form that even his most ardent admirers have difficulty in reconstructing as anything other than slogan and propaganda. His concept of a ‘totality’, which he was to apply consistently to the analysis of the work of art, or indeed, any cultural product, can be seen to be equally applicable to the style


of his life. He believed in total philosophical systems, like Hegel’s, which required an initial commitment to the nature of being; as opposed to the English replacement of metaphysics with a bland empiricism, supported by science and commonsense. His earlier referred-to anthropocentrism is an ontological belief in the primacy and purpose of human being, the constitution of culture through human action and the vivid possibilities presented for change through history. All of this in the context of a modern world, an impelling materiality which, though understood dialectically, nevertheless threatened to oppress the life-force of the ‘Geist’ emerging through creativity; this led directly to his views on ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’ as man-made, yet material constraints upon people freely expressing their unique intent. Lukács’s belief in totalities as philosophical systems extended, without a break, to the necessity of the integration of thought and action; hence his persistent and vigorous political involvement, whatever its implications. Perhaps his fundamental motivation, as a systems philosopher, was to produce a theory of aesthetics that would achieve on behalf of the new culture of East European socialism what Hegel and German idealism had achieved for the modern Western bourgeois world. He generated a tradition of socialist scholarship that was original, revolutionary and worthy of intellectual consideration. This is no slight achievement in an historical period penetrable only by the intelligentsia, and not known for the open policy of its corpus of knowledge. As Steiner put it: ‘Lukács has always held himself responsible to history. This has enabled him to produce a body of critical and philosophical work intensely expressive of the cruel and serious spirit of the age’ (Steiner 1960: 67). This is, perhaps, the positive legacy of Lukács’s ‘devil pact’. For the Marxist Lukács (as opposed to the youthful neo-Kantian who authored The Theory of the Novel) the relation between politics, art and culture became inextricable. A philosopher’s view of the world, like that of the creative artist, is interwoven with the class struggle. This, of course, directs us to the centrality of aesthetics and the singular obsession, and indeed axiom, in Lukács’s ideas, that ‘realism’ in art and philosophy produces not just another version of the world , but it actually portrays the world (the concept that Lukács employs is to ‘reflect’ the world). This is no reversion to a positivistic correspondence theory of truth; it means, instead, that whatever reifications and distortions the social world may have passed through and whatever formal mediations the art or philosophy

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78 culture, marxism and materialism may require, the outcome of a realist project is to enable humankind to perceive their own true nature. ‘Realism is not one style among others; it is the basis of literature’ (Lukács 1963: 48). This potentially constraining assertion provided the basis for his criticism of modernist, formalist and experimental art as deviating from a recognition of the truth of the human condition enmeshed in the totality of social, economic, political and historical conditions. The social relation becomes the basis of a theory of culture, and the form of any cultural representation must be dictated by its content, which is that very social relation: ‘there is no content of which Man himself is not the focal point’ (Lukács 1963: 19). Modernist art, by deviating into the bizarre and alienating circumstances of contemporary life descends into decadent subjectivism; alternatively such bourgeois enterprise attempts literal description, an accurate representation echoing the empiricism of its sciences, this is the descent into naturalism. Such work, through its insistence on description as opposed to narration, leaves man in stasis. Critical realist art and literature, on the other hand, has to be dynamic, it projects its characters into the historical process and provides them with direction, development and the motivation and intention to create change. A dynamic literature, for Lukács, a socialist realism, was a mirror of the dominant movement of its time. Realist art carries with it universal and integrated forms of beauty and truth which are in opposition to the fragmentation and mystification that is created through a capitalist division of labour. The goal for all great art is to provide a picture of reality in which the contradiction between appearance and reality, the particular and the general, the immediate and the conceptual, etc., is so resolved that the two converge into a spontaneous integrity. . . . The Universal appears as the quality of the individual and the particular, reality becomes manifest and can be experienced within appearance. (Lukács 1970: 34)

The totality of human life is systematically eroded through the separation, alienation, isolation and consequent despair that is engendered within capitalist social structures. This is the ‘angst’ that modernist literature, such as Kafka’s, and expressionist art, such as that of Munch, Van Gogh and Kokoschka, seem to celebrate through an exaltation of the subjective, inner self.

culture, marxism and materialism Art functions aesthetically to create an enriched self-consciousness. . . . The essence of all art [for Lukács] lies in its realist aesthetics, its grasp of social totality and the universal within social development. Art is thus the medium of the ‘correct’ education of humanity, a selfenclosed totality pointing the way towards utopia. (Swingewood 1986: 60)

Lukács’s influence extends to his disciple, Goldmann, who we consider below, and in the existentialist work of Agnes Heller. GRAMSCI: CULTURAL HEGEMONY AND THE INTELLECTUALS It would be hard to imagine two more different people than Lukács: ‘the one major philosophic talent to have emerged from the grey servitude of the Marxist world’ (Steiner 1960: 56) and Antonio Gramsci, the Italian communist, whose writings have been seen to ‘broaden, “democratize”, and enrich Lenin’s strategy of socialist revolution’ (Boggs 1976: 12). Though separated chronologically by only six years at birth, the aristocratic Eastern European inhabited a very different class position and enjoyed a different life experience from the small, sickly, physically deformed Sardinian. Nevertheless, they both share an activism, a belief in the centrality of consciousness and its revolutionary potential. In analytical terms they both espouse agency in the face of the fatalism that had become entrenched in the Marxist orthodoxy of economic determinism. Beyond this they are bound together by their impassioned commitment to the cause of socialism, but also through the tasteless metaphor of ‘imprisonment’; Lukács in Stalinist dogma; and Gramsci in the inhuman conditions of Mussolini’s prisons, which claimed almost a quarter of his short life. Although Lukács opened up the possibility of a populist engagement in the cultural process through his notions of realism and the totality, it cannot be denied that his work persistently addressed what we have referred to as ‘high culture’, and rested on the primacy of great art and the leadership of the great artist as ‘partisan for the truth’. Gramsci, on the other hand, through his original address of the role of the intellectual, the necessity of an active cultural politic, and the analysis of hegemony, with its necessary resistance through counter-hegemony, provides for a different kind of understanding and engagement with popular culture.

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80 culture, marxism and materialism The more the cultural life of an individual is broad and well-grounded, the closer his opinions are to the truth, they can be accepted by everyone: the more numerous the individuals of broad and well-grounded culture, the more popular opinions approach to truth – that is to say contain the truth in an immature and imperfect form which can be developed till it reaches maturity and perfection. It follows from this that the truth must never be presented in a dogmatic and absolute form, as if it were mature and perfect. The truth, because it can spread, must be adapted to the historical and cultural conditions of the social group in which we want it to spread. (Gramsci 1918: 261)

These ideas, combined with elements and revisions from Althusser, have become very influential in the development of cultural studies and the sociology of culture in Britain, as we shall see later in Chapter 11. The scope of Gramsci’s substantive interests is attested to by the magnitude of topics that are addressed in The Prison Notebooks, ranging from education, philosophy, issues of gender, history, the intelligentsia, and specifically culture itself. The overall motif, however, is the generation and elaboration of an original Marxist theory suitable for the analysis of the conditions of an advanced capitalist culture. Gramsci’s thought reveals an active and volatile theorist who emphasizes the intentional character of political action in opposition to those theories extolling the inexorable and deterministic laws of capitalist development. The path to socialism is neither singular nor straight, and requires a relocation of the individual in the vortex of revolutionary struggle. To this end, his own writing was always conceived of as a revolutionary act, not an act of speculation or description, but a dynamic in the process of change. This drive is to be systematically fired by the cultural critic’s internalization of the notion of ‘praxis’, the conscious unification of theory and practice, logos and eros, thought and action, subject and object. Life is project and project is polemic. The philosophy of praxis is a reform and a development of Hegelianism; it is a philosophy that has been liberated (or is attempting to liberate itself) from any unilateral or fanatical ideological elements; it is consciousness full of contradictions, in which the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an entire group, not only grasps

culture, marxism and materialism the contradictions, but posits himself as an element of the contradiction and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action. (Gramsci 1973: 404–5)

The most significant contribution of Gramsci’s thinking to the Marxist tradition, and also to the analysis of social and cultural formations, has been through his original discussion of the nature and functioning of ideology through his concept of ‘hegemony’. This concept, most particularly, updates the theory of ideology into the context of late modernity. Whereas Hegel had divided authority into the two spheres of ‘political society’ and ‘civil society’, Gramsci reworked this distinction into the operation of two modes of control being, domination and consent. The former is the hard and brutal edge of power, more typical of an older order in society. Modern political structures function through the allegiance and incorporation of the controlled. The implication here is of a politic of voluntarism; the ideological strategy is, in fact, one of coercion, persuasion, and cooperation but the coercion is ‘soft’, the persuasion ‘hidden’ and the cooperation ‘onesided’; what remains is the appearance and experience of voluntarism. Hegemony is the principle that enables this tacit consent through popular ‘consensus’. Hegemony mediates between the individual and the exercise of choice, and hegemony permeates the structures within which choices are made possible; it alters our knowledge about the world. ‘The realization of an apparatus of hegemony, in so far as it creates a new ideological soil and determines a reform of consciousness and of the methods of knowledge, is a fact of knowledge, a philosophical fact’ (Gramsci 1973: 365–6). All elements of the superstructure contrive to exert ideological hegemony within the culture, from religion, to education, the mass media, law, mass culture, sport and leisure and so on. Within an advanced mass society with mass education, mass literacy and mass media all operating through a high level of technology, the centre of power becomes far more adept and artful in reaching out to embrace the periphery. The ‘normal’ exercise of hegemony in the area which has become classical, that of the parliamentary regime, is characterized by the combination of force and consensus which vary in their balance with each other, without force exceeding consensus too much. Thus it tries to achieve that force should appear to be supported by the agreement

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82 culture, marxism and materialism of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion – newspapers and associations. . . . Midway between consensus and force stands corruption or fraud (which is characteristic of certain situations in which the exercise of the function of hegemony is difficult, making the use of force too dangerous). (Gramsci 1975: 638)

Outside the institutional context, hegemonic power is rendered viable and permanent through cultural values, norms, beliefs, myths and traditions which appear to belong to the people and have a life outside particular governments and class systems; they nevertheless serve to perpetuate the going order. Modern politics administrate not so much through power as through authority, and authority requires acquiescence or ‘legitimacy’. Because such a system invites, and depends upon consent, it rewards its populace with cultural stability; a fact of their own making. The fact of hegemony undoubtedly presupposes that the interests and tendencies of the groups over which hegemony is to be exercised are taken into account, that there is a certain equilibrium of compromise, that, that is, the ruling group makes sacrifices of an economic-corporate kind, but it is also indubitable that such sacrifices and such compromises cannot effect what is essential. (Gramsci 1973: 161)

Gramsci’s analysis of the role of intellectuals in the cultural process (an issue always critical to Marxist theory as intellectuals are either in the vanguard of reaction to social change or are the essential class traitors in the march to revolution) is both to democratize the role and then to incorporate its specialisms and vitality. The democratization takes place by dispossessing the group of the ownership and production of culture, to be intellectual is a universal function. Each man, finally, outside of his professional activity, carries on some form of intellectual activity, that is, he is a ‘philosopher’, an artist, a man of taste, he participates in a particular conception of the world, has a conscious line of moral conduct, and therefore contributes to sustain a conception of the world or to modify it, that is, to bring into being new modes of thought. (Gramsci 1973: 9)


The sphere of intellectual activity within a society, therefore, does not belong to a cultural elite who practise a specialized cognitive style and a shared epistemology, but rather it manifests itself as an integral segment of political action that is rooted in the daily lives and culture of the people as a whole. The mode of being of the new intellectual can no longer consist in eloquence, which is an exterior and momentary mover of feelings and passions, but in active participation in practical life, as constructor, organizer, ‘permanent persuader’, and not just simple orator. (Gramsci 1973: 10)

Gramsci then describes the two kinds of intellectual, the ‘traditional’ who upholds the old order (and bears a striking resemblance to the Catholic Church), and the ‘organic’ who emerges as representative of his time to articulate the new order. They are, respectively, part of the problem and part of the solution.

GOLDMANN: GENETIC STRUCTURALISM the dialectical aesthetic sees every work of art as the expression, in the specific language of literature, painting, music or sculpture etc. of a world vision; and that, as we would expect, this vision also expresses itself on numerous other philosophical and theological levels, as well as on that of men’s everyday actions and activity. The essential criteria by which the aesthetic of dialectical materialism judges the value of any expression of a world vision are the inner coherence of the work of art and especially the coherence between form and content. (Goldmann 1964: 269)

Lucien Goldmann was a sociologist, humanist thinker and cultural critic, born in Romania just before the First World War. His writings on the production and the place of art within an analysis of culture provide a complex, and often challenging, contribution to the tradition of materialistic Marxism within which the author locates himself. Part of his originality derives from his consistent desire to generate a dialectical method for the analysis of literary ‘creativity’ (a term that he preferred to ‘production’ on the basis of his espousal of the place of subjectivity in

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84 culture, marxism and materialism the process). Throughout his work Goldmann remained as resistant to the crude reductionism of most conventional, mechanistic, materialist explanations of cultural representations and forms for its strictures, closures and oppressive triviality, as he was vehemently opposed to the reality and practice of Soviet Communism. Indeed, his sustained lack of a party line and his deviationist adoration of the young Marx (of The German Ideology) and of Hegelianism, have led some to suggest that he may not be a Marxist at all; but this is merely an ideological critique, not a fact. Goldmann developed an approach to the analysis of literary and artistic practice that he referred to as ‘genetic structuralism’. This method found its roots in the Geist of German idealism, particularly in the form of Hegelian dialectics; the Marxist view that culture is the expression of a group consciousness directed towards changing institutionalized social and political structures; the concept of a ‘totality’ deriving from the early, ‘pre-Soviet’ Lukács; and finally from the powerful sense of immanent cognitive categories that he found in the developmental structuralism of the psychologist Jean Piaget with whom he worked for a number of years. Genetic structuralism begins with the premise that any analysis of intellectual creativity and its relationship with practical social existence is concerned with the cognitive categories that shape both realms of the imaginary and the real. Thus, Goldmann argues that the significant literature (or any important art) of any historical period constitutes a nascent articulation of the emerging ‘world vision’ of a new social order. What is a world vision? It is not an immediate, empirical fact, but a conceptual working hypothesis indispensable to an understanding of the way in which individuals actually express their ideas. Even on an empirical plane, its importance and reality can be seen as soon as we go beyond the ideas or work of a single writer, and begin to study them as part of a whole. (Goldmann 1964: 15)

Goldmann ties this in with the concept of social class: World vision is a convenient term for the whole complex of ideas, aspirations and feelings which links together the members of a social group . . . and which opposes them to members of other social groups. This is . . . a tendency which really exists among the members of a

culture, marxism and materialism certain social group who all attain this class consciousness in a more or less coherent manner. . . . In a few cases . . . there are exceptional individuals who actually achieve or who come very near to achieving a completely integrated and coherent view of what they and the social class to which they belong are trying to do. The men who express this vision on an imaginative or conceptual plane are writers and philosophers, and the more closely their work expresses this vision in its complete and integrated form, the more important does it become. They then achieve the maximum possible awareness of the social group whose nature they are expressing. (Goldmann 1964: 17)

This new and emergent social order does not have to be a socialist order; it is here that he disagrees with Lukács over the singularity, necessity and grinding inevitability of the relationship between ‘good art’ and realism. Other artistic and literary forms befit change and different world visions; indeed, proletarian criticism alone cannot be trusted with the future of cultural creativity or with the forging of political utopias. Great art or literature is not, for Goldmann, locked into a predictable relation with the inevitable socialist entelechy, it extols the spirit of its time, the Hegelian Geist; this is what reading, criticism or appreciation seeks to reveal. A second original and significant feature of Goldmann’s method is his relocation of subjectivity. In contrast with most other structuralisms we find no ‘death of the author’ here. The active or dynamic subject is saluted as the very centre of cultural creativity. This active subject, like the developing, immanent subject in Piaget, is proactive in the creation and transformation of representative cultural forms; but these forms, though real and tangible in their manifestations, derive from structures that are cognitive and collective, as are the subjectivities themselves. This means that in order to reconcile the notion of a totality, a holistic structure, with a creative constitutive individual, within the demands of a structuralist theory Goldmann creates the ‘collective subject’ or the ‘transindividual subject’. A cognitive structure, that enables individual action, is the outcome of the combined conduct of groups of people who have lived through shared experiences and devised collective strategies through which to handle and control them. So cognitive structures, that make for active subjects, are like collective consciousnesses, they are social phenomena and not the province of individual psychologies.

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86 culture, marxism and materialism The structural determinism now appears to overwhelm the voluntarism of the author, the author becomes a midwife, inducing the vision from the womb of the world. As Swingewood puts it: ‘Goldmann’s structuralism in effect suppresses the dialectic of subject and object, author and text, author and group transforming the living relations into a schematic formalism’ (Swingewood 1986: 117). Goldmann’s appraisal of the problematic of contemporary culture rests on an extension of Lukács’s concept of reification, stemming from the original Marxian views on commodity fetishism. The world appears, through the advance of capitalism and its permeation into civil society, to have dispensed with a real grasp of use-value under the consuming onslaught of exchange-value. Goldmann charters this development in the novel alongside the changes in the modes of production in society. This enables the diachronicity of his structuralism to exist alongside the synchronicity of his analysis of cognitive forms. Whatever its shortcomings in ingesting aspects of its own idealism, Goldmann’s work goes a considerable distance towards achieving a semiautonomous view of culture within the context of a Marxist materialism. In principle, religion, morality, art and literature are neither autonomous and independent of economic life, nor simply reflections of it. However, in a capitalist society they tend to become so, as the economic system of that society progressively controls all aspects of it. (Goldmann 1959: 96)

BENJAMIN: MODERNITY, CULTURAL PRODUCTION AND THE AURA Walter Benjamin, the German cultural critic, born before the turn of the century and dying by his own hands to avoid Nazi persecution during the Second World War, produced a broad spectrum of writings around the issues of aesthetics, production and reception of cultural forms and artefacts, technicization, literary criticism and urban life; all within a materialist framework. Although a difficult thinker to categorize, he is without systematic methodology and thus he falls well within the definition of a theorist of modernity. Indeed, along with Nietzsche, whose doctrine of ‘the eternal return’ he shared, he has been described as producing an archaeology and explanation of the pre-history of modernity:

culture, marxism and materialism no epoch has existed that did not feel itself, in the most eccentric sense, to be ‘modern’ and consider itself to be standing immediately before an abyss. The despairing, wide-awake consciousness, standing immersed in a decisive crisis, is chronic in humanity. Every period appears to itself as unavoidably new. This ‘modernity’, however, is precisely that which is diverse just like the diverse aspects of one and the same kaleidoscope. (Benjamin 1982: 677)

Benjamin, who regarded himself as very much a critical socialist, producing a sociology of art that has many continuities with the programme of Lukács’s aesthetics and working in association with the theorist Karl Korsch, and also the playwright Bertolt Brecht, was clearly concerned with the political context of a culture, and of art’s political impact on the culture of its time. One of his oft-quoted remarks is to the effect that ‘while Fascism aestheticised politics, Communism politicized art’. Clearly there is a strong sense of the material integrity between politics and culture at work here. Despite the delicacy of his theorizing the compulsion of the materialist reduction is often felt in his work. Indeed, Adorno, a leading member of the Frankfurt Institute who Benjamin had a continuing association with, had occasion, during the 1930s, to be extremely critical of Benjamin’s analysis of the city which was centred on Paris, for its crude reductionist materialism. Adorno also disagreed with Benjamin over his views on the essential value of contemporary art and culture; Adorno was really much more conservative. In his two most significant essays on cultural production, The Author as Producer and The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, Benjamin develops his thesis concerning the central irony of ‘newness’ and the creative project within modernity. While the Frankfurt School were introducing their ideas of the rise of the ‘culture industry’ and of ‘mass culture’ (which we shall consider in the next chapter) – and regarding these historical developments with no small sense of unease, given their grounding in the Kultur of German romanticism – Benjamin was formulating a view of the same processes with a doubleedged optimism. The modern age, among other things, produces its identity and reproduces the signs of that identity through the mechanics of technology. It has accelerated change through the development of its technologies of production – the very origins and necessary material grounds of postmodernity’s supposed simulacra. The ‘good’ in these

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88 culture, marxism and materialism developments, as Benjamin saw it, was the inevitable assault on bourgeois, elite culture. In a time before the possibility of mechanical production, or more significantly, mass reproduction, the purity, singularity, spontaneity, and creativity of the art object – be it a Mahler symphony or a painting by Manet – belonged in the privileged possession of that section of the population, clearly marked out by their class position, who had access to its consumption. This, Benjamin tells us, is the ‘aura’ of a work of art. Viewed in this way mechanical reproduction has an emancipatory potential, whether in the form of videos, long-playing records, musak, Athena reproductions or even imitation jewellery; all people, it is alleged, can have access to art. The ‘bad’ in these developments is, simultaneously and ironically, recognized by Benjamin in the commodification of culture itself. The de-aurification of the art work is a loss: in bringing the art object closer to more people, it is brought nearer only as a commodity. Thus, through the democratization of cultural production its creativity is lost. This is what we see in Picasso T-shirts, or Pavarotti’s ‘Nessun dorma’ as a football anthem. Benjamin defines the aura as ‘the unique phenomenon of a distance, however close (an object) may be’. The aura testifies to the authority of art in its cultic form, its condition of inimitable uniqueness, a singularity in time and space which is the hallmark of its authenticity. The uniqueness of a work of art is inseverable from its being embedded in the fabric of tradition. (Wolin 1982: 187–8)

Art, for Benjamin, as an expression in a culture, is no part of a world-view, as Goldmann sees it, nor even the totality of Lukács; it is a fragment, a microcosm: Love for the object holds on to the radical uniqueness of the work of art and takes as its starting point the creative point of indifference where insight into the nature of the ‘beautiful’ or ‘art’ is confined to and permeates the totally unique and individual work. It enters into its inner nature as into that of a monad, which . . . has no window, but which embodies in itself the miniature of the whole. (Benjamin 1982: 51)


Art has a material basis in the structure and organization of a society, in its beliefs, its means of production and its political arrangements. To this extent Benjamin’s ideas are in line with the predominant view within modernism, that art is intimately linked with grounds of its production. If non-democratic art rests on monopolistic auras, for example, on the private languages of story-telling that typify the specialisms and expertise of bourgeois communities, then socialist art must be based on collective, shared, egalitarian forces in modern society: the facts of realism. Capitalism, and its accompanying industrialism have altered the space between its production and its reception. ‘To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return . . . in a concept of aura . . . comprises the “unique manifestation of difference”’ (Benjamin 1970: 190). Benjamin is demonstrating to us that each mode of cultural production carries with it, in a relatively fixed relation, a specific mode of reception. In his work on Baudelaire and through his engagement with the Arcades Project, based in Paris, Benjamin developed a series of metaphors apposite to the appreciation of cultural representations through modernity, for example the crowd, the labyrinth and, perhaps most poignantly, the flâneur, the trifler, the wanderer of the boulevards. Each of these senses of the ‘receptive’ life of the modern person linked consciousness and art and social structure in a tight, irredeemable complex, an aesthetic complex so reductively materialistic, in fact, that Adorno renounced it as lacking dialectics and mediation. The whole social process that is culture seems to be subsumed by the state of the material, and in this case mechanical, world for Benjamin. The shortcomings of an otherwise insightful body of theorizing are well summarized by Swingewood when he says that: A theory of production clearly requires a theory of society, but Benjamin failed to theorise the specific underlying structural trends of advanced capitalism: on the one hand the capitalist social formation becomes increasingly centralised (primarily in the economic and political sphere) and collectivist (trade unions, political parties) while on the other evolving a complex multiplicity of autonomous institutions located within civil society. Benjamin held a simplified Marxist concept of capitalist economy and culture as closed structures with technology constituting the means of democratising and politicising art: no longer based on ritual, art flows from another practice, that of politics. (Swingewood 1986: 83)

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90 culture, marxism and materialism RAYMOND WILLIAMS: A LONG REVOLUTION The contribution made by Raymond Williams to our contemporary work in cultural studies and the sociology of culture is immense. His writings in the area are legion with, perhaps, Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, Keywords and Culture providing the obvious landmarks in the evolution of his thesis. Following this chronology we can witness a shift in style from that of a left-wing professor of English into a more fully-fledged materialist critique of contemporary culture based as much on an understanding of sociology and anthropology as on the English literary tradition. This is not to suggest that any of his works fail to demonstrate a highly informed and articulate contribution to the culture of socialism in this country. He also provides a systematically insightful analysis of many forms of mass and popular culture. His project may be interpreted as truly counterhegemonic, in Gramsci’s sense. It began, alongside his commitment to workers’ education and the celebration of the working-class culture of his youth, as an intellectual opposition to the reactionary seizure of ‘culture’ by the bourgeois tradition of Quiller-Couch, Leavis and Eliot. Williams was radically opposed to the ideology of elitism exercised in that very academic tradition that had enabled him to speak with authority. There was a question for me whether I should write a critique of that ideology . . . or . . . to try to recover the true complexity of the tradition it had confiscated – so that the appropriation could be seen for what it was . . . I settled for the second strategy. For it allowed me to refute the increasing contemporary use of the concept of culture against democracy, socialism, the working class or popular education, in terms of tradition itself. (Williams 1979: 98)

Williams formulated a tradition of discourse about the concept of culture comprising a series of ‘significant’ thinkers from philosophical, literary critical and humanist schools of thought, for example, Bentham, Coleridge, Arnold, Carlyle, Lawrence, Tawney, Eliot and Orwell – not all of whom he regards as sympathetic. He then attempted a dialectical realization of their ideas as a response to, but also as emanating from, the material circumstances and turbulent and even violent change induced through industrialization and capitalism within the civil society. By


implication the thesis also addresses the changes engendered by the French Revolution within political society, but, as Williams was later to admit, his early work was very much concerned with the idea of culture within the English tradition, so this element is somewhat underplayed. It was, nevertheless, a formidable and remarkable programme which has foreshadowed every subsequent excursion into the field of culture (including this slender monograph). The idea of a ‘long revolution’ for Williams was intended to capture the narrative running throughout his writings on culture; it reaffirmed his unequivocal sense of culture as process, rather than stasis, and as evolving positively rather than as eroding. He asserted the primacy of cultural production in social life, an idea not always well received by traditional Marxism, and addressed the transitions of modernity through three systems, the ‘democratic’, the ‘industrial’ and the ‘cultural’, not all of which are causally driven by the economic base. Williams comes to place a particular emphasis on the ‘creative mind’ as an emergent and critical condition of being and shows its positioning in relation to the social and political history of mass education, mass literacy, mass media in the form of the press, and drama. In the course of this critique of the base/ superstructure form of analysis Williams further enters into dispute with the conceived nature of economic activity through the development of capitalism. Instead of regarding the economy as a system of production he treats it rather as a system of maintenance; this formulation points us away from the more simplistic and reductionist views of economy as subsistence, towards the concept of the economy existing as one part of the complex network of control that pertains in advanced capitalism. Despite these apparently wilful breaks with the basic tenets of historical materialism Williams persists in his views that any socialist account of the history and development of culture is also an account of the history of class conflict; but he will not go as far as E.P. Thompson and regard it as the history of class struggle. For Williams the designation ‘class struggle’ describes particular and vital moments within the whole process. To this end he reaffirms his anthropological view of culture and directs us towards the gradual emergence of a common culture in Britain. He is not, then, forced into the position of citing a handful of working-class novelists, playwrights, poets and filmmakers as signs of the development of an oppositional proletarian culture. Further, within his conception of a complex of elements, rather than a totality, he espouses the view that at

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92 culture, marxism and materialism any particular historical period, and necessarily so, there are dominant, residual and emergent patterns of culture. His partial and relativist view of materialist explanations of cultural formations are well expressed when he states: If the art is a part of the society, there is no solid whole, outside it, to which, by the form of our question, we concede priority. The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families. To study the relations adequately we must study them actively, seeing all the activities as particular and contemporary forms of human energy. If we take any one of these activities, we can see how many of the others are reflected in it, in various ways according to the nature of the whole organization. . . . Thus art, while clearly related to the other activities, can be seen as expressing certain elements in the organization which, within that organization’s terms could only have been expressed in this way. It is then not a question of relating the art to the society, but of studying all the activities and their interrelations, without any concession of priority to any one of them we may choose to abstract. (Williams 1965: 61–2)

There is an ambivalence in Williams’s work between his elevation of culture to the status of central problematic in the progress towards democracy, an appropriate conceptualization for a materialist critique; and yet a decontextualizing of culture through a somewhat idealist hermeneutic. Culture is not special, it is mundane and part of everybody’s everyday life; it is also conceived of as project, as change, as part of a proper and necessary human evolution and yet there is an essentialism in his work (as indeed there would have to be for an author to write a mini encyclopedia reducing culture to a finite set of ‘keywords’). The essentialism tends to depoliticize the very idea of culture and thus subvert the intended radicalism of his thesis. Williams is a Marxist who sees working-class culture as contributing to a ‘common culture’. There is no sense of class antagonisms here and a communality and homeostasis that overrides the notion of contradiction. If culture can be classless then culture is no longer ideological. This being the case, we are left with a benign and all-engrossing network of symbolic representations, a world of meanings, that are not amenable to the appropriation and reproduction


of powerful and dominant groups who are seeking to legitimate their position in society. Art is necessary in order that man should be able to recognize and change the world. But art is also necessary by virtue of the magic in it. (Fischer 1963: 10)

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5 CULTURAL STRATIFICATION In every healthy society there are three types which condition each other and gravitate differently physiologically; each has its own hygiene, its own field of work, its own sense of perfection and mastery. Nature, not Man, distinguishes the pre-eminently spiritual ones, those who are pre-eminently strong in muscle and temperament, and those, the third type, who excel neither in one respect nor the other, the mediocre ones – the last as the great majority, the first as the elite. (Nietzsche 1886)

In a strong sense cultural stratification is not an exclusive category, and it is certainly not a well-insulated category as a whole variety of notions of stratification permeate all of our discussions of the concept of ‘culture’. Throughout this current work we have repeatedly confronted the distinction between the idea of high culture as belonging to a privileged group and the idea of culture being that which defines the whole way of life of a people and we shall, no doubt, rehearse this distinction again. However, there are many other dimensions, differentiations, hierarchies and rankings through which we might discuss this idea of cultural stratification, just as is the case in reference to an understanding of the totality of social life. These distinctions are no trivial matter, in each instance they divide lives and provide the grounds for contest across

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nations, religions, classes, gender, ethnicity, sexuality and ideology. Let us look at a few important examples. We have already considered the relationship between the ideas of culture and social structure, and a large part of that discussion centred around the chronological development of social and cultural anthropology and the theoretical frameworks that accompanied their – often highly competitive and contentious – explanations of the cultural process. What can get left behind in such a debate between schools of thought is not so much the intellectual but rather the social and political relationship between the discipline and its phenomena. If we adopt the relatively crude view that early anthropology constituted the superstructure of Western colonialism then we can regard their classifying and collecting ethnographies as forays in sampling the scarce resources of other cultures, and their expansive, and largely functionalist, theories as the imperialist market research into the power structures and systems of control of the Third World. Now all of this emotive language is not meant as a simple indictment of the political incorrectness of anthropology’s past but rather to point to the clear sense of superiority, emanating from an ideology of ‘development’, that prefigured the intellectually predatory Western mind. The sense of stratification we have at work here, then, is that taken-for-granted relation between the First World and the Third World, the developed and the underdeveloped, the complex and the simple, the advanced and the backward, the literate and the traditional. This is both the conscious and unconscious stratification that Freire refers to when he states that: Cultural conquest leads to the cultural inauthenticity of those who are invaded; they begin to respond to the values, the standards and the goals of the invaders. . . . For cultural invasion to succeed, it is essential that those invaded become convinced of their intrinsic inferiority. . . . Cultural invasion is on the one hand an instrument of domination, and on the other, the result of domination. Thus, cultural action of a dominating character, in addition to being deliberate and planned, is in another sense simply a product of oppressive reality. (Freire 1972: 122–3)

This is the corrosive, but now itself eroding, form of stratification that Fanon highlights in his own acerbic way when he tells us that: ‘To believe that it is possible to create a black culture, is to forget that niggers are

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96 cultural stratification disappearing, just as those people who brought them into being are seeing the break-up of their economic and cultural supremacy’ (Fanon 1963: 188). And this is the methodological stratification which Frank attacks in his essay which: examines the sociology of development currently being produced in the developing countries, especially the United States, for export to and use in the underdeveloped countries. On critical examination, this new sociology of development is found to be empirically invalid when confronted with reality, theoretically inadequate in terms of its own classical social scientific standards, and policy wise ineffective for pursuing its supposed intentions of promoting the development of the underdeveloped countries. Furthermore, the inadequacy grows along with the development of the society which produces it. Like the underdeveloped society to which it is applied, this sociology is becoming increasingly underdeveloped. (Frank 1971: 2)

In part overlapping with the stratification of culture that arises from the ideologies of imperialism are those forms of stratification which seem persistently to emerge from the experiences of race and ethnicity. As modern Western societies have become increasingly multi-racial and multi-ethnic, if only by description rather than through any practice of real ‘equality’ or ‘pluralism’, then so also have these categories provided new grounds for differentiation and stratification. What is important here is the collective recognition of racial status characteristics, treated as natural, and their articulation in terms of the collective behavioural patterns and symbolic representations of ethnicity, real or supposed, that are treated as cultural. Issues of race and ethnicity are easily, and conveniently, conflated and left embedded in the sentiments and politics of both liberalism and reaction. Melting pots and ghettos, integration and isolation, multiculturalism and cultural integrity provide for a battery of problems that are not simply analytic in character. Ideologies of racism, supremacy, purity and cleansing are all available for scrutiny in the assessment of cultural stratification, whether through their formulation of negative racial stereotypes or through the very invisibility of race that they seem to project; in theory, just as in ‘polite’ conversation. How many of these issues have become conflated and disguised under the post 9/11


Western rhetoric waging a ‘war on terror’? We did not require George Steiner to inform us that the cultures of the world will never be the same again after Auschwitz, except that we do, every day, as nobody seems to have heard. Our final example, and one concerning perhaps the most successful voice to have projected itself into the arena of cultural analysis, is the cultural stratification that occurs through gender. This is not a ‘discovery’ parallel with the recognition of women’s difference within the division of labour by the sociology of advanced industrial societies, nor simply a necessary complement to the rhetoric of feminist activism. The issue of gender stratification within culture can be applied equally to the spectrum of polysexuality. A culture, as a process, proliferates with artefacts, customs, symbolic representations and conventions which appear, on the surface, to be applicable to and generated by all people who inhabit that culture. However, Spender (1980) informs us that ‘man made language’, her thesis being that the most fundamental of all shared aspects of being human, language itself, contains in terms of its performance, vocabulary and syntax, a series of deep structural buttresses to male domination. Goffman (1979) offers us an analysis of sexual stereotype images in the mass communication of gender advertisements; Dworkin (1981) provides an account of the centrality of pornography to male/female relationships; Sydie (1987) generates an appraisal of the natural ‘culturedness’ of masculinity and the cultured ‘naturalness’ of femininity; and McRobbie puts forward an examination of the ‘invisibility’ of women even within the ideologically reflexive world of cultural studies: There have been studies of the relation of male youth to class and class culture, to the machinery of the State, and to the school, community and workplace. Football has been analysed as a male sport, drinking as a male form of leisure, the law and the police as patriarchal structures concerned with young male (potential) offenders. I don’t know of a study that considers, never mind prioritises, youth and the family; women and the whole question of sexual division have been marginalised. (McRobbie 1981: 111)

This handful of contributions to the field in no way exhausts the vast and growing body of literature relevant to the issue of gender and culture (see Billington et al. 1991). A widely varied tradition of what we might

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98 cultural stratification broadly describe as ‘feminist’ thinking has impacted upon social and cultural analysis in ways that have forged new politics of difference, new theories of identity, and new views of ontology quite independent of gender specificity. And here I am tracing from Wollstonecraft, through de Beauvoir, Woolf, on to Millet, Mitchell, Daly and Showalter and beyond to the post-structuralisms of Irigaray, Cixous, Kristeva, Spivak, Grosz and Judith Butler. It is also no longer the case that the outmoded, yet by now conventional concepts of ‘patriarchy’, ‘marginalization’, ‘glass ceilings’ and ‘stereotyping’ exhaust the critique of such a fecund tradition. However, what we are pointing towards is the analysis of a significant and increasingly public dimension of cultural stratification. The predominant social division through which cultural stratification is effected and on which this account will, by choice, concentrate is that of social class. There are no societies in which the quality of life is not differentiated by complexes of class, status and power, and as societies become more complex this differentiation becomes more marked, but also more subtly encoded in networks of symbolic cultural representations. For a variety of reasons Western, and particularly European, culture has come to order its people alongside their capacity for understanding. Perhaps following the Aristotelian legacy of true knowledge being the knowledge of ultimate causes, a conflation has occurred between truth and quality, and reason and judgement. The purpose of being is to know, knowing is regulated by the truth, and not all people have an equivalent relation to this goal. When enjoined with a ‘polis’ named democracy, which is functionally a benevolent oligarchy, we have the historical grounds for a culture that is stratified intrinsically in terms of its very texture, and stratified extrinsically in terms of the appropriate characteristics of the guardians of that texture. F.R. LEAVIS: SOCIO-LITERARY THOUGHT AND THE ORGANIC COMMUNITY F.R. Leavis, writing in 1930 in a pamphlet called Mass Civilization and Minority Culture, which was to become oft quoted as summarizing his position on culture, states the following: In any period it is upon a very small minority that the discerning appreciation of art and literature depends: it is (apart from cases of the

cultural stratification simple and familiar) only a few who are capable of unprompted, firsthand judgement. They are still a small minority, though a larger one, who are capable of endorsing such first-hand judgement by genuine personal response. . . . The minority capable not only of appreciating Dante, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Hardy (to take major instances) but of recognising their latest successors constitute the consciousness of the race (or of a branch of it) at a given time. . . . Upon this minority depends our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of the tradition. Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that it is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go. In their keeping . . . is the language, the changing idiom upon which fine living depends, and without which distinction of spirit is thwarted and incoherent. By ‘culture’ I mean the use of such language. (Leavis 1930: 3–5)

Leavis was a leading figure in a school of British academics for whom the study of English and the practice of literary criticism was regarded as a path to the good life, enlightenment, the very core of all that is pure and worthy in the human condition and a panacea for the wasting condition that afflicted society as a whole. A previous professor of English Literature had stated that: England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it. The Churches (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State. (Gordon quoted in Eagleton 1983: 23)

But Leavis was no eccentric, esoteric, other-worldly figure, his ideas picked up very much on the spirit of the time. Following in the lineage of Arnold and other of the literary-romantic figures that we discussed in Chapter 1, there was a persistent and nagging strain among the intelligentsia, radically opposed to the ravages perpetrated through the so-called progress of industrialization. This strain had been further exacerbated, in the early twentieth century, by the four years of horror and ‘rational’ and ‘mechanical’ waste of the First World War.

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100 cultural stratification The monumental trivializing and pain, in direct proportion, that had accompanied the fin de siècle had generated an inverted historical optimism. Whereas the conventional post-Enlightenment rhetoric seems to run that what is cannot be the best, we must anticipate and hasten the next stage of our cultural evolution; what was now afoot was a grand longing for times past. As with all avowals of ‘the good old days’ the actual historical circumstances are more imagined than real and more amenable to introspection than the disruptions of actual change. The ‘organic community’ of Leavis’s fantasies and recollections was an unspecific seventeenth-century England when clearly civilization had reached its zenith in an integration of the head and the heart, the eye and the mind, and the natural and the cultural. It is on literary tradition that the office of maintaining continuity must rest. . . . What we have lost is the organic community with the living culture it embodied. Folk-songs, folk-dances, Cotswold cottages and handicraft products are a sign of something more: an art of life, a way of living, ordered and patterned, involving social arts, codes of intercourse and a responsive adjustment, growing out of immemorial experience, to the natural environment and the rhythm of the year. . . . The machine has destroyed the old ways of life, the old forms, and by reason of the continuous rapid change it involves, prevented the growth of the new. (Leavis and Thompson 1933: 23)

Given, in some way, that this idyll could not be recaptured by the many, it was to become the destiny and the purpose of the few. Leavis was, for almost a decade, locked in a debate with C.P. Snow (1970), whose thesis was that far from there being one core culture that modernity had obscured there were, in fact, two, the literary-artistic and the scientific, the creation of the latter being a specific triumph of modernity. These two spheres of knowledge were distinct but equivalent, and integral to the educated person; an ignorance of contemporary physics was comparable to an ignorance of Shakespeare. Apart from the fact that analytically this challenged Leavis’s view that a shared culture resided in a shared language, ‘a language is a life’, Snow had an implicit preference for the scientific culture and populist support in terms of the new vocationalism. The debate was extremely antagonistic, and divided whole sixth forms across the land; ‘aesthetes’ drew up lines against the ‘barbarous’


scientists, but the latter inherited the earth (and very nearly destroyed it). Though delicate and appealing, at a series of levels, there is no danger of mistaking the message in Leavis through the intricacies of interpretation and irony. Social life is not to be regarded as an experience that is, either demonstrably or purposively, similar for all people. People are marked out by their intellect and their capacity for discriminating judgement; they are differentiated according to this yardstick and they appropriately group in relation to this essential sign of difference. The ‘third realm’, which is for Leavis the realm of sociality, ‘the collaboratively created human world, the realm of what is neither public . . . nor merely private’, is a world extending from the sphere of common culture to that of minority culture, sundered by modernity but potentially mediated through language, art and literature and criticism, and to be bound by the literary tradition, ‘such a tradition as represents the finer consciousness of the race . . . and provides the currency of finer living’, and the cultural tradition, ‘in all things standards above the level of the ordinary man’ (Leavis 1972: 98). The free unspecialized general intelligence must transcend its time, and the mass, and locate the good in tradition. A centre of excellence must hold, ‘for the good of all of us’ and the discerning elite will radiate and disperse around this centre. Privilege requires its binary opposition deprivation, just as minority culture gains its distinction in opposition to the culture of the masses. Great literature captures essential elements of human experience, displays individual authors and elicits creative personal readers. This stands in opposition to the products of mass culture, ironically applauded by Benjamin, which are produced collectively, anonymously, commercially and without creative élan. The latter reflect the mechanical materiality of their time, not the essence of human experience; they can be neither good nor liberating. The reunification of society, through culture, Leavis recommends, will occur through a considered programme of liberal education. Such a programme will enable a strong educated public who will reclaim the most vital features of social, political and moral life. Thus the public in its totality will represent that strong living sense of complexities which is needed, above all in a time of rapid change, to ensure that the achievements, spiritual and humane – the essential creative achievements – of our civilization shall be permanent gains, conserved in the cultural heritage. (Leavis 1972: 227)

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102 cultural stratification Leavis’s ideas, disseminated through his extensive writings, his teaching and his formulation of critical debate through the journal Scrutiny, had a considerable impact on cultural criticism both during his time and subsequently. So also have those of his Cambridge contemporary, T.S. Eliot. T.S. ELIOT: TRADITION AND THE ELITE Eliot’s influence upon the thinking of the English-speaking world is extensive. Recognized perhaps primarily as a literary critic and highly successful poet, his work extended into cultural and social theory and, in Britain after the Second World War, impacted onto politics and educational policy. His primary thesis concerns the necessarily stratified and non-democratic character of culture. Born and initially educated in America, he trained as a philosopher, became a friend of Bertrand Russell despite the political chasm that separated their thoughts, and was much influenced by the neo-Hegelian metaphysics of F.H. Bradley. Fired by this radical idealism, and the preoccupation with searching out the absolute reality behind the superficiality of appearances he was led to a commitment to ‘essence’, in the various forms of the ‘good’ – ‘cultural heritage’, ‘tradition’, and, in parallel, a Christian God. Eliot’s most important works in the area of cultural criticism are After Strange Gods, The Idea of a Christian Society and Notes Towards the Definition of Culture; these were published between the years 1934 and 1949 and demonstrate the evolution of his views on the malaise of modernity and its resolution in a return to the structures of social life in a world past. The form of his own literary creations was imaginative and notable for their innovation, yet he was opposed to the unlocated and ill-disciplined drives of modernism as a project; he announced that the search was on for a fecund and unifying European literary tradition. He had, at an earlier stage of his career, pointed to a moment in cultural history where a serious decline in value had been instigated. The classicism of the pre-seventeenth century had become fragmented through a dislocation of cognition and affect, what Eliot referred to as the ‘dissociation of sensibilities’; the ‘essence’ had been lost and modernisms now dispersed into private languages and bizarre and particularistic imagery. The prophet, the seeker after truth, the creative artist must now resurrect the monotheism of a


shared tradition of value that the process of culture must properly coalesce around. Eliot was such a prophet. For Eliot, the breakdown of a concerted literary and artistic tradition was no mere esoteric occurrence, affecting only the small band of practising artists, critics and surrounding aesthetes; the breakdown, as it instanced the loss of an essential good, threatened the whole way of life of the people. The state of the creative project was thus realized as an index of the state of the collective consciousness in the wider society. Modern society is thus marked by a lack of shared values and beliefs, and an increasing failure to achieve shared meanings, the language and the very system of communication at the core of the culture are steadily corroding. By culture I mean first of all . . . the way of life of a particular people living together in one place. That culture is made visible in their arts, in their social system, in their habits and customs, in their religion. (Eliot 1948: 102)

This belief leads Eliot to contradict the conventional wisdom of modernist aesthetics, which stresses creativity through difference, newness and fracture. He, in opposition, locates the creative artist in the practice of the recovery, redemption and salvation of the tradition that grounds the possibility of recognizable cultural production. So consolidation and roots appear to be the goal. The reconstitution of a literary tradition is also a moral project, for Eliot, almost in the way of a Durkheimian sociologist seeking out the appropriate creed to ensure a solidaristic community in the face of material changes and pressures on the structuring of relationships. Paradoxically, he sees also many of the evils of modern society being manifested in the kind of representations that Marx had previously polemicized: the competitive ethic engendered through capitalism, the organization of human relationships in terms of the discourse of the market place, the central motif of commerce as mediating all social life, the fetishism of commodities, the exploitation of human beings in the form of labour, and the election of profit as the primary motive in social action. All of these guiding principles of modern culture and modern social life run counter to the moral Christian life; just as they had previously affronted Marx’s residual Judaism. In Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (1948) Eliot finally reveals his somewhat less than egalitarian views about the necessary stratification of

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104 cultural stratification cultural experience and socialization. He presents the case, initially, as if it concerned levels of analysis but these levels take on a more positive form and become justifications for levels of participation and the quality of experience. The three cultural strata are the individual, the group, and the whole society. We cannot and, he affirms, should not, elect standards at any one of these levels and render them applicable to any of the other levels; thus, particular individuals can only achieve, culturally, at the level of particular individuals. As a consequence it is wholly inappropriate to attempt to educate the majority into the culture of the minority. This leads instantly to a conflation of the notions of high culture and minority culture. The attempted democratization of high culture leads to a dilution and a falling off of standards. The ‘essence’, the quality and tradition at the centre of a culture in general must, for the good of all, be preserved by the guardians of our aesthetic heritage; an argument reminiscent of Plato’s Republic. Although the ritual, routine and convention of our shared cultural way of life are practices upheld by all members of a society, unconsciously in their everyday lives, there is a particular necessity for the excellences and pinnacles of cultural achievement to be sustained consciously. This is the peculiar responsibility of an elite, and not a spontaneous nor organic elite that emerges according to the dominant material circumstances of the day. Our cultural heritage, our creative tradition requires nurture through continuity which is, itself, best provided through the maintenance of the class system (which is the form in which modernity and capitalism have come to express and institutionalize meritocracy). This recommendation we might read as an apologia for the system of inherited ‘cultural capital’ that we will later see indicted in the work of Bourdieu. ORTEGA Y GASSET: THE THREAT OF THE MASSES Outside this seemingly English, all too English, strand of elitist cultural criticism there existed a steady and consolidated body of American reactionary cultural analysis which, quite independently of Marcuse, was fearful of what it variously conceived as the ‘one-dimensionality’ of human expression and desire that appeared to follow in the wake of the exponentially, all-consuming popular culture. Such ideas, in the American context, further amplified the then current McCarthyite trend in politics, the terror of socialist ‘uniformity’.


In isolation from this debate, yet latterly informing it with a sharp philosophical clarity, was the forceful and prolific writing of Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset working in Madrid up until 1955. His interests covered a wide span including aesthetics, metaphysics, logic, existentialism and cultural life. His unequivocal ideas on cultural stratification appear quite spontaneous until we discover that having received a German university education he became much influenced by neoKantianism. His social theorizing asserts the absolute fragility and volatility of culture. Whereas Thomas Hobbes, some centuries earlier, had seen the resolution to social instability residing in the overwhelming and overseeing power of the state, his ‘Leviathan’, Ortega y Gasset envisages this role being taken over by a select and cultured aristocratic group. For Hobbes, the perpetual and challenging alternative to social order was an anarchy involving a war of all against all; for Ortega y Gasset the disassembly of cultural stability would be marked by a descent into barbarianism and a lethargy of the human spirit. Not all of humanity is sufficiently equipped, or indeed interested, to guard the heritage of quality that constitutes human culture, and thus the constant vigilance that is required to resist cultural and moral decay is to be provided through the leadership of a cultural elite, albeit a liberal cultural elite. The part of the common man, who is unable to provide the necessary energy and insight to police his own culture, is to acquiesce to the leadership of the elite. Because the being of man is not given to him but is a purely imaginary possibility, the human species is of an instability and variability that make it incomparable with animal species. Men are enormously unequal, in spite of what egalitarians of the last two centuries affirmed and of what old-fashioned folk of this century go on affirming. (Ortega y Gasset 1933: 42)

We can hear echoes of Nietzsche here, another influence on the work of Ortega y Gasset, who had already announced that if you had a culture that required slaves then it was not sensible to educate them to become masters. This anti-democratic sentiment is adequately summarized in the title of Ortega y Gasset’s major contribution to the argument over mass culture, The Revolt of the Masses (1930). For him the tendency towards the social, collective and popular response, inherent in the dense sociality of

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106 cultural stratification the industrial world, is a tendency towards the subhuman and the mechanized. Mass society and mass culture, clearly now political rather than descriptive terms, are threats to the expressive and creative project of human being. The social and the cultural do not hold together through spontaneous, egalitarian loving bonds but through the continuous, wilful and dedicated project of the informed minority working for the destiny of all. Far from recognizing any commonality with the tradition of Marxist theorizing expounded in Chapter 4, Leavis and Eliot and Ortega y Gasset have been seen as reactionary, theorists of the ‘right’, and worse. Their position is linked with other manifestly conservative thinkers such as Jacques Ellul, Ernest van den Haag and Russell Kirk. It is nevertheless the case that there is a surprising degree of overlap between some of their ideas on aesthetics and tradition and cultural representation, and those ideas of the group of German critical theorists that we have come to refer to collectively as the Frankfurt School. Clearly the spirit of the time temporarily overwhelmed existing political differences. THE FRANKFURT SCHOOL: MASS CULTURE AND THE ‘CULTURE INDUSTRY’ It is, in many ways, one of the grand paradoxes and ironies of contemporary social theory that a concerted, prolific and radical group of Marxist scholars should have constituted a thesis on the character, value and function of mass culture that is personified by condemnation rather than redemption. Nevertheless, the ‘critical theory’ of Adorno, Horkheimer, Lowenthal and Marcuse has made a lasting, left-wing platform for the espousal of the critique of mass culture and thus the inevitable stratification of culture. The irony of this forcefully argued theme in their work is no less bitter than that engendered by the image of the windows in the Frankfurt Institute, broken by the student revolutionaries of 1968. A melancholy science indeed. Before we look specifically at the ideas of the Frankfurt School it is important to note their dissimilarities from the positions of the conservative critics, previously discussed. The conservatives are clearly opposed to egalitarianism whereas the critical theorists are committed to political democracy. This difference is based on antagonistic views of the people and their intrinsic worth; thus the conservative explanation of the paucity


of mass culture is in relation to the inadequacy, mundanity and ‘low-brow’ status of the general public’s taste and receptive capacities – the Marxist explanation is in terms of the intervention of the market, and the erosion of spontaneous folk-culture in the face of a mechanical and commercially exploitative popular culture imposed outside the control of mass’s volition. Both groups of critics remain, however, disturbed, if not threatened, by the rise of an increasingly autonomous and, as they see it, vacuous popular culture. Nevertheless, Horkheimer, the Director of the Institute, had set their manifesto as concerning: the connection between the economic life of society, the psychological development of individuals and the changes within specific areas of culture to which belong not only the intellectual legacy of the sciences, art, and religion, but also law, customs, fashion, public opinion, sports, entertainment, lifestyles and so on. (Horkheimer 1989: 31)

During the 1930s, in its striving to explain the distortion of both the individual personality and the collective response that occurred through totalitarianism, the Frankfurt School supplanted the search for an economic base in their theorizing with an allegiance to psychology and psychoanalysis. This involved a sustained dalliance with the system of Freudian ideas, but largely through the mediation of Reich and Fromm. This shift from the level of the social to that of the individual, indeed to the inner self, was a sincere attempt to relate to the dramatic transformations in human conduct that routinely took place as a result of the calculated ‘manipulations’ of fascist propaganda. Gentle folk became mass murderers and previously unremarkable differences in race and ethnicity became ‘reasonable’ grounds for denunciation and extermination. Manifestly, this was no passing interest; the members of the Institute had, themselves, to escape to the USA in order to avoid the inevitable consequences of the manipulated Nazi hysteria that had metamorphosed into a rational machine for the constitution of a ‘pure’ future and a purged history. In the USA, the haven from the mass phenomenon of persecution, the members of the Institute confronted their new phenomenon, which was to provide further impetus to the pursuit of a theory of ‘manipulation’. America pulsated with an advanced form of capitalism, unprecedented and unchallenged in the Western world. Here was no fascism, but a society

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108 cultural stratification with relationships regulated by the rules of a market economy, motivated by the drives of possessive individualism, orientated towards ownership and achievement and, most importantly, socialized, massaged, and informed by an equally manipulative popular culture. It seemed no longer relevant to account for the origins of the ‘authoritarian personality’ in terms of poor toilet training or an inadequate repression of libidinal urges. What they looked towards now was the complex conflation of entertainment, leisure, advertising, commerce, lifestyle and mass media that generated the ‘one-dimensional’ American ‘man’: and this complex Adorno and Horkheimer referred to as the ‘culture industry’. The study of psychology moved to a critique of mass culture. This analysis of ‘enlightenment as mass deception’ is a new, and truly sociological, departure in the work of the Frankfurt School. As Bottomore has described it: The argument deployed here is not that of Marx, according to which ‘the ruling ideas in every age are the ideas of the ruling class’ and modern technology might be regarded as having increased the effectiveness with which these ideas are implanted in society at large (a hypothesis to be tested by empirical studies), but rather that technology and a technological consciousness have themselves produced a new phenomenon in the shape of a uniform and debased ‘mass culture’ which aborts and silences criticism. (Bottomore 1984: 19)

There is a sad, if not tragic, vision informing the School’s work of this period. The ‘culture industry’ is not just a description of the capitalist mechanisms of manipulation and Fordist cultural production, it is a concept containing a whole way of life, indeed the state of being of the working classes. The term ‘mass culture’ is virtually replaced by the notion of a ‘culture industry’ in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer; it sums up not an apparatus imposed by outside forces of exploitation, but a wholly integrated life-style and a wholly predictable and replicable course of action for this great body of the people. The vision here is one of fallenness and it is understood with a profound pessimism. Marx’s proletariat, the historical vehicle for revolutionary social change, the group previously endowed with a transformative latency (whatever the state of its oppressive structural conditions), the immanent potential for


activism whose destiny it is to cast off the chains that constrain human possibility and expunge the violence of any status quo; this proletariat has become utterly routinized. It has transmogrified into passivity and complacency, and its will to power has diminished if not withered. The proletariat is no longer a revolutionary force. The Frankfurt School had escaped a tidal wave of European fascism to become engulfed in a stagnant pool of decadence and, to invoke their own term, ‘barbarity’. Their realization of the apathetic and malleable condition of the American populace could not, however, be explained through some version of a ‘culture shock’ theory; this was a view supported in perhaps more vociferous fashion by the endogenous Marxist sociologist C. Wright Mills, whose work The Power Elite (1956) argued that there had been an almost total collapse in civil society and that political life was now constituted through a more or less direct relation between a self-selected and manipulative ‘them’ and a mass and manipulable ‘us’. The political context further inflamed the viability of the thesis in that the previous McCarthyite fears of uniformity wrought through the machinations of the ‘red’ peril now, by virtue of the war in Korea, shifted to the propaganda of the ‘yellow’ peril with talk of mind control and ‘brain washing’. The ‘masses’ were abandoned, within the theory, to the strategies of the ‘hidden persuaders’. They were left to consume their pulp fiction, ubiquitous and continuous television, drive-in movies, fast food, addictive comics, radio that ‘entertained’ but never informed; in fact, a life at the prey of advertising. Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is an analysis of the ‘culture industry’ but it is also the cry of despair of aesthetic Marxism, now off in pursuit of a site for culture in the more traditional, high cultural forms of Kultur. The ‘culture industry’, Swingewood tells us was clearly intended to suggest domination from above although its success still depended on an amorphous, passive and irrational working class. The mass media are repressive: criticism of capitalism is stifled, happiness is identified with acquiescence and with the complete integration of the individual into the existing social and political order. Two themes dominate the Frankfurt School’s theory of mass society: the weakness of traditional socialising institutions in the face of massive economic and technological change; and the increasing reification of

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110 cultural stratification culture in which the object of man’s labour and activity are transformed into independent, autonomous forces seemingly beyond human control. (Swingewood 1977: 13)

The collapse of the family, or rather the erosion of its role as socializer of the rational, choosing autonomous individual, had vacated the space now occupied by the ‘culture industry’. Thus the ‘home of the free and the brave’ had now become the receptacle of Marcuse’s ‘One Dimensional Man’. From Horkheimer’s analysis of the family and the structure of authority the Frankfurt School proceeded to find salvation for the human condition and its cultural manifestations in the traditional repositories of free, genuine art, and the free, genuine, creative consciousness of the artist. This may be an antidote to the oppression of mass culture but it never has been, and never could be, a propensity of more than the ‘few’. There is no new proletariat here. The Frankfurt School have moved from a critical appraisal of cultural stratification to a justification of cultural stratification. POPULAR CULTURE: A POSITIVE APPRAISAL – CULTURAL PLURALISM What we have noted throughout this chapter is that mass or popular culture is realized, analytically, as the antithesis to and inferior partner of high culture. It is one of those concepts that conventionally inhabits the shadows, like deviance, such that one begins to relate to it, from the outset, as constitutionally deprived, belonging to the less-than-good, or at least as signifying other than ‘good’ taste. Although Williams, from a Marxist perspective, may have pointed to the design and construction of trade union banners, for example, as instances of working-class art and creative pursuit, he nevertheless demonstrates a certain ambivalence in treating them as equivalent to or competitive with what-we-all-know as ‘fine’ art. It is indeed a brave, or ambitious, theorist who will go so far as to flaunt ‘informed’ public opinion and declare the intrinsic worth of the Beatles’s music alongside that of Bach, Catherine Cookson’s prose as equal to Proust’s, or the artwork of BritArt on a par with French impressionism. However, what we have to address here is not an argument concerning absolute standards set by gods or philosophers, but rather an argument over the sociological significance of the performance and reception of these various manifestations of culture. This point provides an important


political stance for much of contemporary British cultural studies, as we shall see in Chapter 8; it had, however, been previously addressed by theorists such as Gans (1974) and Gerbner et al. (1969) and others in America, such as Shils, Bell and Riesmann in the 1950s through to the early 1970s. A new order of society has taken form since the end of World War 1 in the United States. . . . The new society is a mass society precisely in the sense that the mass of the population has become incorporated into society. The centre of society – the central institutions and the central value systems which guide and legitimate these institutions – has extended its boundaries. Most of the population (the ‘mass’) now stands in a closer relationship to the centre than has been the case either in premodern societies or in the earlier phases of modern society. (Shils 1961: 1)

The argument runs that modern society, through changes in its productive base and demographic distributions, has experienced a significant shift in the character of its class system, a strengthening of its civil society and an increased incorporation of the populace through notions of citizenship. All people, within the post-industrial society, have more freedom, more choice, and clearly, more self-expression. Popular culture, then, is not simply an exercise in exploitation or mechanical reproduction but instead it fulfils a need and a desire of a particular, but genuine, kind of taste or tastes. Beyond this, given the transitory and historically located character of experience, all people have a right, and now the autonomy, to choose the cultural representations that they prefer. Adopting this kind of position, Gans tells us that the critique of popular culture is misplaced and consists of four elements, being: 1. The negative character of popular culture creation. Popular culture is desirable because, unlike high culture, it is mass-produced by profit-minded entrepreneurs solely for the gratification of a paying audience. 2. The negative effects on high culture. Popular culture borrows from high culture, thus debasing it, and also lures away many potential creators of high culture, thus depleting its reservoir of talent.

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112 cultural stratification 3. The negative effects on the popular cultural audience. The consumption of popular culture content at best produces spurious gratifications, and at worst is emotionally harmful to the audience. 4. The negative effects on the society. The wide distribution of popular culture not only reduces the level of cultural quality – or civilization – of a society, but also encourages totalitarianism by creating a passive audience peculiarly responsive to the techniques of mass persuasion used by demagogues bent on dictatorship. (Gans 1974: 19)

These four theses rest, however, on a set of interests that are particular and biased. The argument for cultural populism, in juxtaposition, is difficult to sustain, given that most of the potential presenters would themselves be appreciators of high culture. Nevertheless, a truly democratic argument in favour of popular culture recognizes not its value in signifying the state of its times, as an abstraction unidentifiable by its consumers, but its worth as supplying a taste, awareness and a set of desires that belong to a people. Gans, arguing in favour of such pluralism, suggests that the critique is biased and misplaced in a variety of ways. In the first place there is no evidence to suggest that popular culture contains the harmful attributes with which it is ascribed. All cultural representations live in a peaceful, if not symbiotic, co-existence. The critique, he says, is largely ideological, it rests upon an aesthetic rejection of the content of popular culture and a ‘disdain for ordinary people’. More than this, it embodies a regressive view of the historical process, a bourgeois and Enlightenment view of individualism, and is clearly creator, rather than consumer, oriented. However, Gans and the other cultural pluralists retain the distinction between the mass, or popular, culture and the high, or minority culture; and also the distinction between the ‘ordinary’ people and, presumably, the more-than-ordinary people. More than this, they gloss over the central concerns of the two modes of theorizing that they seek to resolve by ignoring all questions of cultural value and vitality, and also those of exploitation and domination. The theory of pluralism . . . has a concept of modern society based on an equilibrium of forces in which independent, non-inclusive social groups exercise a limited measure of democratic control through their

cultural stratification access to the major elites. Society is thus a complex structure of checks and balances in which no one group wields dominant power. . . . Consumer capitalism, rather than creating a vast, homogeneous and culturally brutalised mass, generates different levels of taste, different audiences and consumers. Culture is stratified, its consumption differentiated. (Swingewood 1977: 19–20)

It is left until 1977 for Swingewood in The Myth of Mass Culture to produce a synthesis and critique of the conservative position, the Frankfurt School and the cultural pluralists, and to announce that all three groups of theorists are involved in the perpetuation of a political myth, that of ‘mass culture’. Mass culture is not just a descriptive category; it is a rhetorical weapon in a series of arguments variously augmenting cultural stratification based on social class.

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6 CULTURAL REPRODUCTION The object of social science is a reality that encompasses all the individual and collective struggles aimed at conserving or transforming reality, in particular those that seek to impose the legitimate definition of reality, whose specifically symbolic efficacy can help to conserve or subvert the established order, that is to say, reality. (Bourdieu 1990: 141)

Having gone some way towards establishing a working definition of the concept of culture, however volatile and transient, it is appropriate that we should attempt to account for both the recognition of change and the experience of consistency in our everyday relations with cultural formations. ‘Cultural reproduction’, though no longer the catch-all explanatory device that it once was, is nevertheless a useful analytic tool to this end and a particularly fertile area for social theory (see Jenks 1993). The idea of cultural reproduction makes reference to the emergent quality of the experience of everyday life, albeit through a variety of theoretical positions. The concept serves to articulate the dynamic process that makes sensible the utter contingency of, on the one hand, the stasis and determinacy of social structures and, on the other, the innovation and agency inherent in the practice of social action. Cultural reproduction allows us to contemplate the necessity and complementarity of continuity and

cultural reproduction

change in social experience. To that end it both preserves the homeostasis between the elements of any semiotic system, such as culture is, but also provides for the possibility, and inevitable nature, of its evolution. While it might be argued that, in some senses, this particular problematic has been a sustained preoccupation of social theorizing since its inception, the modern critical conceptualization of the problem around the idea of ‘cultural reproduction’ was first developed by the French sociologist and cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu in the early 1970s. The original practical context of Bourdieu’s work was the modern system of education which he saw functioning to the end of ‘reproducing’ the culture of the dominant classes. Such a mechanism of mass socialization clearly assisted in ensuring this group’s continued dominance and also in perpetuating their covert exercise of power. the sociology of educational institutions and, in particular, of higher educational institutions, may make a decisive contribution to the frequently neglected aspect of the sociology of power which consists in the science of the dynamics of class relations. Indeed, among all the solutions provided, throughout the course of history, to the problem of the transmission of power and privileges, probably none have been better dissimulated and, consequently, better adapted to societies which tend to reject the most patent forms of hereditary transmission of power and privileges, than that provided by the educational system in contributing to the reproduction of the structure of class relations and in dissimulating the fact that it fulfils this function under the appearance of neutrality. (Centre for European Studies 1972: 11–12)

ALTHUSSER: IDEOLOGICAL STATE APPARATUSES Such ideas resonated with certain of Althusser’s (1971) concepts that were emerging at about the same period. Althusser, having assimilated and adapted some of Gramsci’s ideas about ‘hegemony’ and the distinction between political and civil society that we considered earlier, was attempting to theorize about the subtle mechanisms of control at work in advanced capitalist societies that enabled the maintenance of a particular social order, a particular set of relations of production and a particular exercise of power without that power being felt. Althusser believed, quite

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116 cultural reproduction rightly, that modern power is no longer forceful, omnipotent and excessive but rather that it is exercised by stealth. Instead of individuals being regimented and directed, or even manipulated, they are incorporated. Through his notions of the ‘repressive’ and the ‘ideological state apparatuses’ Althusser informs us of both the ‘iron hand’ and the ‘velvet glove’. Concretely he is talking about the police and the armed forces as opposed to education, mass media and belief systems; analytically he is revealing that the modern state fails in its desire to rule by consent if the populace comes too much into contact with the hard edge of power. The state is seeking the agreement rather than the coercion of its polity. He develops the mediating concept of ‘interpellation’; this is the manner in which modern ideologies claim the individual. The dominant ideology operates not as an opaque and compelling wall of ideas that impact upon the consciousness of the collective, rather they select and individualize and penetrate the subject; thus they invite us singularly into their complex, and once in we act as if freely choosing the typical motives provided. The advertisement which ‘advises’ that to own a particular make of car is to display your obvious sexual prowess is not intended for your neighbour; the headteacher’s cry of ‘that boy!’ across the packed assembly hall renders every pupil vulnerable to the status, and responsibility, of potential miscreant; and the billboard that exclaims ‘Your Country Needs You’ is certainly not speaking to the person standing behind you. Althusser’s ideas concerning interpellation contributed to the burgeoning body of work on cultural reproduction by indicating the routine and systematic ways in which stasis is achieved within culture with the quasi-conscious compliance of the individual member of that culture. Bourdieu had developed and expanded his central concepts of ‘cultural capital’ and ‘habitus’, which we shall consider in more detail later, and subsequently his own work and his influence upon the research of others spread into an examination of areas of concern beyond education, such as socialization, high culture and artistic practice, and style and mannerism in social relations. Bourdieu’s ideas and his method of analysis are both highly original, but also enlighteningly synthetic, in the good sense, of deriving through a cocktail of intellectual antecedents. Viewed in terms of the history of ideas, it is both interesting and important to note that despite the complex of traditions and influences which contribute to Bourdieu’s thought the British tradition of the sociology of culture and cultural studies seems to


have picked up on and crystallized around the largely negative and critical elements of his thesis. Ensuing from this a majority of contributions to this field have developed the metaphor of reproduction as copy or imitation rather than as regeneration or synthesis. As a consequence ‘cultural reproduction’ has become subsumed under the orthodoxy of studies in the theory of ideology and neo-Marxisms (see Barrett et al. 1979; Bennett et al. 1981; Apple 1982). Certain other different and significant bodies of work continued to develop the positive side, such as Bernstein’s (1971–3) extended studies of the role of socio-linguistic codes in revealing the character of the relation between the social structure and the symbolic order, and also Cicourel’s (1973) research into cognitive sociology which revolved around the acquisition of interpretive procedures. In spite of these important initiatives, and others, the central concept of cultural reproduction had, however, become seemingly hijacked within a deep structural conspiracy of overdetermination which almost precluded redemption. It is, of course important, and for some theorists wholly proper, to address the well-established theme of ideology and structural determinacy in cultural reproduction theory; however, there are other available approaches. Part of what this chapter will recommend is a series of attempts to open up other possibilities from a variety of perspectives less familiar in this area of study like, for example, reflexive sociology, Durkheimian sociology, ethnomethodology, structuralism and post-structuralism. Cultural reproduction is also an important and challenging theme in any discussion over postmodernism, with its emphasis on simulacra, re-presentation and cultural production. It will be useful, at this stage, to examine the place of the concepts of culture and thus cultural reproduction within social theory more generally. All sociological explanations begin with some concept of structure which, following Durkheim (1938), appears as typical to all societal members; that is, it stands as the normal, the mundane, it has a series of taken-forgranted manifestations. Structure is also constraining upon the conduct of members either overtly or, more successfully, through a network of covert strategies. Finally, structure is to be recognized as ultimately independent of the will or caprice of particular individuals. It is, then, a determinate form, intangible but real, and always real in its consequences. Structure provides the supra-individual source of causality in sociological reasoning whether it is experienced by members, or constituted by theorists, as

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118 cultural reproduction economic, political, moral, cognitive or even physical in its orientation. From these various conceptions, or, perhaps we should say, formulations, stem the dynamics in social theory that we might call process. Culture and particularly cultural reproduction are precisely dynamics that we would gather within this notion of process. Indeed, the idea of culture emerges from the noun ‘process’, in the sense of nurture, growth and bringing into being – in fact, to cultivate in an agricultural or horticultural sense (Williams 1976). Culture, as process, is emergent, it is forthcoming, it is continuous in the way of re-producing and, as with all social processes, it provides the grounds for and the parallel context of social action itself. All social action, within sociology, appears not in isolation but rather depends upon its context or a sense of competence for its meaning. In this way it stands as an index of the social occasion from which it arose (see Garfinkel 1967). Action therefore inevitably relates back to the original, but perhaps unspoken, social structure for its coherence and intelligibility. The point of this excursion into the patterning of sociological explanation is twofold: firstly, that sociology has a perpetually ambivalent relationship with the centrality and efficacy of subjectivity, selves become movements within culture or parts of cultural units, and secondly, that sociology appears to generate one sense of a causal chain but what we have essentially is a teleology, a circuit of explanation that is self-sustaining in terms of the object of its completion; as Durkheim put it, ‘explain the social in terms of the social’. An important analytic point here, particularly in the study of a symbolic structure like culture, is that the patterning of these modalities structure, process and social action is not descriptive, although in some epistemological guises, like, for example, positivism, it passes itself off as if it were wholly descriptive. However, and this is a point worthy of emphasis, this patterning of modalities is not descriptive; rather it is metaphoric. The metaphors become our analytic topic. Those cultural signs or conventions, as metaphors, become our topic. Our choice of metaphors and our choice through cultural metaphors expresses our interests, our intentions and our moral relation to the world. The use of different metaphors in our analysis displays our attitude to a knowledge of the social world and its cultures; it reveals our vision and that also of our tradition. For example, it is, or should be by now, commonplace to attend critically to the invocation of the masculine form ‘man’ to summon up images of all humankind in Western reason or indeed in much public discourse, e.g.


the current use of ‘chair’ or ‘chairperson’. At a more esoteric level it is perhaps less routine to acknowledge the empiricist legacy of the centrality of the senses, particularly vision, in much social theory that ‘looks at’, ‘sees’ and specifically ‘observes’ its phenomena; this has even permeated everyday speech where we enquire ‘do you see what I mean?’ We may note further the technical and commercial metaphoricity that has permeated much contemporary sociology; for example, the invocation of terms like ‘production’, ‘profit’, ‘output’; even in the often bureaucratic prose of such theorists as Habermas (1971) when he is, ironically, levelling a critique at the penetration of the discourse of science and technology into the lifeworld thus militating against a free democracy. The point, I trust, should be clear. Different metaphors unconsciously or, in the case of reflexive theorizing, consciously display our varieties of moral commitment and thus our different perspectives on social life. In this gathering of ideas, in this process of signification, our central metaphors are ‘culture’ and ‘reproduction’ and we should now examine these metaphors in order to liberate their potential meanings. Thus far we have introduced the concept of culture in relation to the ideas of process and growth, and extracted a view that culture carries with it a sense of becoming. Earlier, in Chapter 2, we also looked at the relationship between culture and social structure; we can rehearse some of these arguments here but we also need to know what is culture as distinct from society, or do the terms duplicate? Malinowski (1944: 36) tells us that culture is ‘inherited artifacts, goods, technical process, ideas, habits and values’. Included within his definition is a notion of social structure which, he believed, could not be understood apart from culture. He further states that culture ‘obviously is the integral whole consisting of the implements and consumer goods, of constitutional charters for the various social groupings, of human ideas and crafts, beliefs and customs’ and he continues that ‘the essential fact of culture as we live it and experience it, as we observe it scientifically, is the organization of human beings into permanent groups.’ Firth (1951), another eminent anthropologist, adopts a different position and distinguishes firmly between social structure and culture, defining the latter as ‘the component of accumulated resources, immaterial as well as material, which a people inherit, employ, transmute, add to and transmit; it is all learned behaviour which has been socially acquired’.

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120 cultural reproduction Tom Bottomore (1962), writing as a sociologist, concludes my inventory of definitions with the proposition that: ‘By culture we mean the ideational aspects or social life, as distinct from the actual relations and forms of relationship between individuals; and by a culture the ideational aspects of a particular society.’ It would appear that the concept of culture implies a relationship with the accumulated shared symbols representative of and significant within a particular community, what we might describe as a context-dependent semiotic system. Culture, however, is not simply a residue, it is, as we have already considered, in progress; it processes and reveals as it structures and contains. Culture is the way of life and the manner of living of a people. It is often conflated with the idea of high culture, although this is an understanding both too restrictive and too exclusive; yet high culture is our topic also. This binary definition has been a constant theme throughout this book in terms of exclusion, compatibility, and also confusion. Let us now explore our second root metaphor, that of ‘reproduction’. A phenotypical reading of the term, or what I have previously referred to as a ‘negative’ definition, invokes all of the modern and sterile resonances of mechanicism and technicism, it speaks of a crafted or rather fashioned re-production. At its strongest we have a copy or repeat, at its most dilute an imitation or a likeness; within this limited sense of the term we are presented with reproduction as replication; this is a metaphor of constraint. In relation to the experience of social life, such reproduction must be an affirmation of the ancien régime, a system which extols a symbolic violence through its containment of choice in the present (see Bourdieu 1977b). The symbolism of such an order is condensed, opaque and referential of convention, form and demise. Alternatively, a genotypical reading of reproduction is, in juxtaposition, positive and vibrant. It brings to mind the excitement and newness of sexual and biological reproduction. Here the image is generative rather than replicative and it offers the possibilities of change and new combinations. The very idea of birth that stems from such a formulation is innovative and necessarily creative. Here is the theorizing of the new or coming order and the social is conceived of through change, re-formation or even revolution. The symbolism is diffuse and elusive, it lives within rules-in-use as meaning. Both of these understandings of our concept culture, which are well rehearsed by Williams (1971), can be taken to relate to other pervasive


binary combinations in social theory, such as continuity and change, consensus and conflict, structure and agency, and determinism and free will. The fluidity that exists in the space between these oppositions is itself infinitely reproductive and generative of varieties of theorizing. It is also this territory left vacant amidst the avenues of post-Enlightenment dichotomies that is being colonized by the polysemy of postmodern critique, that we shall discuss in the next chapter. CULTURAL REPRODUCTION: THE MARXIST PERSPECTIVE The theme of cultural reproduction is one that has arisen from within a diversity of forms of contemporary social investigation, all of which variously but inevitably refer to a sense of social continuity achieved through modalities of change. Now in one dominant form this appears as a classical Marxist dichotomy between essence (continuity) and appearance (as change) and indeed, as previously suggested, much of the British work on cultural reproduction, but by no means all of it, emerges from a Marxist tradition. It is important, I would suggest, to attempt to liberate the concept back into the wider arena of sociological debate. But, to begin with, let us look briefly at the constitution of a Marxist method in terms of essence and appearance. This is an epistemology initiated in The German Ideology, refined in The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy and the Grundrisse, and reaching its fruition in Das Kapital. The classical examples of this method derive from volume 1 of this last source, Das Kapital. In my chapter on culture, Marxism and materialism (Chapter 4) we looked at the instance of ‘commodity fetishism’, here we shall take our example from the section on ‘wages’. Wages, Marx argues, produce a distorted and distorting image of the relationship between people in the market place. One group, the owners of the means of production, appear to offer wages to the working group in return for the exercise of their labour. Labour then is treated as if it were like any other commodity, it is assumed to be objective and it can be assigned an exchange value. Labour, however, is unlike any other commodity; it is, in reality, subjective, it is part of our species being homo laborens. The consumption of labour generates a value in excess of its original unmobilized state. This peculiar property of labour is called ‘labour power’. Despite the appearance of wages as providing a fair exchange for the consumption of labour, what is actually being appropriated is ‘labour

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122 cultural reproduction power’, it is generating a ‘surplus value’ or a profit for its consumer. The essence of the wages relation is, then, the true relation of ‘exploitation’, and whatever changes might occur in the appearance of wages (trade union bargaining, wage increases, improved conditions of service), the mechanism of exploitation, as the essence, is always reproduced. So in Marx’s terms we have an elementary example of how components of a market culture are reproduced such that the real relations that befit the old order remain intact and hidden. The linking concept for this contradiction or discrepancy between appearance and essence is, of course, ideology. Ideology becomes the process, both conscious but largely unconscious, through which a distortion, blurring, generalizing and decontextualizing of realities occurs; all to the benefit of one particular group within the society. We are provided, through this model, with a pattern and a battery of concepts for the analysis of any cultural phenomenon extending from the material forms like property, artefacts or commodities (things-inthemselves), to the ideational like language, knowledge and subjectivity itself. Indeed Althusser’s concept of ‘interpellation’ offered precisely the possibility of identity and subjectivity emerging from the ideological process. Ideology being a constant variable in social life, it hails and elects individuals, it incorporates them and provides them with purpose and a sense of self. The determinacy of distortion is complete, the realm of the private is invaded and inhabited by the grinding inevitability of ideological necessity. History teaches us odd lessons. Over the past three decades events in eastern Europe have made us poignantly aware that Marxism as a concrete economic and political policy has generated a series of social structures which manifest oppression and, at the personal level, despair. However, in the context of Western theorizing the Marxist tradition has always provided for the possibility of freedom, emancipation and authenticity as intellectual principles. Nevertheless, in the context of cultural analysis in terms of culture’s re-producibility, work emanating from such a theoretical perspective provides a vision of pessimism, of regret and of fallenness, Adorno’s ‘melancholy science’. Thus its often unspoken recommendations provide the grounds for upheaval and conflict, a thesis of constant redemption. As a form of analysis Marxist theory espouses a democracy which is, however, overseen and directed by the hidden expert, the defiler of reified images and the revealer of distortions.


CULTURAL REPRODUCTION: THE DURKHEIMIAN PERSPECTIVE Durkheimian sociology provides another, relatively underexercised, resource for cultural reproduction theory. This tradition centres on an unashamed expert who wishes to ‘speak louder than commonsense’, indeed at an early stage of The Rules of Sociological Method Durkheim tells us that we must ‘eradicate all preconceptions’ which Hirst (1975) has interpreted as an assault on the ideology of commonsense. Durkheim is certainly making a claim for the establishment of a form of discourse that is disciplined, unconventional and reflexive upon the commonplace. He directs us to proceed from the local and the particular experience of everyday life, the individual manifestation; to the real, the typical, the collective representation. From an understanding of this realm of phenomena we can generate an altruistic commitment to the development of a truly moral science. Morality, in Durkheim, refers to that which binds people together, the essential adhesion or bond which must reproduce from moment to moment in order to sustain any experience of cohesion or indeed sociality itself. The problem, for Durkheim, with the issues of social and cultural reproduction is not to reveal their occurrence behind the distorted ideological mask of change but rather to search for the appropriate collective secular credo that will ‘ensure’ reproduction of solidarity in the face of change. Reproduction is not taken to be intrinsically evil, or even necessarily partial in its implications. Durkheim offers us this thesis, which is fundamental to all of his writings (see Smith and Jenks 2000), in The Division of Labour. It is in this formative work that he provides the two pervasive models of integration across the axis of modernity in the form of ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity. Mechanical solidarity is a societal form based on sameness, on compact, shared beliefs, on an ill-defined division of labour and on an intensely other-directed collective consciousness. The transition to organic solidarity, which occurs through ‘moral density’ accompanying the passage of modernity, brings about a steady and debilitating enfeeblement of this collective consciousness which has a knock-on effect on the other features of the society. The division of labour becomes clearly demarcated and rigorously policed, belief systems become more diffuse and divergent, and the point of recognition between people becomes their difference. The change might be summarized, within

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124 cultural reproduction a science of ethics, as a movement away from altruism into the ascendence of egoism. Durkheim’s purpose, and his legacy, is to produce a theory of benign reproduction. A theory that will locate the binding force in the face of potential fragmentation; what he described as the condition of ‘anomie’. His work is reparative and displays a vigorous impulsion to reconstruct difference as interdependence. In opposition to the Marxist approach Durkheim is informing us of the very necessity of cultural reproduction, the necessity of conformity through change. Some systems simply must reproduce; his societal forms are, after all, not evolutionary but morphological. The Durkheimian tradition views reproduction with an optimism, indeed a positive-ism; its metaphors are consensual rather than divisive and its motivation is integrative. CULTURAL REPRODUCTION: THE ETHNOMETHODOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE A further source of the genre of cultural reproduction theory, namely ethnomethodology, may be seen instructively in the wake of the Durkheimian tradition. Garfinkel (1967), the Californian pioneer of ethnomethodology – though notably influenced by Schutzian phenomenology, in terms of the socially constructed yet typical character of reality, Parsonian systems theory, through the unquestionable centrality of the problem of order, albeit reconstituted as an internal rather than an external issue, and Wittgenstein’s linguistic philosophy in relation to language-games and rules-in-use – is also very much in debt to Durkheim. Durkheim’s realization of a ‘collective consciousness’ is instructive of Garfinkel’s sense of the taken-for-grantedness of social members’ everyday knowledge. This is apparent throughout his work but, perhaps, most explicit in Garfinkel’s early paper, ‘Conditions for Successful Degradation Ceremonies’ (1956). Ethnomethodology relies upon a strong sense of a collective but inarticulate consensus in its explanations of human conduct which it describes ironically, in the context of its contest with positivist rhetoric, as the ‘normal’. This ‘normal’ implies not the normative against which we can judge the deviant or pathological but rather the routine, the taken-forgranted, that which we all must know in order to assume the status of a member in everyday culture. Cultural reproduction, for ethnomethodologists, is almost a necessary process, indeed it is a purpose. The artful practices of members that ethnomethodology reveals and celebrates for


us in the intricate ethnographic detail or, most usually, conversational exchange, is dedicated, though not determined, to make sense of its context by reflexively reproducing the conditions of its own occurrence. Thus reproduction for members is both intentional and integrative. It is a constant reaffirmation of collective life. A major departure by ethnomethodology, in relation to the sociological tradition, is the dissolution of the role of theorist as expert. It asserts that the sociologist, in accounting for the character of social life, is exercising the same skills and practices as the lay member, it is simply that the sociologist is reflexive back upon these practices. Whatever the status of this utopian democratic claim on behalf of this body of work, it reiterates the necessary role of both theorist and lay member as agents in the reproduction of a continuous and shared symbolic network that we can call culture. CULTURAL REPRODUCTION: THE STRUCTURALIST PERSPECTIVE Structuralism provides our final, but compelling, input to cultural reproduction theory. This is no uniformity of approach but an internally divisive spectrum of attitudes towards human affairs that shares certain common themes. Structuralism contains and combines many elements of the previously mentioned approaches but reworks the classical epistemological dichotomy between essence and appearance in terms of the continuum between depth and surface. It was Lévi-Strauss (1964) who was primarily instrumental in exercising this geological metaphor. He likens the formation of cultural phenomena to the layering, expanding, contracting and intruding of rock strata; each configuration of topography appearing unique but sharing certain underlying elements with similar geological phenomena. The understanding of such phenomena is to be conducted through the excavation of these strata and a subsequent exposure of their patterns of interrelation. The structure derives from the pattern. Elements of a culture, as we experience them, are the surface appearances or manifestations of underlying patterns at a deeper level, both within time, the ‘synchronic’, and through time, the ‘diachronic’. Ferdinand de Saussure (1960), the Swiss linguist, originally provided, through his science of signs, what now stands as perhaps the most significant and binding element of all structuralisms; it is that the underlying patterns or structure of any cultural phenomenon are to be

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126 cultural reproduction understood in terms of a linguistic metaphor. We may come to know the structures that comprise a culture as if they were a language. The lexical terms or items of vocabulary within such a language are provided for by the symbols that exist within social life, that is, the representations that attach to or arise from the tangible state of things or materiality itself; for example, kinship roles such as mother, son, cousin, grandfather and so on. The grammatical rules of this metaphoric language are provided for by the act, the continuous and habitual act, of signification; which would be the permissible relationships between kin, and the taboos that attach to their transgression. So the variety of ways that we make sense in different cultures variously articulates and therefore gives rise to the different ‘languages’ that our cultural symbols comprise. The complexity of this system of meaning is compounded by the essentially arbitrary relation between any particular object or state of affairs and the symbolic (linguistic) device that is employed to signify its being. Thing-like-ness, then, as objective and recognizable within any culture, derives not from any correspondence between name and named but from a delicately poised structuring of otherness in our contained network of ideas. Things are not so much what they are but emerge from a knowledge of what they are not, in fact from a system of oppositions, the principle at the core of any binary code. Now the fragility of this structuring of otherness remains unthreatened, indeed it appears as robust through the very practice of sociality, through the persistence and reproduction of that tenuous relation at each and every turn within a culture. Meaning then, within a particular culture, emerges from convention overcoming the arbitrary relation between the signifier and the signified. Convention reproduces culture and culture is contingent upon reproduction within structuralism. Culture is a conventional, yet deep structural practice, the rules of which may be only part of the unconscious of its members. Cultural symbols and representations are the surface structure. BOURDIEU AND CULTURAL REPRODUCTION We can return now to the work of Bourdieu, the founder of our concept ‘cultural reproduction’, and we find elements of each of the major traditions considered above emergent in his writing and integrated seemingly without conflict or ambiguity. It is apparent that Bourdieu is committed to the development of a


critical yet appreciative theory of culture and as such his ideas provide an important contribution to our understanding of both power and authority within our society. He began from an analysis of the education system and the part that its institutions play in the constitution and transmission of what counts as legitimate knowledge and forms of communication: the cultural field is transformed by successive restructurations rather than by radical revolutions, with certain themes being brought to the fore while others are set to one side without being completely eliminated, so that continuity of communication between intellectual generations remains possible. In all cases, however, the patterns informing the thought of a given period can be fully understood only by reference to the school system, which is alone capable of establishing them and developing them, through practice, as the habits of thought common to a whole generation. (Bourdieu in Young 1971: 192)

In this sense Bourdieu is forging a positive link between the symbolic order and the state of the social structure. He is demonstrating how forms and patterns of communication both reflect and perpetuate particular communities. In this way his work has much in common with Bernstein’s theory of socio-linguistic codes and both serve to blur the distinction between cultural reproduction and social reproduction. Bourdieu here reveals elements of a Durkheimian epistemology through his interest in the sustaining character of cultural representations; through the production and maintenance of a social consensus, a concept parallel in importance to the idea of a ‘collective consciousness’; and through the assumption of the social origins and persistence of knowledge classifications. He is, however, critical of what he sees as Durkheim’s positivism in that it depends upon stasis, and also that Durkheim considers the functions of the education system to be anticipated (see Kennett 1973). Addressing the context of education, Bourdieu conceptualizes all pedagogic practice as, at one level, a style of inculcation that perpetuates a more general social tendency towards repression – what he refers to as a symbolic violence. Repression, within Bourdieu’s thesis, becomes a ‘natural’ mode of human adaptation towards a culture that is pervasively oppressive. All forms of socialization and enculturation are seen to contribute to this alienating adaptation. Here we see his obvious continuity

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128 cultural reproduction with the tradition of Marxism, its concerns with the corruption of social structures through history and their visual refinement through ideology. Bourdieu bears witness to a society based on constraint, not a just or equitable constraint, but one organized in terms of the unequal distribution of power in relation to the economic order. He looks towards the sets of interests that ground particular social groupings and the selections of what constitute the culturally located sense of reality for their members. He is critical of the structures and institutions that engender, embody and project images of ‘what is the case’ and he wishes to look beyond and reveal the true conditions hidden by these mechanisms of distortion. The essential structuralism in Bourdieu’s work is apparent throughout. He regards society as a surface structure of illusions from which, it is intended, his analysis will reveal the actual set of relations existing at the deep structural level. The transition between the levels will uncover homologies between previously disparate elements of the cultural system but simultaneously the individual actor will recede as a source of agency and intentionality in the construction of history. Bourdieu has provided a major contribution to contemporary studies through his development of a series of forceful metaphors to articulate the subtle relation of power and domination in the social world and through the stratification of culture. Most notable is that which he draws from political economy when he speaks of ‘cultural capital’: ‘there is, diffused within a social space a cultural capital, transmitted by inheritance and invested in order to be cultivated’ (Bourdieu in Young 1971: 201). Differential, and stratified, socialization practices, in combination with the system of education, function to discriminate positively in favour of those members of society who by virtue of their location within the class system are the ‘natural’ inheritors of cultural capital. This is no crude conspiracy theory of a conscious manipulation. Rather, what is being explored here is the possibility of a cultural process that is self-sustaining and self-perpetuating. This process is regarded as carrying with it a context of anticipation and tolerance of stratification and privilege. In this way Bourdieu moves from the ideological function of culture into an awareness of the peculiar efficacy of culture in that it is seen as structuring the system of social relations by its functioning. Apprehended in the context of Bourdieu’s analysis, the education system thus comes to be treated as the means by which social privilege is allocated and confirmed and it is the myth of pedagogic practice as being value-free that enables this process to


complete. This myth is all-engrossing in its opacity, that is, it envelops all groups within society and thus produces complementary versions of the ‘natural’ order. Neither dominant nor oppressed groups suspect this latent function of the educational system and consequently perfect integrity is maintained at the level of each individual consciousness. ‘School serves to transform the collective heritage into the common individual unconscious’ (Bourdieu in Young 1971: 200). Following from this, as Bourdieu makes clear, even within a democratic society this manifestation of a disguised machinery continues to re-establish the inequalities of a social order which is pre-democratic in character and anti-democratic in essence. Included within Bourdieu’s definition of culture are all semiotic systems, ranging from language as a communicative network, through science to art and literature – all instances of a symbolic universe. He argues that all societal members actively involved in the creation and expressive reconstruction of such systems do so against the assumed backdrop of freedom and neutrality. This he points to as a grand illusion that is disguising the true political function of culture. As all members assume and become aware of reality through and within culture, they inevitably and unknowingly have the structure of existing power relations thrust upon them. This is a clear instance of what Bourdieu refers to as symbolic violence. The particular status groups who confer cultural legitimacy, like teachers and critics, conduct their professional roles and distribute merit with reference to a supposedly absolute index of intrinsic worth. This index and its acceptance disguise the actual political situation, which is that cultural judgements and ranking are grounded in the protection of particular interests – indices of worth speak not of an absolute but of power and domination. The area of creative and artistic freedom is accounted for by Bourdieu through linking its emergence with the historical development and automization of the system of production and consumption of cultural goods. This historical process generates what Bourdieu refers to as an intellectual field. Young (1971) clearly summarizes this concept as follows: He (Bourdieu) conceives of the ‘intellectual field’ as the mediating set of agencies in which various groups of producers compete for cultural legitimacy. In elaborating on the idea of ‘intellectual field’ Bourdieu suggests the social and economic context for three aspects of the literary and art ‘worlds’ that are normally taken for granted. l) The belief in ‘art

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130 cultural reproduction for art’s sake’. 2) The assumption of the public’s incompetence and the consequent refusal of artists to respond to public demands. 3) The growth of a group of critics who interpret artistic work for the public and give it legitimacy. Bourdieu refers to the ‘creative project’ as the activity in which the demands of the ‘intellectual field’ and the external context of the social and economic order of the time are joined in the work of art itself. Thus he suggests works of art and literature are formed in the context of public categories of definitions like ‘nouvelle vague’ and ‘new novel’ in terms of which the artist is defined and defines himself. (Young 1971: 10–11)

One more important concept in Bourdieu’s work is that of the habitus. This idea provides a link between the structuring of social relationships and the culture of a society. The habitus constitutes ‘the principle that regulates the act’, it is typified as ‘the system of modes of perception, of thinking, of appreciation and of action’. The habitus is a concept that seems to take meaning at a number of different levels: it is in one sense the metaphor for membership of a community grounded in intellectual or aesthetic considerations yet it is also available as a key to integration into a Durkheimian creed of solidarity, a key that is acquired in early socialization. So, for example, if we treat language as a habitus, it can be seen that certain ways of speech provide for membership of particular communities. These forms of speech, which instance membership, are far more than mere media for communication; they speak more than they can say. Such forms of speech are totemic, they are emblems, they symbolize the particular group, they carry with them the group’s particular interests and orientations, and they display the group’s thought style. At its most concrete, and yet still remarkably subtle, a sense of habitus may be rendered as ‘style’. This is an idea foreign to most British social analysts (even after Hebdige (1979)), yet one absolutely central to the deep and painful recognition of class variations through accents, knots in ties, ways of holding cutlery, recognizing appropriate wine glasses and so on. Certain habituses, not unlike Bernstein’s (1971–3) restricted code, stand in disjunction with the habitus of the dominant group; the latter being the vehicle for a self-structuring sense of ‘good taste’, ‘appropriate style’, ‘expressiveness’, etc., all of which are deemed meretricious within the institutions of the intellectual field. The possessors of the dominant-group


habitus are the inheritors of cultural capital, their forms of reality and cognition are always appropriate (‘you can always tell a gentleman’). So different habituses constitute different forms of programming or equipping the individual in such a way that he naturally gravitates towards his eventual, and proper, location in the social hierarchy (‘class will out’). It may be assumed that every individual owes to the type of schooling he has received a set of basic, deeply interiorised master-patterns on the basis of which he subsequently acquires other patterns, so that the system of patterns by which his thought is organised owes its specific character not only to the nature of the patterns constituting it but also to the frequency with which these are used and to the level of consciousness at which they operate, these properties being probably connected with the circumstances in which the most fundamental intellectual patterns were acquired. (Bourdieu in Young 1971: 205)

The primary function of education and different socialization variants is to transmit cultural capital in the form of particular valued signs and the styles of their presentation. Other habituses are consequently relegated to the status of stigma. Commonsense representations come to realize different social locatedness through differential talent, or even ‘blood’. School failure and indeed social stratification is rendered ‘naturally’ intelligible and the political differentiating function of the education system and family structure is obscured through the fog of public consensus. To put it simply, if educational institutions are judging, assessing and processing people according to their habitus, whether consciously or unconsciously, then they are testing people on things that they have not taught them. The curriculum is not a level playing field; differentiation is not matched to performance but is predisposed by class location. Bourdieu’s other major concept of the cultural unconscious resonates strongly with the notion of habitus and also the Durkheimian ‘collective consciousness’. It is intangible and made real through external referents. It refers to the tacit, assumed and unspoken grounds which precondition any cultural production. Within Bourdieu’s model the cultural unconscious has an elective affinity with the dominant social interests of the epoch:

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132 cultural reproduction the disposition to make use of the School and the predisposition to succeed in it depend, as we have seen, on the objective chances of using it and succeeding in it that are attached to the different social classes, these dispositions and predispositions in turn constituting one of the most important factors in the perpetuation of the structure of educational chances as an objectively graspable manifestation of the relationship between the educational system and the system of class relations. Even the negative dispositions and predispositions leading to self-elimination, such as, for example, self-depreciation, devalorization of the School and its sanctions or resigned expectation of failure or exclusion may be understood as unconscious anticipation of the sanctions that the School objectively has in store for the dominated classes. (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977: 204–5)

7 SUBCULTURE The dividing line between ‘a culture’ and ‘subculture’ or ‘cultural variant’ has not yet been firmly staked out. (Kluckhohn and Kelley 1962: 67)

It has been argued that culture, as an idea, has become both hijacked and adapted by the particular political agenda of cultural studies into a device for displacing the ‘social’ as a source of explanation (O’Neill 1995). What might this mean? Well, in part we dealt with this issue in Chapter 2; however, there is more to say. To a considerable extent cultural studies has shied away from large, or totalizing, explanatory devices like ‘society’ and found explanation in increasingly micro and identity-directed concepts, like ‘subculture’. This erosion of the social also figures as an acceptable part of contemporary rightist and centrist political ideologies vaunting self-help, free will and the powers and responsibilities of the individual. So, for example, following the fifteen years of Thatcher’s anti-‘social’ rhetoric in the UK the alternative ‘new labour’ movement elects for a ‘third way’, combining both public and private sectors, but also produces health and education as private rather than public goods. And although emanating from a different place, within the academy, postmodernism’s critical imperative recommending the end of grand narratives is an invitation to dispense with

134 subculture the power/knowledge, truth and authority on which the society, and in many senses the social bond, of yesterday was established. Furthermore, the multiple meanings from which the concept of culture begins have both encouraged and enabled cultural studies to justify, legitimate, celebrate and politicize all aspects of popular culture, whether aesthetic, transgressive, transitory or even downright silly. At an extreme, cultural studies in its most liberal and populist iterations rejects ultimate values and, in most senses, dispenses with theory in favour of stylistics and with method in favour of insight. However, times change, new voices are waiting to be heard and we social scientists must at least contextualize if not move with the Zeitgeist. It is important to resist the potential backlash towards essentialism. However, an acceptance of certain rapidly changing structural conditions does not lead necessarily to an abandonment of modernity’s project, any more than it demands a slavish obeisance to its ageing aspirations. A new politic needs to emerge and to speak with sufficient authority to quell the indistinguishable polysemy of the popular surface. Treated as a mere dwelling place for all manifestations of difference in social life, the idea of subculture becomes no more than an opinion – everyone has one and, as the cliché runs, they are entitled to it! Clearly then, the mediating concept selected to organize these sets of concerns is that of subculture, and although the concept has a long and unconsolidated past within the social sciences it became, for some time, a significant leitmotif within the discourse of cultural studies, most noticeably from within the variant which emerged from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. Many of these issues coalesce around Dick Hebdige’s milestone text Subculture: The Meaning of Style, first published in 1979. Hebdige’s excellent work, though in many ways historically specific, has evolved, ironically, into an orthodoxy. His ethnographic case studies of punks, mods, teds and rastas are clearly reminiscent of an earlier era and his conceptualization of the central analytic issues in terms of Gramsci via Althusser (with interventions from situationism and Barthes’s semiotics) have also been outstripped by more contemporary developments in social, cultural and political theory. As tends to be the way with orthodoxies, they assume a canonical status, so much so that contemporary students sometimes assume that Hebdige discovered subcultures, both practically and in classificatory terms! It is important, however, for us to see the place of subculture as a concept in the devel-

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opment of social and cultural theory, to point to the reasoning behind its selection as an analytical and descriptive vehicle, in a variety of locations, and to reveal its ambivalent and perhaps unintentional contribution to the deconstruction of the concept ‘society’. At its most straightforward we might suggest that following in the wake of Richard Hoggart’s neo-Leavisite representation of working-class England’s folkways and mores in The Uses of Literacy, the scholars focused around the Birmingham CCCS group mobilized the idea of subculture to articulate the unspoken, or perhaps unheard, voices of a populist proletariat within a critical vision and still with an eye to radical social change. The arrival of Stuart Hall provided the drive and the impetus of that group and his particular version of Marxism provided the theoretical framework. The whole Birmingham CCCS tradition (now abruptly concluded), however, seemed largely content to restrict the idea of subculture to the pastime and possession of youth and, for some of its indigenous critics, mostly male youth (McRobbie 1981) and perhaps even white male youth (Gilroy 1987). In such a context the previously powerful device presented in the form of the concept ‘subculture’ begins to degrade. As such it becomes interpretable as little more than the noise of white, male adolescence, irksome at times but reparable through maturation. This hardly seems to provide a forceful platform for the reconstitution of a modern society nor an important ground, other than in partial and developmental terms, for the critical address of stratification. How then did this particular matrix of neo-Marxist theorizing relate to the emergent study of subcultures, so central to the activities and reputation of the CCCS? In a now classic positioning paper first published in 1976 (but cited here through the 1981 edition) four of the leading figures, John Clarke, Stuart Hall, Tony Jefferson and Brian Roberts, made the link that would prove paradigmatic. They adhere to the view that culture constitutes the way of life of a people and further that cultures comprise ‘maps of meaning’ that are both cognitive structures but also tangible structurings of social relations that cohere. Within any one society there are levels at which culture is shared and intelligible to all members but culture is also stratified in line with the differentiations marked out primarily by social class position. Therefore cultural experience and the organization of social relationships is various but also proscribed by access to power in society. The power-based differentiation is critical. The

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136 subculture general, shared, common culture (all ideological terms) can be realized as the ‘dominant culture’ and its transmission is handled by various state apparatuses which serve to reproduce its dominance. It is dominant, then, in as much as it is hegemonic, as we have previously discussed. Now subcultures may be modifications, differences, oppositions or resistances but they all exist in a relation to the dominant culture. Thus: In modern societies, the most fundamental groups are the social classes, and the major cultural configurations will be, in a fundamental though often mediated way, ‘class culture’. Relative to these culturalclass configurations, sub-cultures are sub-sets – smaller, more localised and differentiated structures, within one or other of the larger cultural networks. We must, first, see sub-cultures in terms of their relation to the wider class-cultural networks of which they form a distinctive part. When we examine this relationship between a sub-culture and the ‘culture’ of which it is a part, we call the latter a ‘parent’ culture. . . . Subcultures, then, must first be related to the ‘parent cultures’ of which they are a sub-set. But, sub-cultures must also be analysed in terms of their relation to the dominant culture – the overall disposition of cultural power in the society as a whole. Thus we may distinguish respectable, ‘rough’, delinquent and the criminal sub-cultures within working-class culture: but we may also say that, though they differ amongst themselves, they all derive in the first instance from a ‘working-class parent culture’: hence, they are all subordinate sub-cultures, in relation to the dominant middle-class or bourgeois culture. (Clarke et al. 1981: 55–6)

So the relation of the subculture to other forms is critical because it directs us to the issue of power, its appropriation, exercise and reproduction. As Hebdige has said: The term hegemony refers to a situation in which a provisional alliance of certain social groups can exert ‘total social authority’ over other subordinate groups, not simply by coercion or by the direct imposition of ruling ideas, but by ‘winning and shaping consent so that the power of the dominant classes appears both legitimate and natural’. Hegemony can only be maintained so long as the dominant classes ‘succeed in framing all competing definitions within their range’, so that subordinate

subculture groups are, if not controlled; then at least contained within an ideological space which does not seem at all ‘ideological’: which appears instead to be permanent and ‘natural’, to lie outside history, to be beyond particular interests. (Hebdige 1979: 15–16)

Clarke et al. continue to argue that subcultures coalesce in relation to content, that is their structure and form are determined by the primary and distinctive practices of a group. The degree of distinctiveness ensures the degree of insulation and boundary maintenance from the parent culture. In turn the degree of distinctiveness provides for the possibility of opposition or resistance to the parent culture. This is a point made forcibly also within the canon of the CCCS through the title (and slogan) Resistance Through Rituals (see Hall and Jefferson et al. 1976). Subcultures are then subordinate, in that they are oppositional, and they are political, in that they are oppositional. They are also both conscious and unconscious in relation to their access to and exercise of power. As such they may be unaware of their potential challenge to the going order but also and equally unaware of their part in supporting and reproducing the going order by upholding the dominant normative structure precisely through that resistance. This sounds like Parsons in reverse. The CCCS scholars further refine their chosen object of concern by showing a preference for tightly delineated subcultures with strong identities and instance the major post-war generational issue of non-compliant youth as demonstrating an archetypical self-replicating mechanism for the formation of subcultures. Thus ‘youth subcultures’ are born, conceptually, as an important (though entirely self-selected) modern phenomenon. So the cult of the white male adolescent as a focus for a considerable body of work became established and with a political justification. To locate youth sub-culture in this kind of analysis, we must first situate youth in the dialectic between ‘hegemonic’ dominant culture and the subordinate working-class culture, of which youth is a fraction. These terms – hegemonic/corporate, dominant/subordinate – are crucial for the analysis, but need further elaboration before the sub-cultural dimension can be introduced. Gramsci used the term ‘hegemony’ to refer to the moment when a ruling class is able, not only to coerce a subordinate class to conform to its interests, but to exert a ‘hegemony’

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138 subculture or ‘total social authority’ over subordinate classes. This involves the exercise of a special kind of power – the power to frame alternatives and contain opportunities, to win and shape consent, so that the granting of legitimacy to the dominant classes appears not only ‘spontaneous’ but natural and normal. . . . The terrain on which this hegemony is won or lost is the terrain of superstructures; the institutions of civil society and the state – what Althusser and Poulantzas, somewhat misleadingly, call ‘ideological state apparatuses’. (Clarke et al. 1981: 59)

The optimism inherent in this tradition of theorizing and research is rife. The subcultures to which they attend, the ‘working-class’ subcultures, are viewed as islands within the political economy. They are sites or spaces wrested from the constraints of capitalism and the dominant order. Even though conceptual, these spaces are spoken of through mostly geographical metaphors such as ‘turf’, ‘territory’, ‘terrain’ and ‘space’ and the boundaries, which enable entry or exclusion, are marked out by language and style. As Hebdige puts it, ‘The meaning of subculture is, then, always in dispute, and style is the area in which the opposing definitions clash with most dramatic force’ (Hebdige 1979: 3). A strong sense emerges that the subcultures of the working class are not ideological, rather they are both victories and they are oppositional. This is a forceful claim. The style of working-class youth subcultures signifies a politics which is reflexive and counter-hegemonic. The clothes, the language, the self-presentation and manner cannot be viewed in conventional terms; indeed, Hebdige critiques the commentators who find a compelling aesthetic in such style. These manifestations have to ‘mean and mean again’, they work outside the conventional view of the world, they resist assimilation. Instead of ‘revolting into style’ they ‘style into revolt’. This all implies strategy and intentionality and agency. But will this do? Does overconsumption signify protest? Does the biker’s leather jacket, the jeans, the kaftan, the tab collar, the dreadlocks evolving into Lacoste and Ralph Lauren logos really announce to the parent and parental culture ‘get out of the new road if you can’t lend a hand’? Is this the mechanism of the historical process and if ‘the times are a-changing’, then might not these supposed political assemblies (in the form of subcultures) simply divert an impotent political will from a recognition of the real contradictions at work? Even Hebdige is drawn to a pessimistic conclusion concerning both the penetration and

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veracity of the political agenda at work in Birmingham-style subcultural studies: we should be foolish to think that by tackling a subject so manifestly popular as youth style, we have resolved any of the contradictions which underlie contemporary cultural studies. . . . It is highly unlikely, for instance, that the members of any of the subcultures described in this book would recognize themselves reflected here. They are still less likely to welcome any efforts on our part to understand them.

And terminates with: The study of subcultural style which seemed at the outset to draw us back towards the real world, to reunite us with ‘the people’, ends by merely confirming the distance between the reader and the ‘text’, between everyday life and the ‘mythologist’ whom it surrounds, fascinates and finally excludes . . . it would seem that we are still, like Barthes ‘condemned for some time yet to speak excessively about reality. (Hebdige 1979: 139–40)

Perhaps the key to self-conscious realization of resistance through style lay in what Hebdige, and others, designated bricolage. This concept, borrowed from Lévi-Strauss via Clifford Geertz, designates the practices of a primitive cosmologist (qua mythologist) in placing an order upon the chaos of reality without the assumption of scientific or even dominant classificatory categories. This combination of ‘primitiveness’, which we could take to imply fundamental or inherent artfulness, and the ability to think outside the box is the sign of youthful praxis. This is the source of their active, conscious minority resistance as opposed to the simple, and market-driven anticipation that they would passively consume fashion. Well, this may be about an awakening and a waning of political consciousness but it may also be about shifting patterns of consumption, linked to shifting patterns of the overall standard of living. Muggleton, writing two decades on, and with an eye to revealing subcultural formations and significance among ‘postmodern’ youth, speculates about the very concepts derived from Marx and neo-Marxisms by the Birmingham group being themselves potentially elements of an enlightenment modernity. In this sense such concepts do not readily apply to the ironies

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140 subculture and paradoxes of the postmodern condition and the subsequent re-styling of style. So does the postmodern trend towards stylistic eclecticism, ironic overloading and the destruction of historical referents finally result in the ‘death of the social’, a total loss of meaning? Perhaps, like their attitude towards God, Baudrillard’s masses retain only the image of fashion, ‘never the idea’. Similarly Jameson’s ‘breakdown in the signifying chain’, which leads to a destruction of narrative utterance and its replacement by the intensification of aesthetic ‘affect’, can be interpreted as having identical consequences for fashion. In both cases, meaning gives way to spectacle. Style is now worn for its look, not for any underlying message; or rather, the look is now the message. (Muggleton 1998: 176)

In many ways the whole rich, and seductively readable, canon of the Birmingham group’s work can be seen as a series of exercises in narrowing or focus. All of this work, both analytical and empirical, was carried out with considerable zeal and with a buttress of justification that, on occasion, seems to rationalize the manifest pleasure that the authors derived from their chosen subject matter. Whereas both Parsons and the Chicago School, in their very different ways, had employed the concept of subculture to investigate non-normative, non-mainstream, deviant, marginalized, minority, class, racial, criminal, unemployed, ‘underdog’ groups within their social milieu, for the Birmingham people ‘youth’, and mostly white, male, working-class youth, set the parameters. The reasoning behind such exclusivity ran as follows: post-war English society was experiencing a condition of rapid and destabilizing change and this change was impacting significantly on the class structure and on the systems that maintain power and control. The perceived most sensitive index of this instability was working-class youth and its relation to what Clarke et al. (1981) described as its parent culture. If future analyses sought to link image and reality, that is ideological form and actual form, through the highly visual, ‘spectacular’ (in the sense of Debord’s ‘society as spectacle’), then a newer and more historically appropriate understanding of the contemporary exercise of power would emerge. The utter visuality of these youth groups was taken to be highly significant; they had emerged as both perceptual phenomena each with their own ‘look’ or ‘style’, and they had emerged

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as political phenomena in that they now impacted on the order of the day. Both Hall and Hebdige have referred to youth subcultures as ‘noise’ (a concept which communications theorists employ to mean anything that gets in the way of ordered communication). This apparently new and embodied noise was to be seen as it stood in relation to working-class culture (its ‘parent’ culture), the dominant culture (the normative structure wherein power legitimates stratification) and the mass culture (the context of popular culture, mass-produced, market-driven, ideologically juxtaposed to high culture). Post-war youth demonstrated many non-solidaristic elements with the class culture of its parents and, indeed, the post-war aspirations of its parents were often complicit in this desire for change and an unwillingness to accept the status quo. So youth became a vehicle for anti-establishment currents; or so it was seen. Youth may simply have been and always will be a diversion. The consciousness, and self-consciousness, of youth was adopted by both cultural analysts (and the mass media) as a vector of instability in relation to systems of stratification but also the social structure as a whole. Any shift in patterns of consumption, life-style, leisure and self-presentation by youth might signal a collapse of the old order. So an attention to a particular form of dress was not a sign of uniformity and containment but rather a sign of positive engagement with the going order. This must have been music to the ears of the entrepreneurs who were running Carnaby Street and the Kings Road and valuable news for the moguls running the recording companies of the era. This ‘youth’ was no rebel without a cause, there was no nausea or alienation, perhaps it took the failure of Revolution 1968 or the deaths on Kent Campus, Ohio to instil these sentiments. Or perhaps this ‘youth’ was, as previously suggested, the optimistic articulation of a different, higher level and somewhat removed political agenda of one wing of the intelligentsia. But the concept of subculture did not begin either with Hebdige or the Birmingham group. Subculture is a concept with a long, but largely forgotten, history. There are trace elements of the concept ‘subculture’ even to within the classic sociological tradition. We need only attend to the devices employed by the founding fathers to reconcile the desired stability of the post-revolutionary European society with the inevitable recognition of accelerative and compound social change wrought through modernity’s relentless progress. So, for example, Durkheim’s vision of the multiple mechanicisms of work groups and guilds functioning as a microcosms for the overall interdependence of organic solidarity.

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142 subculture At a different stage in the development of our discipline the Chicago School in the USA had made strenuous efforts to elevate the lifeworld of the ‘underdog’ into an intelligible, and manageable, form through urban studies, biographical methods, social reaction theory, labelling theory, typification vignettes and essentially through the assembling device of the subculture. At its most modest, the Chicago School (or what we might describe more accurately as the neo-Chicago School following George Herbert Mead and Everett C. Hughes) can be seen to employ the concept of subculture to highlight the symbolic normative structure of groups smaller than society as a whole. This is a micro-sociology, or perhaps a microcosmic sociology, that gives voice to and directs our attention to the ways in which such groups differ in such elements as their language, belief systems, values, mannerisms, patterns of behaviour and life-style from the mainstream, larger society of which they are also a part. The formative insights of Chicago’s long and influential tradition of sociology are also addressed in Chapters 9 and 11. From a wholly different political position Talcott Parsons claimed the concept of subculture and incorporated it in a masterly fashion within the cybernetics and autopoesis of the social system such that all deviant and non-normatively oriented conduct could be absorbed within the scheme of central values. This was no simple diversion, it was this arresting appropriation of the concept subculture that informed much of the positivist criminology and social pathology emanating from the USA and setting the ground rules for this sub-discipline up to the late 1950s. What we have here is a much more conflictual model. The subculture is not a part within a part within a whole. In the Parsonian universe central values stay central and the concept of a subculture designates a group, an enclave, a cult or a distraction of antithetical values that are expressions of either frustrations with or interventions into the dominant structure of legitimation and control within society. These are usually realized in terms of the pathological relationship between social structure and personality and are largely viewed in a remedial manner. The very idea of a subculture re-emerged in the British sociology of education (Hargreaves 1967; Lacey 1970) in the late 1960s. Here it was mobilized as a way of accounting for working-class underachievement, this model being an unhappy amalgam of Chicago and Boston (in the form of Parsons) seen above. Definitions and versions proliferate and origins are obscure. It has been argued by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) that the

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term ‘subculture’, though not the concept (a fine distinction), was not widely employed in the social science literature until after the Second World War. Lee (1945) is cited as making the first use of the term closely followed by Gordon (1947), who is quoted defining subculture as: a subdivision of a national culture, composed of a combination of factorable social situations such as class status, ethnic background, regional and rural or urban residence, and religious affiliation, but forming in their combination a functional unity which has an integrated impact on the participating individual. (Gordon 1947: 40)

Another definition from around the same time states that: The term ‘subculture’ refers . . . to ‘cultural variants displayed by certain segments of the population’. Subcultures are distinguished not by one or two isolated traits – they constitute relatively cohesive social systems. They are worlds within the larger world of our national culture. (Komarovsky and Sargent 1949: 143)

And so we evolve through: A society contains numerous subgroups, each with its own characteristic ways of thinking and acting. These cultures within cultures are called subcultures. (Mercer 1958: 34)

to: Such shared learned behaviors which are common to a specific group or category are called subcultures. (Young and Mack 1959: 49)

These preceding examples are not isolated, the history of the concept comprises a vivid mosaic but each segment demonstrates a political move, and each exemplar reveals a step outside the kernel sense of the social, for supportive or critical reasons, and the beginning of a gradient that leads through fragmentation towards agency. Of necessity then, the concepts of

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144 subculture identity, difference and selfhood will be addressed, and from within a poststructuralist paradigm the politics of knowledge are now reviewed in terms of identity politics, affinity politics, standpoint epistemologies and the narratives of post-colonialism. Each of these moments is itself held in a tension with tenuous clusterings of the social, or rather the subcultural, and we look to the heroic potentialities for liberation within the groupings of, for example, women, ‘queer’ folk, black consciousness, childhood or even cyborgs. The excavation of the tradition is not meant simply as an interesting but arcane history of an idea but rather as an argument for the necessity of a theory or mode of concept formation that enables what has come to be known as the middle range. That is, I will present a sociological argument for the place of an order of construct, like subculture, which retains the causal necessity of the social but overcomes the mysterious leap between, for example, Durkheim’s structural constraints (the outside) and an individual act of self-destruction (the inside). Such argument both retains the necessity of the social and relocates the subcultural. As early as 1960 Yinger wrote in the USA: In recent years there has been widespread and fruitful employment of the concept of subculture in sociological and anthropological research. The term has been used to focus attention not only on the wide diversity of norms to be found in many societies but on the normative aspects of deviant behaviour. The ease with which the term has been adopted, with little study of its exact meanings or its values and its difficulties, is indicative of its utility in emphasizing a sociological point of view in research that has been strongly influenced both by individualistic and moralistic interpretations. To describe the normative qualities of an occupation, to contrast the value systems of social classes, or to emphasise the controlling power of the code of a delinquent gang is to underline a sociological aspect of those phenomena that is often disregarded. (Yinger 1960: 625)

These remarks are in a large part supportive of the endeavour of a number of subcultural theorists to honour the norms, life ways and values of members of some groups which at a systems level might be disregarded as dysfunctional, irrational, sick or deviant. However, addressing more metatheoretical considerations he continues:

subculture It is unfortunate that ‘subculture,’ a central concept in this process, has seldom been adequately defined. It has been used as an ad hoc concept whenever a writer wished to emphasize the normative aspects of behavior that differed from some general standard. The result has been a blurring of the meaning of the term, confusion with other terms, and a failure frequently to distinguish between two levels of social causation. (Yinger 1960: 625–6)

And I would concur with this point. We cannot simply elect to define a group of people whose proximity or range of activities has fallen under our analytic gaze as a subculture unless we express a clear epistemological purpose. Now if that purpose is to indicate the very difference of that group of people or the conscious antagonism of that group of people to what the body of people in their wider society think or believe then, as Yinger (1960) points out, we might properly employ the concept of a ‘contraculture’. Perhaps the purpose of subcultural work is to demonstrate inconsistencies between a particular group’s practices and those of the mainstream and to reveal further the systematic strategies that they employ to guarantee a reproduction of those inconsistencies. If this is so, then we may be implying that subcultures exercise agency, their difference is selfconsciously meaningful action, in which case might not they be potentially ‘asocial’? However far we push the definitional necessity of subcultures bearing a relationship to some sense of a wider normative structure (be that a soft or hard conceptualization), then we are still left with the problem of boundaries. Downes, interrogating the concept in relation to an explanation of delinquent activity expresses this well: no culture can be regarded as a completely integrated system. Most cultures, like personalities, can be regarded as permeated by apparent contradictions. The concept of the ‘subculture’ embodies one such contradiction. What constitutes the ‘culture’ of a complex society: all its subcultures, their uniformities only, or the dominant subculture? Where, to put it crudely, does culture end and subculture begin? Does subculture merely refract or totally displace culture? Any vagueness over the boundaries of the overall culture will automatically extend to subcultures. (Downes 1966: 4–5)

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146 subculture Downes (1966) continues to address the elusive nature of this boundary yet is drawn to proceed in his criminological analysis on the basis of his own typology which, though clear, continues to evade the question that he himself has raised. He says that subcultures may be classified into two main kinds, one of which contains two sub-categories: (a) those which precede, or are formed outside the context of the ‘dominant culture’: for example, the ‘culture’ of immigrant groups which become ‘subcultures’ in the context of the host culture; also, regional subcultures which precede, but come to co-exist, merge with or differentially respond to the enveloping ‘dominant culture’. (b) those which originate within the context of the dominant culture: these fall into two sub-categories: (i) those which emerge in positive response to the demands of the social and cultural structures; for example, occupational subcultures, age-group subcultures, and (ii) those emerging in negative response to the social and cultural structures’ demands; e.g. delinquent subcultures; religiousmessianic-revivalist subcultures; political-extremist subcultures. (Downes 1966: 9)

One of the evasions here is concerning the internal coherence and ontological status of such subcultures; that is, are we to assume that the members of such groups know that they are indeed members of such groups and that such groups actually exist as reality structures? The other evasion concerns the epistemological status of such subcultures; that is, are they all, in a significant sense, actually theoretical devices used to formulate collective action for specific rhetorical, political or moral purposes? Although the motivation to describe and explain slices of life in the mould of subcultures may, in most non-Parsonian instances, be to insulate, to ideal-type, to retain a difference and an essence, to politicize and to render equivalent, it is also a dereliction of the sociologist’s commitment to explain the social in terms of the social (or at least engage with the problems that such an imperative entails). In one strong sense the invocation of the concept of subculture to explain a social phenomenon is an analytic sidestep or swerve by the theorist to avoid the crunching impact

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with the social structure and its claim for mono-causality. Now, the situation is clearly not an either/or but without the buttress of intervening theorizing about levels, constraint and social control, and to opt unreflexively for the use of subculture as a source of explanation begins a reduction. The path to individualistic reductionism started here leads to the ultimate abandonment of a sociological perspective by arguing that an event occurred ‘because this subculture is unique’, ‘because that’s the kind of guy he is’ or because one or more individuals are mad. Perhaps the story begins rather further back. Totalizing concepts like ‘society’ and ‘social systems’ have never had a practical currency within the explanatory frameworks of lay members of any particular social group. Perhaps we might argue that since the 1960s in the West ‘society’ has become part of a quasi-political rhetoric of mitigation for the unwanted or unintended consequences of human action. It designates a dull, deepseated, impersonal causality for which no one person has to claim unique responsibility. Even at times of severe external threat, like war, when Durkheim convincingly disserted that social solidarity would reach an unprecedented intensity, it is empirically unlikely that previously experienced forms of difference, stratification, inclusion and exclusion would become resolved through more than the expressive mode of a new and transitory sense of nationhood. Society, then, is essentially an analytical device both contrived and espoused by sociology in its earliest incarnations to establish the specific and distinct ontology that all scientific paradigms need to announce their difference from all previous types of understanding. Society is a structuralist trope routinely employed to designate and summarize all of the universal, ideal, essential and peculiarly human dispositions that ensure their tendency to opt for clustering rather than isolation. More than this, society is an inevitable growth out of moral philosophy that saves humankind from the sad and shallow reductions that are required through its explanation with reference to psychology’s ‘behaviour’, ‘market forces’ in economics, and ‘the state’ in politics. The actual empirical referent of ‘society’ is people’s perpetual, though variable, sense of the ‘social’ and ‘sociality’. The laudation and illumination of this fine and irrepressible human sentiment was sociology’s rightful purpose at its inception, not some cynical attempt at intellectual entrepreneurship or epistemological imperialism. And this is worthy of retention. Real, material people know about love, attraction, affection, care, altruism, obligation, contracting, expectation, togetherness, solidarity,

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148 subculture loyalty, belonging and so on without being able to, or indeed needing to, point at an object-form called society. Sociologists speak of society while lay members know about and act in relation to family, friendship, community, organization, institution and group membership. Clearly what is at work here is not a confusion or a competition between different reality structures, nor even the existence of a parallel world. In reality what we are witnessing is the practice of construction or transformation from one order, the ‘lived’, into another order, the ‘conceptual’. This transformation implies no hierarchy of validity, but certainly the latter seeks to understand more fully the former and to do so by extraction, clarification, and releasing the everyday world from the grip of commonsense (or what ethnomethodology would refer to as the taken-for-granted). In a strong sense then, the sociologist’s invocation of ‘society’ makes reference to the lay member’s cognitive and affective architecture which enables his or her bonding with others. It has been argued that the signifier ‘society’ implies a description of a nation-state or a population, but this is relatively worthless in attempting to discern meaning. Nation-states are historical, arbitrary, sometimes geographical and almost always internally divisive units symbolically united by language – sometimes. Population, on the other hand, is a strictly statistical category. Demographic trends are post hoc descriptions of stability or instability, they are not explanations of meaningful human action and motive. Society must remain an ideal conceptualization of a collective consciousness which exerts constraint upon individual action with the function of sustaining groups, formations and networks of interaction. This is the level that sociologists have continued to refer to as the ‘macro’ as opposed to the ‘micro’. Any shift towards the micro, as is instanced by the espousal of the term ‘subculture’, must take care not to liberate its object of study from the constraints of the totality. Subcultures cannot in any sense be meaningfully insulated from the society of which they are an inevitable part. Subcultural theories are obliged to express their coherence with the social theories from which they emerged. Thornton (1995), addressing a similar range of concerns, states the following: What is a ‘subculture? What distinguishes it from a ‘community’? And what differentiates these two social formations from the ‘masses’, the

subculture ‘public’, ‘society’, ‘culture’? These are obstinate questions to which there is no agreed answer, but rather a debate – the problem at the root of which is about how scholars imagine and make sense of people, not as individuals, but as members of discrete populations or social groups. Studies of subcultures are attempts to map the social world and, as such, they are exercises in representation. In attempting to depict the social world or translate it into sociology (or cultural studies or any of the other disciplines that are active in the field), we are unavoidably involved in a process of construction. (Thornton 1995: 1)

But she goes on to say: ‘Community’ is perhaps the label whose referent is closest to subculture, to the degree that several contributors use the term interchangeably. Nevertheless, there are subtle disparities between the two concepts, which affect when and why one or the other is applied in any case. (Thornton 1995: 2)

Thornton then reminds us that communities conventionally suggest a greater permanence than subcultures, that they tend to be geographically aligned to a specific locale, and that in general they comprise families and kinship groups. All of this is coherent with what we came to know as British community studies through, for example, the work of Young and Wilmott (1957), Wilmott (1963), Townsend (1957) and Jackson and Marsden (1962). However, there is a more analytic point to be made which is illuminated by Harris when he says: Community is an old and venerable sociological concept that developed in sociology’s ‘classic period’ and has only recently begun to be problematised. It is, moreover, one area of debate within which sociology can plausibly claim to be part of the ‘reflexivity of modernity’. Community is a concept with powerful resonances among non-sociologists, and lay and sociological uses inform each other. To call something a community is to link it into an intense signifying chain with positive connotations such as locality, solidarity, closeness and mutual support. (Harris 2001: 37)

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150 subculture What this opens up is a further, an important, distinction in the classifications that sociologists might employ, which is often confused or conflated in the application of the concept subculture. We can attempt to classify different forms of social group and we can attempt to classify different forms of social relationship. The former is about scale and proximity; the latter is about texture and integration. When we speak about classifying social groups we might make reference to Simmel’s (1902) highly sophisticated micro-sociology, his analyses of the dynamics within dyads and triads and his exposition of the interwoven links between the physical size of a group, the organization or structure of a group and the character of the relationships that exist within such groups. All this Simmel refers to as ‘the quantitative determination of certain divisions and of certain groups’. Much later Homans (1948) attempted a not wholly satisfactory taxonomy of human groups based not so much on how they diverge as on the ways in which they overlap. This was a micro-sociological attempt to elicit high-level generalizations concerning the nature of social interaction. Subsequently Gurvich (1971) set out an extremely abstract and complex matrix through which different types of social group may be determined. It is clear that every organised group is also structured. However, a group may not only be structurable, but also structured, without also being organised, nor even capable of being organised, not even capable of being expressed in a single organisation (such as social classes, which are a patent example of this). Further, when organisation enters into the equilibrium of a structure, it is no more than one element, and not even an indispensable one at that. (Gurvich 1971: 60)

He exercises fifteen criteria which include size, proximity, duration, function and so on. The scheme claims to be exhaustive. When we speak about classifying different forms of social relationship we enter into a far less cold, technical and empirical realm (though this would not be a fair way to describe Simmel’s work which is equally instructive about the texture of relationships). In this context we are aggregating and disaggregating different manners of relationship, social bond or solidarity. It is in this context that classical sociological theory has made some of its most telling and lasting pronouncements. Perhaps

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most noticeably Durkheim, in his thesis on the division of labour in society, provided us with two formative modes of collection and integration that he referred to as ‘mechanical’ and ‘organic’ solidarity. These were intangible entities, yet experienced as the social sentiments of societal members; sociologically these are powerful devices for establishing a link between the social bond and the symbolic order in terms of both chronology and complexity. Mechanical solidarity is a highly condensed symbolic experience and organic is much more diffuse; one may well evolve from the former, both absolutely fit the going order and both appropriately demonstrate the intense interrelation between action, affect and social structure. Even before Durkheim, Tönnies (1887) had developed his thesis which distinguished between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft, concepts which have come to be transposed as ideal-typical representations of ‘community’ and ‘association’ (or ‘society’). This twofold scheme can and has been applied to the distinction between groups as well as the distinction between societies but, as in the case of Durkheim, the idea was clearly inspired by the advent and march of modernity along an evolutionary yet unpredictable path. And earlier still, in 1876, the anthropologist Maine drew an enlightening separation between those societies whose relationships are ordered by ‘status’ and those that are ordered by ‘contract’. In Maine’s writing this primary distinction parallels a second, namely the distinction between ‘static’ and ‘progressive’ societies; the gradient from stasis to progress often being specified by the development of civil laws which shift the focus of control from the individual to the family. There are striking homologies between these various lines of theorizing. The idea of subculture, then, takes us to a range of places and opens up a spectrum of debate. Nearly a quarter of a century ago Mike Brake produced a fine inventory of the applications of the concept in relation to youth and popular culture which left him confident enough to direct us forward with this ‘new’ taxonomy: Subcultural theory has developed considerably since the mid-sixties. It can be divided into four approaches. First, there is the early social ecology of the working-class neighbourhood carried out in the late fifties and early sixties. Second, there is the relation of the delinquent subculture to the sociology of education, a tradition which is still continuing. This examines the relationship of leisure and youth culture as an alternative to achievement in the school. Third, there is the cultural emphasis of

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152 subculture the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University. This approach, which is influenced by the new criminology developed by the National Deviancy Conferences, used a Marxist framework to consider youth cultures and their style, in terms of their relationship to class, dominant culture and ideology. Involved in this is the attempt to examine the ethnography of youth culture, their relation to popular culture and their moments in class history. Lastly there are the contemporary neighbourhood studies which look at local youth groups, not as the early social ecologists did, but in the light of influence by contemporary deviancy theory and social reaction. Both of these approaches consider the meaning that youth cultures and subcultures have for their members. (Brake 1980: 50)

8 VISUAL CULTURE Among the revolutions in higher education in the last twenty-five years has been an explosion of interest in visual culture. The most obvious evidence of this development has been the emergence of studies in film, television, and mass culture alongside a new social/ political/communicational order that employs mass spectacle and technologies of visual and auditory simulation in radically new ways. But there have been less-public developments as well as the sphere of the professional study of culture. The revolution in that vast, and indeterminate field known as ‘literary theory,’ new philosophical accounts of representations and its relation to language, and new developments in art history have laid the groundwork for thinking of visual realities (including everyday habits of visual perception) as cultural constructions, therefore interpretable or readable, therefore of at least as much interest to students of culture as the traditional archives of verbal and textual production. (Mitchell in Lanvin 1995: 7)

What Mitchell has produced for us here in this brilliantly succinct extract is an account of the reclassification of certain empirical phenomena and certain theoretical approaches within the burgeoning paradigm of ‘visual culture’. Some might argue that it is more than this but it is certainly no

154 visual culture less. And Jay, who we shall hear more of later, would see this upsurge of interest as a mark of the ‘visual turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. At its least specific, but often most exciting, visual culture not so much names a series of objects or a clustering of approaches but designates a new conceptual territory where previously delineated disciplines can overlap, integrate and generate new forms. As a sociologist of culture my concern here will be to introduce you to some philosophical and sociological traditions that focus on and seek to explain both the social context of the visual but also, and perhaps more significantly, the social and cultural construction of vision itself. This, I trust, will provide the reader with more scope to address visual phenomena from a critical and informed position. It will certainly be more useful than providing a review of what X said about Hitchcock’s movies or what Y said about TV soaps. Thus we begin with Berger’s prioritizing of the visual: Seeing comes before words. The child looks and recognizes before it can speak. But there is also another sense in which seeing comes before words. It is seeing which establishes our place in the surrounding world; we explain that world within words, but words can never undo the fact that we are surrounded by it. The relation between what we see and what we know is never settled. (Berger 1972: 7))

Building on this it would appear that any attempt to establish a social or cultural theory of visuality seems beset by paradox. In Western society we have, over time, come to regard sight as providing our immediate access to the external world. But beyond this, and perhaps because of this belief, visual ability has become conflated with cognition, and in a series of very complex ways. On the one hand vision is lionized among the senses and treated as wholly autonomous, free and even pure. Yet on the other hand visual symbols are experienced as mundane and necessarily embedded, and their interpretation is regarded as utterly contingent. As Mitchell’s (1986) work on imagery informed us, the idea of vision and the idea as vision has a history. ‘Idea’ derives from the Greek verb, meaning ‘to see’. This lexical etymology reminds us that the way that we think about the way that we think in Western culture is guided by a visual paradigm. Looking, seeing and knowing have become perilously intertwined. Thus, the manner in

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which we have come to understand the concept of an ‘idea’ is deeply bound up with the issues of ‘appearance’, of picture, and of image. As the ‘early’ Wittgenstein stated, ‘a picture is a fact’ and ‘a logical picture of facts is a thought’ (Wittgenstein 1961: 16 and 19). The content and form of things is, we might suggest, to be approached in terms of how they ‘look’. The manifest ‘phono-logo-centrism’ of this book about ‘visualizing’ culture attests to this point – we begin from visual forms and talk and theorize and achieve understanding of those forms through mental constructs. Merleau-Ponty addressed this point in terms of the issue of perception: The perceived thing is not an ideal unity in the possession of an intellect . . . it is rather a totality open to a horizon of an infinite number of perspectival views which blend with one another according to a given style, which defines the object in question. Perception is thus paradoxical. The perceived thing is itself paradoxical; it exists only in so far as someone can perceive it. (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 16)

It has been forcefully argued by Jay (1989; 1992; 1993) that modernity’s project was most effectively achieved through the privileging of ‘sight’ and that modern culture has, in turn, elected the visual to the dual status of being both the primary medium for communication and also the sole ingress to our accumulated symbolic treasury. The modern world is very much a ‘seen’ phenomenon. Sociology however, itself in many senses the emergent discourse of modernity, has been rather neglectful of addressing cultural ocular conventions and has subsequently become somewhat inarticulate in relation to the visual dimension of social relations (see Fyfe and Law 1988; Henny 1986). RORTY AND THE MIRROR OF NATURE The problems of theorizing vision as a social practice begin, perhaps, when we investigate the foundations of our ways of understanding things within modern Western culture. Rorty (1980), at the outset of his ‘mirror of nature’ thesis, provided a description of modern philosophy’s project and an account of its peculiar lineage, both of which, he argued, clearly contributed to our present state of confusion concerning the ‘seen’, and established a commonplace view that mental representations are essentially

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156 visual culture reflections of an external reality. Philosophy principally regards its problems as universal, and believes its methods to be concerned with either confirming or contradicting every claim to understanding. In this sense philosophy underwrites all culture in that culture can be recognized as the eternal, collective, re-affirmation of humankind’s coming to ‘know’ nature, as distinct from the animal kingdom’s innate inability to exist as anything other than a continuous part of nature. Culture, as a form of mediation, enables a distancing from nature and a control over natural occurrence, facilitated through symbolic representation. Such processes rest not reductively upon a ‘natural’ disposition of being human but rather upon a theory of human nature. This is also a formative idea in Ivins’s views on the rationalization of sight: At the very beginning of human history men discovered in their ability to make pictures a method for symbolization of their visual awareness which differs in important respects from any other symbolic method that is known. As distinguished from purely conventional symbols, pictorial symbols can be used to make precise and accurate statements even while themselves transcending definition. (Ivins 1973: 8)

Our contemporary views on epistemology were, Rorty informed us, shaped by a combination of Cartesian ideas concerning ‘mental substance’ and Lockean ideas concerning ‘mental processes’. Descartes’s ‘cogito’ centred understanding on an independent, located and subjective mind – a finite capacity and disposition – waiting to be unified with Locke’s conception of active ‘mentalism’, or what we might describe as the practices by which we come to know. This powerful combination, that is, this now ‘active’ ‘mind’, was latterly situated by Kantian philosophy within a total and unified cosmos which was both organized through and knowable in terms of pure reason itself. The metaphysical questions addressing the real characteristics of the ‘outside’ nature and the ‘inside’ mind were seemingly held in abeyance (or just taken for granted) and philosophy’s project became dedicated to the ‘rigorous’ and ‘scientific’ divination of the accurate and most appropriate transportation of the ‘outside’ into the ‘inside’ (Feyerabend 1981; Willer and Willer 1973). The conventional highway for this transport has been the senses, but primarily ‘sight’. Such empirical rather than intuitive

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theories of knowing have marked out the epoch of modernity: a period we might describe as the ‘opening of vision’. This historical scenario established an absurd dichotomy in the relation between ‘self’ and ‘other’, two moments which could now be more appositely reformed as ‘the receptacle’ and ‘the spectacle’ (Debord 1983); or perhaps ‘the vision’ and ‘the ultimately visual’. This scenario also fostered the emergence of the ‘mind’-less empiricism and ‘value’-less positivism as the methodological strategies that were both to dominate and, unintentionally, retard the development of modern social theory. Our contemporary realization of this inquisitorial dichotomy between ‘self’ and ‘other’ in sociological work has subsequently settled into the sanitized methodological form of ‘observation’. ‘Observation’ has become a root metaphor within social and cultural research and an extensive vocabulary of ‘visuality’, applied in an almost wholly unreflexive manner, has become instrumental in our manoeuvres for gaining access to and understanding the concerted practices of human communities (Phillipson 1975). As Lowe has stated, ‘the perceptual field thus constituted . . . was fundamentally nonreflexive, visual and quantitative’ (Lowe 1982: 26). The implementation of the concept of ‘observation’ in socio-cultural research, and its obvious general acceptability, are by no means accidental or arbitrary. Such usage, and its institutionalization, are refinements of the conventional ‘ocularcentrism’ (Jay 1993) abroad within the wider culture. We daily experience and perpetuate the conflation of the ‘seen’ with the ‘known’ in conversation, through the commonplace linguistic appendage of ‘do you see?’ or ‘see what I mean?’ to utterances that seem to require confirmation, or, when seeking opinion, by inquiring after people’s ‘views’. (For the pedagogue such habitual interrogative phrasing can assume the form and regularity of punctuation: a habit radically, and poignantly, arrested in my own experience after having taught people with severe visual impairment.) The point to be established is that routinely the ‘voir’ in ‘savoir’ speaks through our daily knowing and through our tacit rules of agreement. The social theorist, since the turn of the century, appears to have been locked into a stance of ‘observation’ and this is a position at odds with the conceptual leaps achieved within other scientific disciplines during the same period. While contemporary physicists, for example, conjure up metaphors to designate their un-available phenomena and the supposed relationships that hold between them (like ‘charm’), the social theorist has

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158 visual culture for too long adhered to a classical view of science predicated upon three anachronistic principles: (1) a mechanistic view of the universe as a whole interrelated totality; (2) a principled acceptance that an intrinsic order resides within phenomena as external forms; and (3) the necessary contingency, being that understanding proceeds through the ‘independence’ of an observer’s sight. The idea of observation, within the tradition of social theory, implies a studied passivity and a disengagement. We can detect a theorist who is skilled in watching, contemplating and spectating, but there is also the suspicion of the icy and self-gratifying gaze of the voyeur. This version of the observer demands the necessity of standing back, an aim of seeing from a distance or, perhaps most favoured of all, the privilege of looking down from an elevated platform. Goffman even likened the stance to that of ‘the fly on the wall’ (Goffman 1979). This, in terms of perspective, is what Nicod described as ‘our so-called visual distance which alone is correct enough for science’ (Nicod 1930: 172). Such a notion of ‘observation’ seems intent on the reduction of social experience to the behaviour of pure perception: this, paradoxically, also reduces the practice of ‘vision’ to the behaviour of pure perception! A strangely self-inflicted one-dimensionality and a reductive abandonment to natural disposition. This supposed reduction generates what Mitchell called ‘the innocent eye’, of which he said: When this metaphor becomes literalized, when we try to postulate a foundational experience of ‘pure’ vision, a merely mechanical process uncontaminated by imagination, purpose, or desire, we invariably discover one of the few maxims on which Gombrich and Nelson Goodman agree: ‘the innocent eye is blind.’ The capacity for a purely physical vision that is supposed to be forever inaccessible to the blind turns out to be itself a kind of blindness. (Mitchell 1986: 118)

However, as Bryson (1983) has pointed out, in relation to art history, it is critical that vision should be realigned with interpretation rather than with mere perception. And as Bourdieu has succinctly stated, ‘any art perception involves a conscious or unconscious deciphering’ (Bourdieu 1993: 215). ‘Observation’ though bland in its significations has, ironically, become an instructive concept. As a metaphor for method or technique within

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the social sciences or cultural studies ‘observation’ drags behind it an excess baggage of ontological and epistemological assumptions, albeit unexplicated, that can direct us to the origins of ‘our ways of seeing’ through modernity. Three items are paramount: (i) assumptions concerning the finite and ‘visible’ character of social phenomena; (ii) assumptions concerning the ‘clear sightedness’, that is, the moral and political disposition of the theorist; and (iii) assumptions concerning the manner of ‘visual’ relationship that sustains between the theorist and his/her phenomena. In large part these sets of assumptions have been subsumed under the analytic posture that has become both stereotyped and generalized under the blanket term ‘positivism’. Others before me have made thorough and valuable attempts to formalize the key characteristics of positivism, in the senses of it being both a technical philosophical term but also a cultural disposition, and I shall therefore only briefly rehearse some of their arguments here (Giddens 1974; Kolakowski 1972). POSITIVISM AND THE METAPHOR OF OBSERVATION Positivism, for social theory, came into prominence through the highly influential works of Auguste Comte. It was he who envisaged sociology, his ‘queen of the sciences’, becoming the culmination of the endeavours of positive philosophy. Sociological positivism was, for Comte, the pinnacle of an intellectual rational-reformist trajectory developed as a response to the social, and moral, instability that had been precipitated by the French Revolution. Sociology was allocated the role of completing a supposed hierarchical evolution of all scientific disciplines: it was to supersede all other forms of thought. Particularly to be transcended, within Comte’s ‘Law of Three Stages’, were the developmental stages of ‘theological’ and ‘metaphysical’ forms of cognition (and we might note that ‘metaphysical questions’ have remained the anathema of positivisms, such as that of the ‘Vienna Circle’, ever since). Proper (modern) scientific thought, Comte envisaged, was initially to grow out of a knowledge of great generality, relating to phenomena furthest from humankind’s own involvement, like deities. Having transcended this beginning, understanding should then metamorphose steadily onwards towards a stage of great specificity, relating to the phenomena of closest proximity to immediate human experience, that is, the law-governed things that surround us. Such an epistemological evolution heralds the advance and arrival of the ‘observer’.

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160 visual culture As humankind’s attention is directed more and more closely towards itself and its immediate environment, quite simply more and more objects enter into ‘vision’. From the opaque distance required of gods, through the hazy and incalculable horizons of metaphysics, to the necessity and familiarity of things-in-themselves, inexorably, the world drew nearer and nearer, it became more focused, and it assumed the vivid shapes of empirical phenomena. This passage is, however, forgetful of Hegel’s pronouncement that in the familiar we find the most strange and the least known. Nevertheless, we have, with Comte’s guidance and in the dour company of his ‘observer’, descended from heaven to earth and we are met with the positivist revelation, that ‘what can be seen can also be believed in!’ Conveniently, but not coincidentally, this historical closing up of reality and cultural sharpening of the senses was enhanced and assisted by the parallel developments in the technology of the lens, the telescope and the microscope; and both were simultaneously popularized through the printing press (McLuhan 1964). A particular perceptual and literal view of reality was, dare I say, taking shape. This ‘view’ is what Bryson has referred to as the ‘Natural Attitude’: Perhaps the most powerful arguments against the Natural Attitude have come from the sociology of knowledge. The doctrine of technical progress towards an Essential Copy proposes that at a utopian extreme the image will transcend the limitations imposed by history, and will reproduce in perfect form the reality of the natural world: history is the condition from which it seeks escape. Against this utopia the sociology of knowledge argues that such an escape is impossible, since the reality experienced by human beings is always historically produced: there is no transcendent and naturally given Reality. (Bryson 1983: 13)

Positivism, in its variety of forms, is best understood as an attitude towards knowledge. It does not investigate the psychological, historical or political grounds of knowledge – all these serious concerns are assumed in terms of ‘pure perception’, which, as we know, is the fundamental canon of ‘empiricism’. The positivist rule-book legislates for the representations of ‘vision’, it provides evaluative criteria for assessing the validity of depictions of reality and our statements about the world. It is, as with all forms of cognitive/moral/political legislation, most adept at informing us what is

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best excluded from our Weltanschauung. Thus positivist instructions for ‘good seeing’ are essentially directives for a ‘partial sight’, which would never recognize itself as being the ‘impaired vision’ that it really is, because positivism is, after all, legitimated by the ideology of ‘pure perception’. Do we sense another paradox here? Within what I am now describing as an ideology of seeing (and we should note that although it was Marx who first implicated vision with the concept of ideology through his invocation of ‘distorted’, ‘refracted’ and ‘inverted’ images stemming from the original ‘camera obscura’, a previous epoch had been policed by the Christian sin of ‘idolatry’, and before that Plato was awakened to the mistaken images within the cave) cognition is to be informed through the primacy of experience. So now we are presented with an injunction, being that ‘only that which can be “seen” can be believed’. Such formalism allows no distinction to be made between ‘phenomenal form’ and ‘essential form’. Any attempt to retrieve the latter is either diverting or facile, we must look-at-things-as-they-are (Keat and Urry 1975) in each case. The prime cultural value now becomes ‘face-value’. A pre-modern faith in the deity has been replaced by modernity’s faith in the precision of human optics, buttressed by a serious commitment to surface. This new realism takes a further step away from the texture of actual social relations when, in its technical and clinical guise of scientific methodology, it wilfully abandons all judgements of value (other than face-value). We now have a vision that regards itself as pure and which also parades both its a-morality and its anti-aesthetic. The overwhelming appeal of such a rigid and intransigent relation between vision and visual field must surely derive from its strengths in protecting the variety of interests inherent in any social order of signs and images. This visual fixity is one that is dominant and consistent within our modern, Western cultural cognitions, upheld largely through the agency of scientific practice. Such a ‘plain view’ of reality must surely rest upon and also project a consensus ‘world view’. The programme set within modern culture for the supposed unification of seeing obviates the disruptive abrasion of conflict and the necessity for discussions of difference. Any alternative ‘visions’ or ‘perspectives’ can be rendered intelligible in the form of deviance or, rather, ‘distortion’. The moral basis of the consensus ‘view’, within this self-confirming hall of mirrors, is never questioned and consequently our ‘sight’ and the object of our ‘sight’ are systematically undisturbed by the dissonance of choice or interpretation.

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162 visual culture This has long been a topic for fine art and even psychology, but it is late coming to social theory and it has certainly not impacted onto everyday life. The sustained visual constraint of the modern era has, in large part, been enabled through the collusion of science, or rather the ideology of scientism, in our cultural outlook. Scientism is not the professional practice of genuine scientists but the naive and popular attitude that ascribes the conferment of truth to the infrastructure of technicism around which the economy has developed. Science, or rather scientism, is bestowed the duty of ‘imaging’ reality, as part of the exercise of its role in manufacturing ‘truth’ throughout modernity. This view finds support in the work of Jay: The assumption . . . that Cartesian perspectivalism is the reigning visual model of modernity is often tied to the further contention that it succeeded in becoming so because it best expressed the ‘natural’ experience of science valorized by the scientific world-view. (Jay 1991: 179)

Ivins further reinforces the view, stating that ‘today there are few sciences or technologies that are not predicated in one way or another upon this power of invariant pictorial symbolization’ (Ivins 1973: 13). THE ISSUE OF PERSPECTIVE Social and cultural theory, like all forms of understanding, or ‘ways of seeing’, generate a partial view of the world. However hard they may strive through systems theory, subcultural theory, phenomenologies or neo-Marxisms, such perspectives cannot recreate the living whole. Such work can only assemble an amalgam of chosen parts of a society’s network of action and institutional processes, or elements from a culture’s system of signs. All concepts of totalities are merely glosses of an unattainable unity. Socio-cultural theory is also partial in the sense that the elements of the social world that it does seek to choose and assemble are always chosen in relation to some set of interests, whether they are politically explicit (i.e. the critical purpose of the work) or theoretically implicit (i.e. the tradition from which it arises). Thus the ‘visions’ of social theory are realized through the practices of selection, abstraction and transformation. Selection is the process which entails the theorist’s choice, or disposition,

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deriving from whatever source of values, from the personal to the traditional, and selection facilitates the subsequent ‘focusing’ on particular aspects of social reality. Another way of treating this would be to say that the practice of selection involves the ‘illumination’ or ‘bringing into visibility’ of certain finite elements of the continuous and infinite social process. Selection is often made real and legitimated by the methodologies of collection. That is, within the languages of social and cultural theory we have ways of capturing, gathering or collecting the world. We do this through schemes of classification, through our sorting procedures, and through the generation and application of our categories of analysis. Such processes should only be interpreted as ‘blinkering’, ‘distorting’ or ‘viewing through rose-coloured spectacles’ if they are unreflexive and premised on a version of ‘pure vision’. Social theorizing is also actively concerned with the practice of abstraction. Abstraction can be regarded as a perspectival issue, that is, an issue concerned with altering the size and prominence of aspects of phenomena in relation to their original place. Hughes pointed to the paradox here through an inversion of terms: Essentially, perspective is a form of abstraction. It simplifies the relationship between the eye, brain and object. It is an ideal view, imagined as being seen by a one-eyed, motionless person who is clearly detached from what he sees. It makes a god of the spectator, who becomes the person on whom the whole world converges, the Unmoved Onlooker. Perspective gathers the visual facts and stabilizes them; it makes them a unified field. The eye is clearly distinct from that field, as the brain is separate from the world it contemplates. (Hughes 1980: 17)

To abstract implies a removal, a drawing out from an original location, and an enforced movement of elements from one level to another. Abstraction, then, involves the transposition of worlds; an extracting of essences, or elements, or generalities from one original plane into another. The new world, the created level, the (re)presentation, provides the potential arena for the manipulation and control of images. Images become infinitely malleable once freed from their original context, whilst still retaining significations within that original context (as poetry, hermeneutic theory, modern art and advertising all know – for good or ill). Because, for

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164 visual culture some and on some occasions, the strategies of refining, adjusting, displacing and enhancing images that occur through abstraction may generate unwelcome ‘sights’, the whole process can sometimes be indicted as a practice of reification. Whether or not we take heed of this last criticism, abstraction undoubtedly leads us through a series of problematics which are unsettling in their implications. Through the practice of abstracting phenomena from one plane or locus to another visual dimension, we are led to ask ‘which image should we finally attend to?’, or indeed, ‘which image (re)presents the world?’ Such questions pitch us into what Hegel might have termed ‘a whirling circle’ of uncertainty, which derives, in part, from the essentially non-consensual character of socio-cultural theory. We are confronted with a set of questions concerning representation which are not wholly dissimilar to those which have beset art history when it attempts to explain painting’s relation to its social context. As Bryson has put it in his debate with Gombrich: To the question, what is painting? Gombrich gives the answer, that it is the record of perception. I am certain that this is fundamentally wrong. . . . It is a natural enough attitude to think of painting as a copy of the world, and given the importance of realism in Western painting it is perhaps inevitable that eventually this attitude would be elevated to a doctrine . . . what is suppressed by the account of painting as the record of perception is the social character of the image, and its reality as sign. (Bryson 1983: xii)

Here, we are essentially questioning the level at which a particular theory, or scopic regime, seeks to concentrate and thus suspend, or hold, its signs: for theory always gives supremacy to a particular level. Art history might see this as, for example, an issue of figuration, abstract expressionism, conceptualism, hyper-realism or whatever. Sociology, far from being a shared and happy perspective on social reality, is, rather, fragmented and competitive. This dispersion and challenge quite appropriately, though not exhaustively, reflects what Schutz would regard as the infinite ‘multiple realities’ that comprise all human experience. Different paradigms within sociology, then, produce different worlds just as different scopic regimes of modernity, or different rationalizations of sight have fashioned our cultural ‘outlook’. The world

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is not pre-formed, waiting to be ‘seen’ by the ‘extro-spection’ of the ‘naked eye’. There is no-thing ‘out-there’ intrinsically formed, interesting, good or beautiful as our dominant cultural outlook would suggest. Vision is a skilled cultural practice. As Paglia said: How did beauty begin? Earth-cult, suppressing the eye, locks man in the belly of mothers. There is, I insist, nothing beautiful in nature. Nature is a primal power, coarse and turbulent. Beauty is our weapon against nature; by it we make objects, giving them limit, symmetry, proportion. Beauty halts and freezes the melting flux of nature. (Paglia 1990: 57)

It is for this reason that positivism/empiricism in sociology and perceptualism in art history must be ever confounded by the issue of shifting interpretation. The idea of vision being socially constructed or culturally located both liberates and subsequently elevates the practising ‘see-er’, the human actor, from the status of the messenger of nature and into the status of theoretician. In this way sight becomes properly recognized as artful. Through modernity, vision has also become divested of its originality, in ways both real and imagined. In a perceptual environment of rapidly changing and infinitely replaceable images and representations much of what is ‘seen’ is pre-received (the ‘hyper-reality’ of the postmodern). As Marx originally suggested, nature no longer offers itself free of the ‘sensuous’ engagement of human labour – mountains, rivers, forests and fields, some of the most elemental forms in which we can now encounter ‘nature’, are all tainted by culture. But more than this, the visual experience of the real is often second-(hand?) Indeed, in late-modernity, we anticipate that it should be with TV, film, video, photography and advertising providing our most immediate access to ‘other’ through frozen, stored, contrived, and re-presented images. This apparent dissolution of modernity into a more generalized logic of public representations is what Virilio (1994) described as ‘the vision machine’. There is a cultural void emerging between the abandonment of the image and the overweening attachment to the image; what Mitchell has explained as ‘the struggle between iconoclasm and idolatry’ (Mitchell 1986: 3). Much social and cultural theory also works in relation to ‘secondary data’ like official statistics or through textual analysis, the sources of which have already been used by

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166 visual culture other people for other purposes. And fine art, though not having ended with photography as Ruskin predicted, often finds inspiration through Coca-Cola cans, billboards, photography and the at-hand rather than the ethereal. These sites of visual knowledge are the artefacts and cultural products of Benjamin’s ‘age of mechanical reproduction’ and the practical embodiment of Baudrillard’s ‘simulacra’. Late modernity finds comfort, and perhaps some stability, not just in ‘viewing’ but in ‘re-viewing’. But is this necessarily a problem, or even a barrier to obtaining a ‘clear view’? For Baudrillard it merely described the shiftless character of the postmodern aesthetic dystopia: Abstraction today is no longer that of the map, the double, the mirror or the concept. Simulation is no longer that of a territory, a referential being or a substance. It is the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. (Baudrillard 1988: 166)

And for Virilio the postmodern ‘logistics of the image’ point to both a cultural amnesia and a loss. He stated that: One can only see instantaneous sections seized by the Cyclops of the lens. Vision, once substantial, becomes accidental. Despite the elaborate debate surrounding the problem of the objectivity of mental or instrumental images, this revolutionary change in the regime of vision was not clearly perceived and the fusion-confusion of the eye and camera lens, the passage from vision to visualization, settled easily into accepted norms. (Virilio 1994: 13)

In fact, however, it is not the ‘real world’, in any supposed original form, or the ‘pure vision’ of empiricism, or even the ‘best method’ claimed by positivism, that generates the most apposite material for socio-cultural theory or, indeed, artistic representation. It is rather the theoretical problem that dictates the ideal material. The issue of levels or perspective is wholly theoretical, these different ‘levels’ hold no equivalence. Theory is modified by methodology and vision by scopic regimes, both, in their different ways, demanding a uniformity of (re)presentation in the form of data or image. This need not lead us to a determinist position in relation

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to the practices and artefacts of ‘visual culture’ but rather to a recognition of and attendance to their social context. Thus social science lives within social paradigms of objectivity and art lives within the social/intellectual field of criticism. The ‘methodic’ character of theorizing both locates and places potential horizons on what ‘can’ or, perhaps rather, what ‘will’ be seen, be it ancient, modern or post. . . . REFLEXIVITY AND TRANSFORMATION This returns us to the issue of ‘reflexivity’. It is possible to forge a conscious recognition of the constructive relation between our visual practices and our visual culture. Such a recognition flies in the ‘gazing’ face of modernity’s inert mythologies of ‘objectivity’, ‘pure vision’, ‘bias-freedom’ and ‘the naked eye’. And it inverts their mythic claims to provide the yardstick against which all ideology is assessed by ‘seeing’ such claims as themselves ‘ideological’. These endeavours also undermine the irresponsible and tentative relationship that is routinely established between the theorist/ artist/visionary and the outcome of their own activities. Method, then, is not the servant of theory: method actually grounds theory. To speak/write/ depict the world as a coherent form is to formulate the world in line with an active methodic vision. To reform an earlier point, I would now suggest that what the dominant grip of empiricist and positivist views of knowledge and understanding have led to is a polarization of theory and method. Theory has come to be seen as the idiosyncratic, naughty, contentious and extravagant grounds of individual difference and method as the good, concerted, technical grounds of uniformity. Empiricism knows no mind, it is a theory of learning behaviour. The senses have, through modernity, become inflated indicators of the real, but none more so than vision. As a direct consequence of this elevation the staring optics of humankind act as the final arbiters of truth, beauty, desire and goodness . . . ‘I don’t know much about art but’ . . . ‘Keep an eye on it’ . . . ‘Just use your eyes!’ . . . ‘It’s staring you in the face’ . . . ‘Beauty is in the eye of the beholder’ . . . ‘She’s good looking’ . . . ‘If looks could kill’ . . . ‘Look and learn’. Ivins summarized this point for us: From being an avenue of sensuous awareness for what people, lacking adequate symbols and adequate grammars and techniques for their use,

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168 visual culture regarded as ‘secondary qualities,’ sight has today become the principal avenue of the sensuous awarenesses upon which systematic thought about nature is based. Science and technology have advanced in more than direct ratio to the ability of men to contrive methods by which phenomena which otherwise could be known only through the senses of touch, hearing, taste and smell, have been brought within the range of visual recognition and measurement and thus become subject to that logical symbolization without which rational thought and analysis are impossible. (Ivins 1978: 13)

Within such a system of closure radical questions about the character and purpose of ‘seeing’ and the ‘seen’ cannot be asked, for within a world dominated by overarching techne all phenomena are regarded as being given and equivalent, both spectacular and sullen. However, as it is the case that socio-cultural theory, and the visual arts, are about the construction of worlds from worlds (from worlds . . . ) we do need to interrogate the nature of ‘seeing’ and ‘seen-ness’. In order to know which world we are in and at which level we are working, we need to investigate the interests, values and intentions that were operating in the production of the image. In other words, we are committed, as analysts, to reveal the grounds of ‘partiality’: we need to be reflexive. Ironically it is as if the strictures of empiricism and the positivist attitude, in the form of an emphasis on technique, had grown up independently of the critical discourses of modernity, that is, the traditions of socio-cultural theory and making art. These discourses, initiated as critiques of the mechanical and inhuman consequences of the division of labour, in its broadest possible sense, and oriented in a variety of ways towards the generation of a moral vision of the future, have all, through an increasing cultural emphasis on technique, become complicit in a totalizing instrumental technicism. Techniques of uniform and predictable representation have a strong market appeal (whether as data, information, or art/craft/musical reproductions), methodology takes on a life of its own, and critical theory, along with ‘fine’ art, becomes marginalized within its culture. In the same way that Gestalt theory developed the distinction between ‘figure’ and ‘ground’ (that which is selectively perceived against that which provides its setting), theorized ‘sight’, critical ‘sight’, or reflexive ‘sight’

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elicit their phenomena from all that-is and might-have-been: their ‘vision’ has a purpose. So whereas the dominant visual cultural mode ‘looks’ for the ‘essential’ and the ‘typical’, an interpretive vision pulls, extracts or abstracts its phenomenon into a new setting. The metaphor for (re)presentation shifts, consequently, from one of ‘correspondence’ to one of transformation, the latter embodying intention. Trans-formation is not a gathering of the world through vision, it is a re-ordering of the world within a vision. This is what Bryson saw as an encoding: Viewing is an activity of transforming the material of the painting into meanings, and that transformation is perpetual: nothing can arrest it. Codes of recognition circulate through painting incessantly. . . . The viewer is an interpreter, and the point is that since interpretation changes as the world changes, art history cannot lay claim to final or absolute knowledge of its object. While this may from one point of view be a limitation, it is also a condition enabling growth. (Bryson 1983: xiv)

How then, we need to ask, do the ‘transformed’ products of socio-cultural theory, or indeed fine art, relate to everyday actual events? Surely everyday life is open-ended and multiple-ly-real whereas life within a theory, a particular ‘viewpoint’, is limited, coherent and subject to an internal logic? Transformed objects of knowledge are not and cannot be the same as the objects of knowledge of everyday life, whatever cultural convention or scopic regimes dictate. Theorized ‘sight’ generates ‘new phenomena’ which will always exist in a problematic relation to the real world. As Max Weber informed us concerning his own major methodological innovation, the ideal-type: ‘The exact relation between the ideal-type and empirical reality is problematic in every single case.’ Our concepts, in each case, have a metaphoric relation with the ‘real’ continuous world, the relationship is never ‘direct’. Even though the empiricist demands of modern culture insist that we should impartially witness and report on the external in a correspondential manner our concepts are always metaphoric – nothing more, but certainly nothing less. They ‘stand for’ a state of affairs, they do not assume the status of literal descriptions – they are ‘meta’ (above) and ‘phoric’ (in the place of). In the same way we can see that a materialist view, such as that of Bryson, might interpret a system of signs:

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170 visual culture To understand a painting as sign, we have to forget the proscenic surface of the image and think behind it: not to an original perception in which the surface is luminously bathed, but to the body whose activity – for the painter as for the viewer – is always and only a transformation of material signs. (Bryson 1983: 171)

SCOPIC REGIMES AND THE PANOPTICON Thus far we have considered the visual in terms of what I have been calling a ‘cultural outlook’ informed by what Jay (1993) originally referred as a ‘scopic regime’, and I have sought to establish, with the assistance of ideas derived from social and cultural theory, and art history, that there is a singular and determining ‘way of seeing’ within modern Western culture. Of course any such totalizing assertion of singularity is abusive of the infinite variety of human experience but the weight of evidence certainly seems to convince us that the dramatic confluence of an empirical philosophical tradition, a realist aesthetic, a positivist attitude towards knowledge and a techno-scientistic ideology through modernity have led to a commonsense cultural attitude of literal depiction in relation to vision. Human optics are assumed to accurately reflect externality and visual images, in the form of representations, are supposed to record the history of perception. Visual symbolism, the primary form of symbolism within the culture, is dispossessed of its iconographic, or metaphoric, role and routinely understood as ‘correspondence’. Everyday members of the culture are consequently effectively deskilled in their capacities as interpretive beings. One would be very much mistaken in assuming that debates about such issues are no more than arcane squabbles among the intelligentsia concerning, say, the ‘best’ way to relate to visual art. Such questions may well be implicated within the broad range of considerations raised here but there are others, far more fundamental, and far more sinister. The debate is not merely about how to relate to visual art but rather about how to read the world. The scopic regime that Jay (1993) referred to as Cartesian perspectivalism and that I have described as a clumsy, yet wholly persuasive, combination of empiricist tactics and positivist diktats, produces a closure and a restriction of vision, but one moderated through the removal of

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irksome questions of choice. Societal members have not, through modernity, expressed their concerted outrage at this narrowing of the visual field as they have been, at some other level, tranquillized by the pictorial reciprocity of perspectives and interchangeability of standpoints that this ‘tunnel vision’ provides for them in their everyday interaction. Our culture has seemingly acquiesced to the denigration of visual potential. Picture then, a contemporary social bond tenuously located on the assumption of a common imagery. That it is ‘common’ does not mean that it is ‘shared’, the latter would require negotiation and an active engagement with the finite character of the ‘real’ image. Semiotics cannot proceed on the basis that signs mean different things to different people; on the contrary it depends on a cultural network that establishes the uniformity of responses to/readings of the sign. This network is our scopic regime. It is essential that we cast our critical gaze upon constellations of interests inherent in and protected by any social order of signs and images, or rather the consensus world-view that they seek to promote – it is essential because we are now addressing the exercise of power! Commenting on the ‘birth of the western eye’ in this context Paglia stated: Social order and the idea of social order emerge. Egypt is history’s first romance of hierarchy. Pharaoh, elevated and sublime, contemplates life’s panorama. His eye was the sun disk at the apex of the social pyramid. He had point of view, an Apollonian sightline. Egypt invented the magic of image. . . . Social order becomes a visible aesthetic, countering nature’s chthonian invisibilities. Pharaonic construction is the perfection of matter in art. Fascist political power, grandiose and self-devinizing, creates the hierarchical, categorical superstructure of western mind. (Paglia 1990: 59)

Modern power has the deft touch of a ‘look’ in interaction. It no longer requires the hard-edge and the explicit realization of the ancien régime; through a ‘look’ it can absorb all and do so without being noticed, or say all without ever revealing its true intentions. Modern power is pervasive, though not omnipotent, because it cautiously acts on and in relation to the scopic regime, but it is not in its sway. The ‘gaze’ and the conscious manipulation of images are the dual instruments in the exercise and function of modern systems of power and social control.

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172 visual culture The model for this delicate power is provided by Bentham’s Panopticon and appropriated by Foucault to epitomize a vision of modernity’s optical discipline at once combining abstract schematization and a range of practical applications. It represented, for Foucault: a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. . . . It is the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form. . . . It is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. . . . It is polyvalent in its applications. (Foucault 1977: 205)

Any attempt to establish a social theory of visuality seems beset by paradox.

9 URBAN CULTURE Losing the city, we have lost everything. Recovering the city, we will have gained everything. If there is a solution possible today, it lies in reorganising the place of communal life. (Virilio 1999: 52)

Cities are magical places; however, their magic is not evenly distributed. So uneven is the experience of city life that it would not be vexatious to describe the idea of an urban culture as oxymoronic. Indeed, Castells (1976) disserts openly on the ‘myth’ of urban culture and worries us with the threat of the conceptual confusion that stems from the pursuit of such an idea. But this is not meant to counsel despair or recommend an early abandonment of our topic. It is, I believe, an introduction to the complexity that confronts us, a complexity that is both challenging and exciting – and that, perhaps, is part of the magic. The birth and growth of the city certainly predates the development of sociology as a form of understanding; yet, in many senses, the need for the city and the compounding of social processes, forms of social relation and identity, and the new kinds of social pathology that stem from its explosion into our landscapes are exactly parallel with the mission of social theory at the turn of the nineteenth century and beyond. Within the wider realm of cultural history and criticism such leading figures as Baudelaire

174 urban culture and subsequently Walter Benjamin have realized the city as a prime metaphor for the advance of modernity. Cities and the urban attitude embody the truly modern. Clearly the urban is much more than just condensed housing stock, mass population and the logistics of servicing such demographic bulk. Such indices are merely concrete and descriptive; yet cities are made up of these too. At a different more analytic level the urban form speaks of density, adjacency and a volatile juxtapositioning of uniformity and difference. So if an urban culture is the whole way of life of people living in towns this must include their hierarchies, their communities of inclusion and their strategies for exclusion, the material conditions of their existences and the ideal conditions for their hopes and aspirations. A city is at once an agglomeration of social members but simultaneously an elision (and often collision) of their beliefs, symbolic repertoires and codes. It is a fragile massing of mosaic pluralisms and a temporarily grasped consensus. Another way of seeing this is in relation to the interface between subjectivity and anonymity, the individual and the crowd. Raymond Williams, writing from within a literary tradition, addresses the same point: London, Hardy wrote, in 1887: ‘ . . . appears not to see itself. Each individual is conscious of himself, but nobody conscious of themselves collectively . . . ’ This way of seeing London has a clear continuity from Wordsworth in The Prelude, though it has become more emphatic. Moreover, in the contrasting idea of the ‘collective consciousness’, it has been altered and extended by the democratic and industrial experience and language of the nineteenth century. Yet there is still the sense of a paradox: that in the great city itself, the very place and agency – or so it would seem – of collective consciousness, it is an absence of common feeling, an excessive subjectivity, that seems characteristic. . . . The perceptual confusion and ambivalence that Wordsworth made explicit has been simplified and developed to an image of the human condition within urban industrial capitalism. Dickens, observing the condition, had worked to reveal a practical underlying connection, in human love and sympathy. Engels and Marx, as they went on looking, worked to reveal a different underlying condition: a new collective proletarian consciousness and self-consciousness, which would trans-

urban culture form the society from its base in industry and the cities. So what was commonly seen, in immediate experience, was a social dissolution in the very process of aggregation. (Williams 1993: 215–16)

This vast unconscious collectivity is no transitory feature of a rapidly transforming social structure, a symptom of modernity’s becoming urban. Rather this poignant contradiction points us to the paradox at the heart of the urban cultural experience. When Simmel (1950) writes of the ‘stranger’ he is not speaking about an individual’s recent arrival, their abnormality or their marginality achieved through rejection. Rather the ‘strangeness’ refers to a more generally held mode of attachment in contemporary sociality. Substantively, throughout history, strangers have always been present through the necessity of trade. Trading implies a kind of usury, an instrumental relationship and an interaction based on no organic form of solidarity. The trader relates to all and with an equivalence, there is no intimacy and no dependence, indeed we might suggest that the meeting with others is predicated on the necessity of a kind of unsentimental objectivity. Reciprocally, the stranger/trader too is objectified by the collectivity. He claims no special confidences and his dealings with others are free from the constraints of partisanship. Momentary closeness is achieved only through symbolic exchange, with no assurance of future reliability or predictability and, analytically only through the broadest and most abstract of social categories. Thus strangers communicate through such media as nationality or perhaps even the supposedly shared state of modern life. Simmel’s practical trader melding into the experience of the stranger is, of course, a metaphor for the distance, reserve and anonymity that the urban crowd both provides and is constituted through. In spite of being inorganically appended to it, the stranger is yet an organic member of the group. Its uniform life includes the specific conditions of this element. Only we do not know how to designate the peculiar unity of this position other than by saying that it is composed of certain measures of nearness and distance. Although some quantities of them characterize all relationships, a special proportion and reciprocal tension produce the particular, formal relation to the ‘stranger’. (Simmel 1950: 408)

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176 urban culture Within contemporary theorizing the very idea of the urban is treated as either mundane or problematic. Up until the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, the bulk of the population did not live in cities, thus the ‘urban’ was a particular and peculiar question and the distinction between the urban and the rural had some significance. By the beginning of the twentieth century most people lived in cities, rural populations were a residue and survived to service the complex conurbations, thus the divide was becoming less significant. In the modern world it can be argued that despite some of the scattered populations of the South all life is urban life, and this is one strong element at the heart of the globalization thesis. It is not necessary to be ‘housed’ in a street, in a neighbourhood, a district, a recognizable town in order to be touched by the all-permeating patterns and demands of global capitalism. Patterns of consumption in the city are indistinguishable from patterns of consumption in the countryside, the mountains, the forests, the deserts or the islands. Fast food, Coca-Cola, credit and the internal combustion engine are ubiquitous. So is urban culture another way of speaking about contemporary life? This conceptual fusion between the urban and the modern may well be the case, yet the residue of the non-urban provides an interesting category. Perhaps particularly emphasized in north European societies there is desire to reflect upon a binary opposition to the urban, however well the urban is received. The urban–rural dichotomy, however loosely grounded in representations of real states of affairs, is also another way of signifying badness and goodness, corruption and health, darkness and light, intensity and calm, danger and purity. This is a peculiarly contemporary mythology resting on idyllic visions of a past time never fully realized, and inchoate appraisals of a future unexplored but redolent with risk and threat. To this end, urban culture, in whatever form it is experienced, remains tainted by its necessary corrosion of a rural reverie. We might say that such understanding is fostered through late eighteenthand nineteenth-century romanticism in art, literature and music, but it is to be witnessed too in the exercise of reason upon the modern condition. Tönnies, as far back as 1887, made a now canonical distinction between two manifestations of the social bond. These two types of union between people he referred to as ‘community’ (Gemeinschaft) and ‘society’ or ‘association’ (Gesellschaft). These classificatory forms have, through the years,

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been employed in a number of ways which we might summarize as follows: (1) the distinction between types of human relation, e.g. ‘intimate’ and ‘dispersed’, (2) the distinction between types of agglomeration or proximity, e.g. ‘rural’ and ‘urban’, and (3) the distinction between actual types of society, e.g. ‘traditional’ and ‘modern’. And in many useful ways Tönnies’s analytical model serves all of these purposes well. The concepts are essentially heuristic devices rather than empirical descriptions and, as such, retain a fluidity and a nimbleness that allows for such adaptation and relocation. As Tönnies himself puts it: both names are in the present context stripped of their connotation as designating social entities or groups, or even collective or artificial people; the essence of both Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is found interwoven in all kinds of associations. (Tönnies 1955: 18 quoted in Harris 2001: 37)

Within the idea of Gemeinschaft we can assemble such affective traits as privacy, inclusion, exclusivity and, as previously cited, intimacy. Extending from this focus we can align more concrete forms such as families, clans, kinship groups and perhaps build into neighbourhoods and friendship groups and networks. Gesellschaft, however, in signifying association, calls on notions of public as opposed to private life. Such relationality depends upon the exercise of cognition rather than the feelings; it is about consciousness, deliberation and rational choice. There is a gradient of intentionality gradually disclosed behind these two forms of bonding, they conjure up two different forms of human will or motivation (perhaps prefiguring Weber’s ‘traditional’ and ‘instrumental’ rationalities). Timasheff puts it thus: All social relations are creations of human will, of which there are two types. The first is the essential will: the basic, instinctive, organic tendency which drives human activity as from behind. The second is arbitrary will: the deliberate, purposive form of volition which determines human activity with regard to the future. Essential will, Toennies stresses, dominates the life of peasants and artisans or ‘common’ people, while arbitrary will characterizes the activities of business men, scientists, persons of authority and members of the upper class. (Timasheff 1955: 100)

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178 urban culture What is critical here in relation to urban culture is that the dimension extending between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft is transversed by economic interest. That is, ‘communities’ are made up of individuals whose total identity is proscribed by the sentiment of the collectivity whereas the ‘association’ is opted into with a motivation towards partial and wholly specific outcomes and it is united through a reciprocal and rational agreement of interest – the latter has much more the characteristics of the market or the division of labour. This economic dimension is important when assessing the modernist elements of growth and change embodied in the concepts. Gesellschaft results, in part, from a development into complexity. This is a stage when the needs of Gemeinschaft are no longer satisfied and the burgeoning wants of Gesellschaft become available through exchange in a wider context. Both as part of, but also because of, the advancing division of labour, individuals and the goods or services that they offer become voluntarily detached from the stasis of community. The new meeting point becomes the free market and economic exchange, symbolic exchange and social exchange blur into a new form of commonality and association. And so the form of the bond appears driven by the socio-economic vectors: material circumstances come to proscribe the parameters around the way that people relate. European capitalism truly makes the society and we get the society that our capitalist will deserves. Although there appear to be longings in Tönnies’s work for the mode of relationality, Gemeinschaft, now outstripped, there is an implicit recognition of the difficulty in reversing this historical current. Various cheap, ideological attempts at such social engineering have been attempted such as Hitler’s claim for the Heimweh to emerge through National Socialism and Margaret Thatcher’s appeal for a return to Victorian values; being both purely rhetorical and hopelessly romantic they have failed. In a sense then, what begins as a dichotomous classification, a structuralist move often replicated in subsequent social theories, reforms into a continuum and one that is tolerant of overlap. Thus we can see that it may be virtually impossible to achieve the pure status of a Gemeinschaft (community), yet within a Gesellschaft (society) there are a number of Gemeinschaft points at which the individual engages the social and announces his or her unique personal, yet wholly social, identity. Similarly in a nation or state, almost demographic in character, certain mechanisms can induce the Gemeinschaft sentiment of, say, national consciousness. What

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this enables conceptually, however, is a community or communities coexistent within a society. This model sustains and announces its difference to the concept of subculture because of the emphasis on the will but also because of the sustained theorizing concerning the symbolic order of the social structure. That is, Gemeinschaft sentiments arise in a reciprocal relation to Gesellschaft sensations of bonding. Since Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft correspond to types of will, social relations are treated by Toennies as manifestations of these. Human wills may enter into manifold relations, with the emphasis on either preservation of order or on its destruction; but only the former, relations of reciprocal affirmation, should be studied by sociologists. Reciprocal affirmation itself varies in intensity. Thus a social state exists if two persons will to be in a definite relationship; this relationship is commonly recognised also by others. When a social state obtains between more than two persons, there is a circle. If however individuals are regarded as forming a unit because of common natural or psychic traits, they form a collective. Finally, if there is organization assigning specific functions to definite persons, the social body becomes a corporation. According to Toennies, all of these social formations may be based either on essential will or on arbitrary will. It is, however, hard to conceive how a collective could be a Gesellschaft or a corporation a Gemeinschaft. (Timasheff 1955: 100–1)

Tönnies then appears, quite early on in our tradition, to have opened up the possibility of sociology attending to different levels at which humankind can experience the social. Even though his two major concepts, which are still employed today, do not exhaust the extraordinary variations that characterize people’s collective life, they provide a model with fluidity which nevertheless honours a strong sense of social structure. The many parts are not hermetically sealed. This alerts us to the significance of both openness and closure, and the fluidity enabling any movement between these two possibilities in our conceptualizations of the social bond. Urry (2000) develops a sociology of mobilities which both investigates this fluidity but insists that the previously assumed stasis of fixed social institutions is no longer applicable to a global society. The very idea of mobility redescribes social life in irregular and unstable ways.

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180 urban culture community is also a matter of powerful discourses and metaphors. Certain ideals of a supposed gemeinschaft are vigorously attached to particular social groupings, especially in recent years in western societies with the supposed general loss of community and its communion-like features. But many places that deploy the notion of community are often of course characterised by highly unequal internal social relations and by exceptional hostility to those who are on the outside. To speak of community is to speak metaphorically or ideologically. (Urry 2000: 134)

Despite this most recent reconfiguration we will find that Tönnies’s dichotomous taxonomy set a pattern often replicated in social thought though sometimes moulded into a triadic classification, so for example: Sir Henry Maine’s ‘status’ and ‘contract’; Herbert Spencer’s ‘militant’ and ‘industrial’; Charles Cooley’s ‘primary groups’ and ‘others’; Karl Popper’s ‘tribal’ and ‘open’; Hobhouse’s ‘kinship’, ‘authority’ and ‘citizenship’; Max Weber’s ‘traditional’, ‘charismatic’ and ‘bureaucratic’; Herman Schmalenbach’s ‘community’, ‘federation’ and ‘society’; and Georges Gurvitch’s ‘communion’, ‘community’ and ‘mass’ to name a few. The founding figures of sociology, Marx, Weber and Durkheim, all treated industrialization, the advance of the division of labour, the growth of populations and attendant difficulties – bureaucratization and a polarization in the distribution of power and wealth – as synonymous with the burgeoning urban experience. Marx, through his economic materialism looked to the malformations of and alienations within social structures based on industrialization – and this was primarily urban industrialization. Weber addressed both the advance of and constraints upon the development of instrumental rationality within city forms and ideal-type organizations of proximity. And Durkheim questioned the maintenance, reproduction and regeneration of a moral consensus in the face of increasing physical and moral density. Moral density cannot grow unless material density grows at the same time, and the latter can be used to measure the former. It is useless to try to find out which has determined the other; they are inseparable. . . . The formation of cities and their development is an even more characteristic symptom of the same phenomenon. The increase in

urban culture average density may be due to the material increase of the birth-rate, and, consequently, can be reconciled with a very feeble concentration, a marked maintenance of the segmental type. But cities always result from the need of individuals to put themselves in very intimate contact with others. They are so many points where the social mass is contracted more strongly than elsewhere. They can extend and multiply only if the moral density is raised. (Durkheim 1933: 258–9)

Each of these writers had lived through a time that rendered the transition from rural to urban a meaningful historical process and one that had marked the awakening of their discipline and the ‘modern’ world. Nevertheless they all observed the necessity of announcing the ‘new’ through a spectrum of ‘pain’ or ‘pathology’ clauses. For Marx the inevitable human consequence of the advance of the modern was an alienation of humankind from its species being, of person from person, and of person from the product of his or her labour. Weber warned of the ‘iron cage’ that bureaucracy promised while applauding its necessity. Durkheim foresaw the advance of ‘anomie’, the breakdown of social constraint and the cult of the personality. And, independently, Freud, within a different tradition, would see the social bond emergent only through repression and neurosis as the future shadow of the urban condition. Yet each, with a clarity of vision, now saw the urban as the model for the future and the rural as a kind of anthropological trace from which to draw comparison. However, normlessness, alienation, bureaucratization and madness remain forceful elements in the diagnostic vocabulary of modern urban being. Emerging at the same historical period as this European stirring of the Zeitgeist, but in a different continent, we witness the growth of Chicago, USA, and its indigenous urban sociology. Chicago and the sociology of Chicago combine to make up an extraordinary phenomenon. This is a vertical city built on a delta that empties into a lake the size of a sea. The city knows only two seasons, summer and winter, there are no gradients like spring and fall, the boundaries mark out major differences. The grid system on which the city was planned and built is equally clear in its pattern of differentiation, corners are sharp and square and there is no confusion about the urban geography: East 22nd Street is where it should be. As if to mimic, rather than mock, this architectural regimentation the incredibly diverse population assumed a symbolic grid and sought to

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182 urban culture insulate its identities and differences from one another. That the early Chicago urban sociology adopted an ecological model that would map the zones of ‘Little Sicily’, ‘the Loop’, ‘Deutschland’, ‘China Town’, ‘the Ghetto’ and so on was neither inaccurate nor a flight of fancy. Beyond this the social mosaic policed its cracks to prevent them from becoming joins and the sociology reflected this ‘edge’ in the city and the demarcations as contributing to social control. Mass immigration of widely disparate ethnicities, conflict, violence, organized crime, low-life, poverty and corruption all contributed to the complex. Chicago certainly vied with New York for first-city status. Chicago sociology has iterated through a number of forms yet certain elements remain constant and provide for its easy identification. The concept of an urban culture precisely segmented into urban subcultures will eventually emerge as an integral and inevitable element. Robert Park, who joined the department in its early days around the outbreak of the First World War, had previously been a successful and committed journalist. He was no hack searching out sensation but rather the natural-born flâneur who regarded his city as a complex of stories waiting to be told. As such his transition from newspapers to urban sociology was simple and seamless. Within a short time of having joined the department he had established his status and a reputation and produced a manifesto for the Chicago School that would extend for decades of highly successful work. This manifesto was his ground-breaking essay ‘The city: suggestions for the investigation of human behaviour in the urban environment’. What the paper reveals, and also instils as core elements in the Chicago urban cultural/subcultural tradition, is a number of elements both motivational and conceptual. First there is an overwhelming enthusiasm for and absorption in Chicago as a site. Of course the ideas and theoretical frameworks were intended to be transferable but the fervour for this particular city, its history, its structure and its demography demonstrate a kind of intense micro, local ‘nationalism’. The city and its interrogators never exhausted their relationship – Chicago never seemed to get overresearched. For Park and future generations the city’s potential was limitless. Second, there was a sense of mystery. The many faces of this city expressed themselves as a great unknown. This was no mere analytic trope but perhaps a genuine reflection of the way in which the many and different forms of life, cultures, styles and strata were both segregated and hidden from each other. Such divisions and insulation may have been a

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consequence of structural exclusions, isolationist mechanisms from within or a dynamic combination of both. Chicago comprised a series of closed doors which the academy set out to open. Third, there was an implicit but certainly present intent to reform. Whereas in the English tradition reform and philanthropy were established as a proper and articulate element of any social science or social commentary, in the USA with its high personal achievement ethic, its culture of ‘making out’ and its consequent cast of winners and losers such liberal patronizing motives hardly dare speak their name. Nevertheless the Chicago theorists for generations sought out and honoured the ‘underdog’, from hobo to junkie. The fourth element stemming from Park’s manifesto, which relates to our second point about closure, is an entirely conceptual issue that informs the Chicago view of both place and space. American sociology, and this is as true for Parsons and the East Coast theorists as it was for Chicago, operated with a very concrete version of space. Unlike the postmodern and cultural geographies of today where space can be the conceptual loci of identity, in these early days space was quite literally the physical location of the actors who then acted in relation to those physical surroundings. Space was as a series of plateaux or perhaps set stages upon which action occurred, slum districts might correlate with slum behaviour. Pieces of geography became meaningful variables and as such context took on ontological status – place has being. This gives a new reality to ‘manors’, ‘turfs’, ‘districts’, ‘islands in the streets’, ‘ghettos’ and ‘slums’. We can now begin to appreciate the appeal of the early Chicago obsession with social ecology. The Chicago perspective on urban culture gave rise to a morphology of urban theories all of which diminished in vigour such that the study of the urban became tedious. Its politics were subsumed by town planning and its poetics remained part of a literary genre. The reasons for this are both complex and opaque but in part reside in the realism, the positivism, the sheer ‘objectivity’ that such approaches appeared to invite when inspecting the city. Although Baudelaire had long since politicized the urban in his critique of Haussman’s fashioning of the grand boulevards of Paris, a theme later picked up in Benjamin’s Arcades Project and the French Situationist International, social and cultural theory appears to have experienced a major fugue in this regard. The urban did indeed become the housing stock and the map, and urban culture addressed the distribution of different groups of people to different segments of that cartography. The door was open for a new paradigm of radical theorizing and it arrived in the persons

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184 urban culture of Henri Lefebvre, through the late 1960s, and later Manuel Castells who both instilled a fierce structuralist Marxism into our thinking about urban culture. Lefebvre, reacting to the quasi objectivity of urban social theory and the scientism of town planners, began by treating all hitherto existing conceptions of the urban as distinctly ideological. That is, the urban as it had come to be understood was an illusory form which in turn masked an actual form of social relations supportive of the going system. The urban, then, was the new manifestation of capitalism and the new house of its peculiar form of social relations. Urban culture now became redolent with indicators of the means, modes and relations of production. Surplus value, exploitation, power and powerlessness came to comprise and delineate the multiple components of the territory. This was a new, an angry and an aesthetics-free interrogation of the city. New meanings were placed upon the margin, the ghetto, the slum, the disposed, the local (work-based) community. In many senses Lefebvre’s analysis began where Chicago’s vivid description left off. Urban culture is now a capitalist social construct. Space is political. Space is not a scientific object removed from ideology or politics; it has always been political and strategic. . . . Space, which seems homogeneous, which seems to be completely objective in its pure form such as we ascertain it, is a social product. The production of space can be likened to the production of any particular type of merchandise. (Lefebvre 1977: 341 quoted in Saunders 1993)

Castells moved the analysis of urban culture several steps further along and, although sharing a Marxist framework (in the broadest sense) with Lefebvre, finds his work also ideological and thus part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The span of Castells’s work covers a considerable distance and, like so many creative corpuses, eventually denies its origins, which in this case dwell in Althusser. Althusser shocked the Marxist establishment by announcing an ‘epistemological break’ in the master’s writings, decrying the early work as itself ‘ideological’ and hailing the later work as ‘scientific’ – the axial moment is achieved through the Grundrisse. So the beginning of Castells’s thoughts seeks a scientific, structural Marxist analysis of urban life, but this evolves into a much more abstract systems theory. The urban system is essentially a microcosm of the total social system, it can be explained throughout in terms of a stable unitary isomorphism; all elements and all functions are formally analogous. The specific

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function of the urban system operates through its capacity to form and engender patterns of consumption; this effectively socially and culturally reproduces labour-power which maintains the capitalist system at the highest level. Urban social space becomes the medium through which the reproduction of labour-power is ensured. The urban space is permeated by both ideological and repressive state apparatuses and, as such, is a fundamentally political territory. House building, renting and ownership are thus instances of the sharp politicization of an aspect of the material base. Social theory and contemporary urban cultural geographies have, over the last three decades, cast new light on urban social space. This has transformed our understanding of space from being either a neutral setting for social action, or a determined outcome of material conditions awaiting cartography, to a more deeply political conception of social space. Laclau (1979), for example, regards space as fixed and antipathetic to change. The configurations of urban space that pertain to social relations are embodiments and manifestations of this stasis; such arrangements ensure stable cultural reproduction (Jenks 1993) and a sense of the fixity and immutability of the city and its systems. What we ‘know’ as social space in our everyday lives (see de Certeau 1984), for example, ‘home’, ‘neighbourhood’, ‘town’, is thus a recognition of social order. As Harvey (1989) suggests, we are able to overcome the constraints of social space through conscious spatial arrangement. Urban space, then, is no opaque or inert medium, but must rather be understood in an intense and complex matrix together with identity, difference and differentiation. Urban space is part of the process of identity-making and can, indeed, exhaust the possibility of identity. As Urry puts it, ‘it is possible for localities to consume one’s identity so that places become literally almost all-consuming places’ (Urry 1995: 2). On the surface, urban metaphors like ‘community’, ‘district’ and even ‘home’ are social spaces that appear dedicated to stasis and through popular imagery are constituted as such (Sibley 1995). Most material centring on social identity has seen ‘home’ or urban location as the key source of rootedness. Such work explores the ways in which the concepts of self and personhood are acquired as particular ideas, modes and vocabularies of cultural belonging (Cohen 1982; Jenkins 1996). Traditionally, following the classic account of Barth (1969), the process of identity formation has been tied to or reflected through particular fixed geographical or spatial

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186 urban culture localities. Within this tradition, nationalist discourses, for example, have been regarded largely as debates about belonging, and social identity has been articulated through, and in relation to, tangible, material spaces. This elision of space, belonging and ownership in relation to national identity is well summarized in the rhetorical device that has stated ‘Europe will have become a nation when young men are prepared to die for it’. Cohen (1982) suggests that this emphasis on firm boundaries, be they national or urban, has led to a persistence, and almost a reification, of the idea of the group or of ethnicity (and as such urban segments have become ghettos). Jenkins similarly criticizes this tradition for ‘espousing a middleof-the-road materialist realism that resonates with the core themes of pragmatism’ (Jenkins 1996: 99) and for working with a determined causality that stems from an assumption of the individual’s influence upon the collectivity. In opposition to the Barth thesis of ‘home’ or urban-centredness as a placed identity locus there is, however, a more contemporary literature concerning human movement, a perspective more suited to the understanding of temporary, transitory, agitated and effervescent urban existence. This burgeoning corpus of work critiques the fixing of identity in relation to particular times or historical moments. This is the vehicle for the decentred identity of post-structuralism and the post-historical being of postmodernism. Urban culture is, after all, a statement of heterology. Hebdige prefigured these arguments well: a growing scepticism concerning older explanatory models based in history has led to a renewed interest in the relatively neglected, ‘undertheorized’ dimension of space. . . . It has become less and less common in social and cultural theory for space to be represented as neutral, continuous, transparent or for critics to oppose ‘dead . . . fixed . . . undialectical . . . immobile’ space against the ‘richness, fecundity, life, dialectics of time’, conceived as the privileged medium for the transmission of messages of history. Instead spatial relations are seen to be no less complex and contradictory than historical processes, and space itself refigured as inhabited and heterogeneous, as a moving cluster of points of intersection for manifold axes of power which cannot be reduced to a unified plane or organized into a single narrative. (Hebdige 1990: vi–vii)

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Within such postmodern discourse, an essentially urban voice, it is argued that, rather than fixity, ‘movement has become fundamental to modern identity and an experience of non-place (beyond a “territory” and a “society”) an essential component of everyday existence’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 6). This feature, it is suggested, has an overall importance for appreciating the complexity of modern urban cultural experiences and practices in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Within anthropology, for example, the emergence of this perspective has entailed a critical examination of the discipline, bringing its epistemological grounds and elementary practices under scrutiny. It has been argued that the traditional anthropological interest in identifying and localizing groups and societies of socio-cultural significance underplays the complex relations of, and between, time and space (and also inhabits an outmoded rural or pre-urban mindset). Anthropological studies have tended to elicit and represent cultural separateness rather than cultural and societal interconnectedness, and to see social relations and cultural practices as fixities rather than unfinished, in progress or made en route so to speak. These new perspectives have been developed in relation to developments in post-colonial studies, in line with the major advances in sociologies of race and ethnicity, and particularly alongside studies of migrants, refugees, travellers and diasporic communities. Such work has become centrally engaged in the study of decentred urbanism, the ‘making of home away from home’ (Clifford 1997; Rapport and Dawson 1998). Building on the notion of space as a social construct and thus home as primarily an analytical construct through which individual identity can be explored – for ‘home is where one best knows oneself’ – Rapport and Dawson argue strongly against static conceptualizations of identity formation in relation to fixed spaces or frozen times: the emphasis on a relationship between identity and fixity has at least been challenged in anthropology of late by representations of the relationship between identity and movement. Now we have ‘creolizing’ and ‘compressing’ cultures and ‘hybridizing’ identities in a ‘synchronizing’ global society. Part of this reconceptualization pertains significantly to notions of home: part and parcel of this conceptual shift is a recognition that not only can one be at home in movement, but that movement can be one’s very home. (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 27)

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188 urban culture It is thus argued that traditional conceptions of individuals as members of separate localized communities and insulated cultures have become increasingly redundant in a world characterized by the accelerating processes of urbanization, globalization, synchronicity and hybridization. The call is for the social theorist to engage with the practices and configurations of identity in and through relations of time and space and, as such, to regard the search for the modern self ‘as inextricably tied to fluidity or movement across space and time’ (Rapport and Dawson 1998: 4). This emerging emphasis on the dynamic and changing temporal qualities of identity formation, so crucial to an understanding of ‘urban culture’, has permitted the recognition that identities are neither fixed nor given; they are not ascribed by belonging to a particular culture or living in a particular space. Rather, identities are achieved, negotiated, experimented with and challenged. However, the extent to which such a shifting and temporalizing construct must, necessarily, lead to an abandonment of any or all spatial markers of identity remains questionable. This is an issue raised by Keith and Pile: it may be argued that simultaneously present in any landscape are multiple enunciations of distinct forms of space – and these may be reconnected to the process of re-visioning and remembering the spatialities of counter-hegemonic cultural practices. We may now use the term ‘spatiality’ to capture the ways in which the social and spatial are inextricably realized one in another; to conjure up the circumstances in which society are simultaneously realized by thinking, feeling, doing individuals and also to conjure up the many different conditions in which such realizations are experienced by thinking, feeling, doing subjects. (Keith and Pile 1993: 6)

Urban culture(s) thus becomes a way of speaking about the postmodern condition, the decentred self and the inevitably fraught relations and post-structuralist structures of relations between decentred selves. At a time when it is supposed that the grand narratives issuing from the Enlightenment and propounding Reason’s project through modernity have broken down; at a time when collective politics have become dispersed through the fragmentation of all forms of solidarity and consensus and replaced by the indistinguishable pluralisms and polysemy of identity

urban culture

politics it is to urban culture that we turn. Analytically urban culture is the new metaphor for collective life and the new space for exploring both identity and difference. The cultural politics of difference, whether old or new, arise primarily from the workings of power – in society and on space in both their material and imagined forms. Hegemonic power does not simply manipulate naively given differences between individuals and social groups, it actively produces and reproduces difference as a key strategy to create and maintain modes of social and spatial division that are advantageous to its continued empowerment. At the same time, those subjected, dominated, or exploited by the workings of hegemonic power and mobilized to resist by their putative positioning, their assigned ‘otherness’, struggle against differentiation and division. This socio-spatial differentiation and struggle is, in turn, cumulatively concretized and conceptualized historically and geographically as uneven development, a term which we use to describe the composite and dynamic socio-temporal patterning of socially constructed differences at many different scales from the local to the global. (Soja and Hooper 1993: 184–5)

Cities are indeed magical places, they are the fount of modernity, the focus of politics and the very axis of the historical process. Without the city, there can be no politics. Without the history of the city, there is no reality of history. The city is the major political form of history. (Virilio 1999: 40)

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10 CULTURE AND POSTMODERNISM [By the] early 1980s the modernism/postmodernism constellation in the arts and the modernity/postmodernity constellation in social theory had become one of the most contested terrains in the intellectual life of Western societies. And the terrain is contested precisely because there is so much more at stake than the existence or nonexistence of a new artistic style, so much more also than the ‘correct’ theoretical line. (Huyssen 1988: 12)

Over the space of, perhaps, one decade, postmodernism has grown from the status of a mood to that of a reality; or at least a reality-in-thought. Its nebulous empire, projected forward by the tenuous and neurotic principles of self-decentring, the unrecognizability of priority, and committed instability, has expanded in step with this elevation in status. What was once a localized, and healthy, concern with the limits of the modernist trajectory in fine art and architecture has grown beyond arrogance into hubris, and mounted a critique of modern life and, more particularly, the forms of knowledge and value that support and sustain such living.

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Postmodernism knows no discipline – though its protagonists write mostly from ‘respectable’ positions within traditions of thought – rather it envelops as a corrosive sea mist and takes recognizable form either as an external attack on the methods and values of our time or as a spontaneous, intentional and internally generated symptom of our time. A phenomenon of this magnitude and scope is worthy of our concern: it affects our conceptions of culture, it challenges and perhaps changes our conceptions of culture, it may even, if some of its self-generated claims are to be internalized, constitute our culture. Could it be that postmodernity describes a state of the social structure, an ontology; whereas postmodernism describes an approach to knowing, an epistemology? If indeed this is the case, then postmodernism does not appear to proffer alternative ways of knowing from whence we might appropriately confront and appreciate the ‘new’, but instead it insinuates into all discourse, through a continuous scything at the knees of existing epistemologies, a sustained reduction and depotentiation of explanations that is premised upon the wholly unprivileged quality of all discourses. This is because it rejects such conventional forms of knowing; it would claim that epistemologies are ‘interested’, as for example in Foucault’s notion of ‘power-knowledge’. Deriving from the deconstruction of post-structuralism Baudrillard has occupied the wasteland between the signifier and the signified and justified it in the manner of a diagnosis, and even a celebration, of the entropic tendencies of our time. For Lyotard the difference between moral and political positions is as significant as the play of language games, and the theorist, the self, derives from the intersection and interface between these games – the différend – the synapses through which the various messages flow. The battle for the sign is clearly begun, without justification for any prior claims. The rule is that the rules do not stand. Within this swath social theory stands or falls (see Bauman 1992; Callinicos 1989; Jenks 1993), as does the concept of culture itself. Although the idea of postmodernism appears wilfully to elude definition, there being no discourse that could capture its project (there being no project), a courageous summation of its scattered parts is attempted by Hebdige. Now an acclaimed high priest himself, he has the authority (ironically, there being no such privilege) to provide the necessary conceptual bin-liner. Postmodernism – we are told – is neither a homogeneous entity nor a

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192 culture and postmodernism consciously directed ‘movement’. It is instead a space, a ‘condition’, a ‘predicament’, an aporia, an ‘unpassable path’ – where competing intentions, definitions, and effects, diverse social and intellectual tendencies and lines of force converge and clash. When it becomes possible for people to describe as ‘postmodern’ the decor of a room, the design of a building, the diagesis of a film, the construction of a record, or a scratch video, a television commercial, or an arts documentary, or the intertextual relations between them, the layout of a page in a fashion magazine or critical journal, an anti-teleological tendency within epistemology, the attack on the metaphysics of presence, a general attenuation of feeling, the collective chagrin and morbid projections of a post War generation of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle age, the predicament of ‘reflexivity’, a group of rhetorical tropes, a proliferation of surfaces, a new phase in commodity fetishism, a fascination for images, codes and styles, a process of cultural, political or existential fragmentation and/or crisis, the ‘decentring’ of the subject, an ‘incredulity towards metanarratives’, the replacement of unitary power axes by a plurality of power/discourse formations, the ‘implosion of meaning’, the collapse of cultural hierarchies, the dread engendered by the threat of nuclear self-destruction, the decline of the University, the functioning and effects of the new miniaturised technologies, broad societal and economic shifts into a ‘media’, ‘consumer’, or ‘multinational’ phase, a sense (depending on who you read) of placelessness (Jameson on the Bonnaventura Hotel) or the abandonment of placelessness (e.g. Kenneth Frampton’s ‘critical regionalism’) or (even) a generalised substitution of spatial for temporal coordinates – when it becomes possible to describe all these things as ‘postmodern’ (or more simply using a current abbreviation, as ‘post’ or ‘very post’) then it’s clear that we are in the presence of a buzzword. (Hebdige in Jenks 1993: 70–1)

So there it is . . . an analytic scatterbomb waiting to be randomly secreted in argument by the cultural terrorist. The story behind postmodernism, although it resists the narrative form, is about the end of another and greater story. The concluding tale is that which was written by the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment established a set of typical characters, with typical motives and a shared goal, that is to say that it provided the ‘grand’ narrative form for the history of modernity. Reason was to triumph


over faith, humankind was to become the measure of all things, nature was to be quelled and put to the service of humankind, and time was to be measured in terms of a transition from darkness into the light, a transition and an implicit theory of moral evolution that came to be known as progress. The centrality of humankind and, following Descartes, cognitive subjectivism, when linked to the institutionalized mode of reason that we call science, provided the methodology of this master plan. However, as history has shown us, the self-appointed claims of the methodology, those to objectivity, and the ideological insulation of its practitioners, in the form of value-neutrality, have created an accelerative moral vacuum. World wars, techniques and technologies of mass extermination and a market-led programme of subsequently polluting productivity have all weighed in the deficit column to offset the gains in health, income, enlightenment, democratization and overall quality of life. Is this then the state of modernity that warrants the new designation – postmodernism? More than this surely? . . . or perhaps less. NIETZSCHEAN INCEPTION The prince of irrationalism, Nietzsche, the (re-)discovered philosopher of the postmodern, had, it is argued, predicted and applauded the advent of this age of negative alchemy. His philosophical stylistics was, there is no doubt, concerned with morality – its redundancy and disassembly, to be more precise. Nietzsche made a series of sonorous pronouncements concerning the topic and purpose of philosophy and the weaknesses and degenerations that its conventional forms had wrought. Most serious and lasting is that uttered in the allegorical guise of Zarathustra, the pilgrim of postmodernity, descending from his ten years of contemplation on the mountain top, accompanied only by wisdom and pride, and witnessing the wastelands of humanity around him, ‘God is dead’ he declares, repeatedly. Now this is no simple sociological observation concerning the secularization of modern Western society, although it may be superstructural to such a phenomenon: what the philosopher is announcing is the collapse of the centre and the consequent decentralization of value. In contradistinction to all of those turn-of-the-century metaphors from social theory stressing ‘integration’, ‘solidarity’, ‘community’, ‘structure’, ‘instrumentality’ and ‘culture’ itself, in sum, the language of unification, Nietzsche is recommending dispersion. The survival of the human spirit

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194 culture and postmodernism rests no longer in the hands of collectivities but in the affirmation of the new warrior, the individual in the incarnation of the Übermensch (the overman). Man must escape from the protective politics of order into an affirmation of life as ‘the will to power’. Herewith are the seeds of our new cultural critic. I teach you the overman. Man is something that shall be overcome. What have you done to overcome him? All beings so far have created something beyond themselves; and do you want to be the ebb of this great flood and even go back to the beasts rather than overcome man? What is the ape to man? A laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. And man shall be just that for the overman: a laughingstock or a painful embarrassment. You have made your way from worm to man, and much in you is still worm . . . . Behold, I teach you the overman. The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say: the overman shall be the meaning of the earth! I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth, and do not believe those who speak to you of otherworldly hopes! Poison-mixers are they, whether they know it or not. Despisers of life are they, decaying and poisoned themselves, of whom the earth is weary: so let them go. (Nietzsche 1966: 124–5)

Nietszche is a didactic rather than a persuasive philosopher, he is forthright in telling people how best to live their lives and the key lies not in some collective ethic, either religious or secular, but in the overthrowal of the beliefs and conventions of the common man. Zarathustra espouses three significant doctrines being: the will to power, the suspicion and revaluation of values, and the eternal return. Life is not a rehearsal and does not benefit from modesty, obedience or claiming second place. The will to power is the existential self-affirmation of destiny through authentic and reflexive choice. The values of others are obstacles to the realization of the will, they are inhibiting and, particularly in the form of collective beliefs like Christianity, are constraining and worthy of violent opposition. Values, ideologically designated as ‘virtues’, such as pity and meekness, are corrupting and depotentiating of the will to power. It must be the Übermensch who will inherit the earth, but not in a finite state. This is no millennial philosophy searching for the ‘good’ society in a stable recognizable form – such is the discourse of Marx, Weber and Durkheim,


the ‘conventional’ theorists – there is no entelechy for Nietzsche: his telos is in the instability of process. The power of the will and the constant revaluation of values are the ‘good’, in themselves. No ‘end’ point can, nor should, be envisaged, no new or improved set of values is the purpose of being, but only the challenge of convention. If there can be no end then the process built on the ‘grand narrative’, ‘myth’, or ‘values’ of history is nothing more than an eternal return of circumstances, values, people and things. Nietzsche’s philosophical position is well summarized in the title of one of his last works Beyond Good and Evil, an amoral and apolitical locus from which to ‘deconstruct’ the thought and practice of other, more embodied and contexted, epistemologies and codes. His intuitive, anti-deductionist, anti-rationalist ideas challenge the classical tradition of philosophy and fly in the face of the metaphysical project, a knowledge of being. All metaphysical systems and ethical paradigms disguise assumptions and interests that are committed to the preservation of a weak stasis, the stagnation of the will and the triumph of mediocrity over the strength of creative being. Following in the wake of this violent assault on the social ethic is the clamouring Babel that postmodernism designates ‘polysemy’, the many voices within a culture waiting to be heard all with an equivalence and a right, ranging from the oppressed to, simply, the previously unspoken. POST-STRUCTURALIST GESTATION The many voices of today have become liberated through the exhaustion of modernity, and through its diminished ability to hold our thoughts in order. This is an articulate world but one increasingly lacking in a shared vocabulary and syntax; we have less and less to say about our collective condition. There is a diminished common identity, or shared vision. As Feher put it, ‘Postmodernism, like many of its conceptual brethren, postrevolutionary or post-industrial society, post-structuralism and the like, understand themselves not in terms of what they are but in terms of what they come after’ (Feher 1990: 87). The conduit for this vociferous hydra is provided by the post-structuralist project, the era of ‘difference’. The Nietzschean heritage turned left to emerge in the form of the French intellectual avant-garde through such writers as Lyotard, Lacan, Baudrillard, Derrida, Foucault, Donzelot, Virilio, Deleuze and Guattari.

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196 culture and postmodernism The theory of signs propounded by de Saussure had, through the amplification of Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism, established the premise that all cultural phenomena are primarily linguistic in character. More than this the cultural/linguistic system had come to be characterized, at a formal level, as an arbitrary but finite rule system capable of generating any number of other rule systems. The system has no biological necessity, and it is arbitrary also in terms of its symbols. The potential built into such a cultural system lay in its power in realizing an infinite range of realities. Relations between people could be reordered as a direct consequence of the formal properties of the cultural system. Thus the fact of human language, the fact of human culture, creates the potential for instability in the structure of communication. Meaning in culture, as in language, became a matter of ‘difference’. Through the anti-conventionalist will to power, through a sustained ‘deconstruction’ of the values of the system, through a commitment to the ‘instability of process’, post-structuralism pressed this premise further. If structuralism divided the sign from the referent . . . ‘post-structuralism’ – goes a step further: it divides the signifier from the signified. Another way of putting what we have just said is that meaning is not immediately present in a sign. Since the meaning of a sign is a matter of what the sign is not, its meaning is always in some sense absent from it too. Meaning, if you like, is scattered or dispersed along the whole chain of signifiers: it cannot be easily nailed down, it is never fully present in any one sign alone, but is rather a kind of constant flickering of presence and absence together. Reading a text is more like tracing this process of constant flickering than it is like counting the beads on a necklace. (Eagleton 1983: 128)

Derrida’s leading role in post-structuralism’s revaluation of meaning, though widely adopted as a model in cultural analysis, has a distinctly ‘text-centred’ form. Indeed, according to Derrida, all other cultural phenomena may be regarded as of the same genre as text or metaphoric representations of text. The implications of his disassembly of reference in meaning and also of the status of the subject in knowing are serious for our formulations of an increasingly relativized and fluid sense of the ‘cultural’. If meaning derives continuously from a play of signifiers, a


reprise of the instability of process, and we begin perpetually from the belief that ‘all the world’s a text’, then that which is known or knowable is beyond the province of mere subjectivity, is it, perhaps, in search of a ‘transcendental signifier’ in the form of a universal consciousness. Indeed, the previously referred-to assault on the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is a strategy for breaking down the phenomenological grounding in intentionality which had grown out of the Cartesian centring of the cogito, the subject, the self. Through Derrida we can no longer depend on the necessity or reliability of the self-present and self-referential practices of understanding that have come to provide for the ‘Reason’ behind Western, postEnlightenment consciousness. The ‘difference’ established by de Saussure has become, for Derrida, insufficient to handle the problem of signification. He therefore introduces the new concept of différance which, though immensely complex, is succinctly defined by Callinicos as: This neologism is what Lewis Carroll would have called a ‘portmanteau word’. It combines the meanings of the two words ‘to differ’ and ‘to defer’. It affirms, first, the priority of play and difference over presence and absence, and secondly, the necessity within difference of a relation to presence, a presence always deferred (into the future or past) but nevertheless constantly invoked. Presence is as intrinsic to difference as absence. (Callinicos 1982: 46)

There is no longer a closed system of meaning but rather an open horizon to infinity of possibilities and substitutions, with no certainty provided for the subject except through the falsehood of cultural convention. Reality is aestheticized and cultural forms are as but stylistic modes and devices within a written (but de-authored) text. Beyond Derrida’s ‘textual’ view of culture, Foucault and his disciples have taken another way. Their post-structuralist socio-cultural theory has dispensed with, or ‘deconstructed’, the oppressive causality of structure. Thus, any account of action became an account of the interface between politics and psychology, which is what we see in Donzelot’s analysis of the family as a unit of control, or Foucault’s many analyses of the constitution of subjects (or person-hood) through penology, sexuality, insanity or medical regimes. Such work is providing a ‘history of the present’ through a series of imaginative genealogies of modernity. Nietzsche’s will to power

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198 culture and postmodernism is revised as a ‘will to truth’ and the new synchronics of the past become realized as ‘power-knowledge’. Escaping from the anti-human poetics of Derrida’s Grammatology we encounter a somewhat more embodied politic in Foucault’s stories of timeless and yet infinitely connected instances of the exercise of power which make for the subject. For Foucault, it is the endless recursive spirals of power and knowledge: the total, timeless space he creates around the hellish figure of the panopticon: the viewing tower at the centre of the prison yard – the voir in savoir/pouvoir, the looking in knowing. (Hebdige 1988: 200)

Culture(s) for Foucault are not made up of lineage and heritage which may be understood under the name of tradition. Such a thesis on the continuity of collective understanding is both referential, with a priority to the signifier, and subject-based, atomizing knowledge through the concept of ‘idea’ and thus detracting from the larger purpose. This larger purpose is that of understanding history outside of the ‘classical episteme’ and the totalizing fiction of the ‘grand narrative’. Foucault’s archaeologies of knowledge provide us with appraisals of ‘discursive formations’ which both escape the determinisms and reductionisms of historiography and also enable the play of cultural signifiers to provide for meaning in contexts beyond the text. Here, then, the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche is appeased and the ‘ontic’/ ‘ontological’ of Heidegger is presented in challenge to the completion of metaphysics through history. The field of culture, within Foucault’s vision, is constituted through a symbolic system which must be viewed with the utmost suspicion. The system, as a play of signifiers, is a construction of meaning through the exercise of power. The aesthetic may embody political rationality; relationality and even intimacy may operate through surveillance; and the mundane artefact or taken-for-granted formation carries with it synchronicities of control and inhibition in other areas of social life. Thus Foucault invokes the concept of ‘governmentality’ which is: ‘the ensemble formed by the institutions, procedures, analyses and reflections, the calculations and tactics, that allow the exercise of this very specific albeit complex form of power, which has as its target population’ (Foucault 1979: 20).


Drawn as one easily is, into the pleasurable tyranny of exotic poststructuralist prose, it is too easy to forget or deride its political input to the study of culture, most notably in the area of feminist analysis, and most eloquently through the work of Kristeva, Cixous and Irigaray. Just as the Foucauldian school had dispensed with the concept of structure in the explanation of socio-cultural phenomena, so also had the feminist perspective begun to critique the ‘totalizing’ impulsions of such a notion. Although important stages in the development of a gendered politic, first wave feminism was still working with structural issues: the demand for equal rights that stemmed from liberal feminism, and the revelation of the exploitation and oppression accompanying the roles of domestic labour, the reserve army of labour and childcare, that Marxist feminism moved to centre stage. A second wave of theorizing was emerging which required the recognition of the centrality of ‘sexuality’ and ‘gender’ to identity and subjectivity. Post-structuralism, in its irreverent and will-topower-full demolition of the finite boundaries of meaning, executed the demolition of the ‘combinatories’ or ‘binary oppositions’ that had been so central to de Saussure’s language system and Lévi-Strauss’s cultural system (which had discussed the ‘exchange of women’). Most pervasive of these binaries, and most pertinent to the prevention or facilitation of a ‘feminized’ culture were those of man/woman, culture/nature and the cognitive/affective. POSTMODERNISM: THE FRUITION Another significant, but often underplayed or forgotten, element in the mixing of the postmodern cocktail is the contribution of liberal and even conservative sociological theories concerning the altered structure of social relations in late modernity. Bell, proclaiming an end to ideology, arguably instigated the ‘visible’ era of the ‘post-’, with his thesis describing the shift in both the mode and the relations of production. The productive base, Bell and also Touraine inform us, had shifted, through market forces and advances in technology, into the post-industrial, and the system of social stratification, long since recognizable in terms of polarization and now steadily thickening at the waist, had altered, such as to diffuse conventional class antagonisms, into the post-capitalist. These two concepts, Bauman tells us: ‘have served the purpose well: they sharpened our attention to what is new and discontinuous, and offered a reference point for counter arguments

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200 culture and postmodernism in favour of continuity’ (Bauman 1988: 217). What has occurred beyond this, it may be suggested, is a conceptual drift, a crude assumption that postmodernism is, in some sense, the direct efflux of these potentially altered structural conditions: that it is a superstructural realization of shifts in the material base. This is an appropriation that one could ascribe to Lyotard when he states that postmodernism ‘designates the state of our culture following the transformations which, since the end of the nineteenth century, have altered the game rules for science, literature and the arts’ (Lyotard 1984: 23). This would appear to provide postmodernism with an objective status. It is now descriptive of ‘the state of our culture’; it is not reducible to being merely an idea, an abstraction, a mood or a fashion. Lyotard’s manifesto is more than suggestive; it is legislative and covertly value-laden. It sweeps away the triumphs of reason and political struggle throughout Western history (an alternative set of values) and it opens the forum to the malcontentions of an infinity of factional interests which ‘must now be heard’. Its values, if they may be designated as such, are those of disappointment, futility, despair and anarchy. It is as if ‘anything goes’ in the manner of a true nihilism. The tragedy of this injunction, as also recommended for scientific method by Feyerabend (1978), is that whereas some ‘things’ should be heard with a voice loud enough to silence common sense, all things ‘go’ with a competitive equivalence and are thus diffused under the banner of the postmodern. We are led into absurdities, such as the novelist Bret Easton Ellis treating the ‘serial killer’ as a metaphor for the truly postmodern man, or being asked by Baudrillard to imagine that the Gulf War only took place within our television sets. This is a high price to pay to avoid the ‘totalizing’ effects of social theory. McHale (1987) explains that every theorist and commentator ‘constructs’ postmodernism in different ways and towards different ends; he also notes that all accounts are ‘finally fictitious’ – a truly non-referential exercise! McHale also states that postmodernism displays an ontological ‘dominant’ in opposition and reaction to the ‘epistemological’ dominant of modernism. This latter distinction is an intriguing way to differentiate between phenomena, but it is based upon the binaries that post-structuralism was supposed to have rendered defunct. The binaries also loom large in Harvey’s (1989) definitions, with modernism addressing paradigm, hypotaxis, and genital/phallic formations as opposed to the postmodern preoccupations with syntagm, parataxis and the polymorphous/


androgenous. This all contrives to place the postmodern back within the ambit of conventional reason and closed systems of meaning. However, this continuity will not do. Both Baudrillard and Lyotard, in their different ways, expunge the possible influence of antecedent theorizing by positing an unprecedented fracture between past and present. This constitutes a leap into the postmodern which is an extrapolation from a huge conceit, one that Kellner (1988) points to, ironically, as a theory of an ‘epistemological break’ resting itself upon a ‘meta-narrative’ of the nature of recent history. Baudrillard has prepared us for this failure of continuity through the edict announcing ‘the end of society’ (this is certainly a development of the Nietzschean valediction for the deity and the Foucauldian reduction of sociology to the role of ‘power-knowledge’). The social bond in postmodernity has, it would seem, dispersed into a proliferation of signs and the reality of our being together is fabricated through a series of infinitely reproducible similarities: the simulations of simulacra (surely the hyperbole of Benjamin’s shrinking aura contained within a vision of the ‘eternal recurrence’). History becomes no longer ordained through human desire and purpose but through an apparently semi-autonomous cybernetic technology. Different but uniform models or codes (transposed from the ‘texts’ of post-structuralism) come to structure life through social organization. Modernity exploded through ‘growth’ and ‘production’ into differences: postmodernity espouses a vertiginous dedifferentiation through the implosion into simulations. The consumptive but non-generative ‘black hole’ becomes a central, and suitably sciencefictional, metaphor. Lyotard’s postmodernism is a rather more cognitive condition than that of Baudrillard, who though abandoning the ideology of sociology is still inhabiting the same terrain. Lyotard offers us primarily a commentary on knowledge and not a description of social structures, although in many instances his ideas depend implicitly on a Baudrillardian formulation of such structures. He appears concerned to develop an epistemology appropriate to the newly emergent conditions of knowledge, but this is too grand a claim on his behalf. Such theorizing would place him in continuity with the Marxist project of developing historically appropriate categories of understanding. Lyotard reveals himself as resistant to epistemology, he rejects its ‘meta-narratives’, its backward-looking values, its totalizing thought such as that humanistic vision of an altruistic moral commitment inherent in the sociological tradition. In opposition,

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202 culture and postmodernism or substitution, Lyotard recommends the play of ‘language games at a local level’ – this is the key to rendering the ‘now’ intelligible. At one point he cites as desirable the replacement of the ‘expert’s homology’ with the ‘inventor’s parology’: could this be an attempt to justify the democratization of all knowledge claims or perhaps a contemporary invocation of the principle of ‘falsification’? It is, of course, neither. It is Cartesian radical doubt gone schizoid, and this resonates with the sad, minimalist devastation at the heart of Kroker and Cook’s (1986) apparition of hyperreal darkness within postmodernism. The message seems to be that in the face of generations of oppressive and exploitative reason and ordered thought the ‘post’ demands faulty logic, mistakes and accident as its methodological imperatives. This last set of invocations are, sadly, reactive upon the status quo, like the noise of adolescence. Perhaps as Hutcheon tells us, ‘Postmodernism paradoxically manages to legitimize culture (high and low) even as it subverts it’ (Hutcheon 1989: 15). Whatever attitude one strikes in relation to the postmodern it cannot be ignored: it is now a cultural phenomenon itself. It has permeated the academy and the media and therefore requires attention. It may be trivialized as mere artefact, ‘the decor of a room’ or the mini skirt in combination with the army boot, or it can be treated seriously as an endeavour to theorize the ‘new’ – in progress. The difficulties of knowing the contemporary are well known. Knowledge, it is often claimed, can only be gained and enjoyed about what is in some sense over and done with. The claim to know the contemporary is therefore often seen as a kind of conceptual violence, a fixing of the fluid and formless energies of the urgently (but tenuously) present now into a knowable and speakable form, by fundamental and irrevocable acts of critical choosing. This formulation rests upon a sense of the inherent division between experience and knowledge, a belief that, when we experience life, we can only partially understand it, and when we try to understand life we are no longer experiencing it. According to this model, knowledge is always doomed to arrive too late on the scene of experience. (Connor 1989: 3)

However flawed, or incomplete or, in places, absurd, this is postmodernism’s place, to challenge such disjunction. It is not a body of thought,


it is not a method, it may be an attitude towards culture. Whatever, it is not reducible to axioms, so I shall therefore foolishly attempt its capture around a series of ‘family resemblances’. • Postmodernism always begins with the problems set by the ‘languaged’ character of its culture. It cannot escape, and seeks not to escape, the problems of reference and re-presentation. • Postmodernism witnesses the transformation of the dominant form of knowledge in Western society. Science and its ideology – scientism – have moved from a belief in the ordered character of externality to a metaphoric relation with the cosmos. As we applaud the shrinkage of ‘mind-less’ empiricism and ‘value-less’ positivism, postmodernism addresses the advent of ‘techno-science’ with its rapidity, calculation, subtlety and intrusiveness. Its ability to imitate and distance the self from whatever reality might have been are exponential. • Postmodernism attends to the necessary allegiance of ‘techno-science’ with national and transnational consumer capitalism – what we know as ‘globalization’. The practical, realist, materiality of everyday life is reduced, through representation, and thus aestheticized. • Postmodernism abandons faith in the ‘grand’/‘master’/‘meta-’ narratives of traditional epistemologies. Truth, certainty and mono-directional causality are no longer sought or respected. • Postmodernism celebrates the previously unspoken (or only whispered) multiplicity of differences of today in sexuality, gender, ethnicity, and art and writing . . . Perhaps the ‘new European ideal’, if not just a resolution of conflict and a policing of difference, would have to be the embodiment of a postmodern culture – timeless, universal, de-contexted, de-traditionalized, spontaneous and impartial symbolism. We will have travelled a long way from a culture which: includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people . . . (thus for the English) . . . Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, the cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. (Eliot 1948: 63)

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204 culture and postmodernism Yet we must remember that a reactionary knee-jerk will not arrest this cultural and theoretic flow, postmodernism is here. As Michelle Barrett advises, ‘postmodernism is not something that you can be for or against: the reiteration of old knowledges will not make it vanish . . . it is a cultural climate as well as an intellectual position, a political climate as well as an academic fashion’ (Barrett et al. 1979: 156).

11 CULTURAL STUDIES: WHAT IS IT? This book has not been about ‘cultural studies’ but about the sociological study of culture. The two are not incompatible, but the latter, which subsumes the former, derives from a variety of philosophical antecedents and traditions of social theorizing that I have attempted to place some sense of order upon throughout this short monograph. ‘Cultural studies’, though drawing variously, and either explicitly or implicitly, from these traditions, is a relative newcomer and claims a difference for itself. I shall attempt here a brief sketch of this difference, or rather identity, and its background, which will not necessarily provide a justification for its particularity although, as in the case of postmodernism, I have confirmed its status by singling it out for special treatment. Many other scholars have attempted to provide a map of this emergent area of work and I shall offer two excellent summations of the territory before I begin my own. We should note that all pivot around the establishment of the Birmingham Centre. Milner and Browitt tell us that: The unusually polysemic quality of ‘cultural studies’ attaches as much to the terms ‘studies’ as to ‘culture’ or ‘cultural’: not only is there no clear consensus over what to study, but also none over how to

206 cultural studies: what is it? organize this study. The various senses of ‘cultural studies’ seem to cluster around four main sets of meanings: 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. (Milner and Browitt 2002: 6)

And McGuigan recommends: I want to suggest that there are, broadly, three levels at which the development of cultural studies can be addressed. First, in terms of the movement of ideas within the field, the succession, incommensurability and interaction between different paradigms and problematics. This is the most conventional means of accounting for an academic project. Second, cultural studies may be considered in terms of its formation , as Williams insisted it should. This involves addressing and institutional and historical contexts of emergence and transformation. Third, one can explore its politics of representation, the mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion which regulate agency within the field: basically, who gets to define the issues and with what purposes. (McGuigan 1992: 29)

Over no more than the last thirty years, initially in Britain and then spreading to North America and Australia, a new realm of research and publication activities has entered the academy under the guise of ‘cultural studies’. Within that period it has gained a legitimacy and a popularity, both inside and outside the academy, which is indicative of its appeal to important contemporary social currents. Research centres have been established and have flourished, academic appointments have been made specifically in that field (and one notes this in relation to, say, the significance of Durkheim gaining the first European Chair in sociology), graduate and, more recently, undergraduate degree programmes set up, numerous journals launched and heavily subscribed, and publishers have designated lists and promoted editors wholly in terms of ‘cultural studies’. So what is it? If, like Topsy, it just grew, both during the Wilsonian boom in university provision and the support of critical thinking but also

cultural studies: what is it?

through the Thatcher/Joseph period when the social sciences more generally were under threat, then it must surely have strong and influential parentage or the political complexion of a chameleon. Neither of these assessments is strictly true. Over the issue of lineage, Stuart Hall (in Bennett et al. 1981) has produced the clearest orthodoxy of a family tree which other, more recent, biographies have assumed as fact and reproduced (and which I shall rehearse in a moment), yet the rush of biographies (Turner 1990; Agger 1992) itself, all prior to even a fiftieth birthday, and a constant ‘origins’ introspection on the part of even its leading practitioners (see Johnson 1983) reveal a bastard child desperately insecure and in search of a parent figure. And over the issue of political complexion one might suggest that the hue was predominantly pink – if not recognizably Marxist then certainly socialist, or at least social-democratic – with a commitment to unfashionable values like conflict and radicalism, reform and democratization. Yet neither of my two previous assessments is strictly false either. Hall’s hagiography for ‘cultural studies’ points, rightly, to beginnings not so much in continuities as in fractures: In serious, critical intellectual work, there are no ‘absolute beginnings’ and few unbroken continuities. . . . What we find, instead, is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks – where old lines of thought are disrupted, older constellations displaced, and elements, old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. . . . Cultural Studies, as a distinctive problematic, emerges from one such moment, in the mid-1950s. (Hall in Bennett 1981: 19)

Hall proceeds to elect a solid triumvirate of men-and-their-texts as formative and epoch-making. The three are Richard Hoggart and his Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams with Culture and Society and E.P. Thompson with The Making of the English Working Class. Now this is an impressive line-up and notable also for its location within the humanities and literary studies, rather than the social sciences. Perhaps part of their acceptability was the capacity to popularize social scientific issues from within ‘respectable’ disciplines; all three, to varying degrees, were at home within the lecture theatre, the Arts Council, BBC2’s Late Night Line Up,

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208 cultural studies: what is it? the political rally and university administration. All three managed to theorize the social and political grounds of culture without the militant taint of the social sciences, at that time identified with long hair, leather jackets and student occupations. Hoggart, for example, in his Preface, lays out a sociological problematic with a literary ‘distancing’. I am inclined to think that books on popular culture often lose some of their force by not making sufficiently clear who is meant by ‘the people’, by inadequately relating their examinations of particular aspects of ‘the people’s’ life to the wider life they live, and to attitudes they bring to their entertainments. I have therefore tried to give such a setting, and so far as I could, to describe characteristic working-class relationships and attitudes. Where it is presenting background, this book is based to a large extent on personal experience, and does not purport to have the scientifically-tested character of a sociological survey. There is an obvious danger of generalization from limited experience. I have therefore included, chiefly in notes, some of the findings of sociologists where they seemed necessary, either as support or as qualification of the text. I have also one or two instances in which others, with experiences similar to mine, think differently. (Hoggart 1958: 9)

Nevertheless, Hoggart, Williams and Thompson are collected, by Hall, as the ‘caesura’ out of which ‘cultural studies’ sprang because all three treated working-class culture (with a disregard for the ‘culture debate’ over high/low or mass) as active, coherent, intelligible, located within history, and – even though all three work with versions of materialism – not solely reducible to a developing set of economic conditions. This important sense of ‘agency’ in culture is well established by Thompson when he tells us that the growth of the working class: is revealed, first, in the growth of class consciousness: the consciousness of an identity of interests as between all these diverse groups of working people and as against the interests of other classes. And, second, in the growth of corresponding forms of political and industrial organization. By 1832 there were strongly-based and self-conscious

cultural studies: what is it? working-class institutions – trade unions, friendly societies, educational and religious movements, political organisations, periodicals – workingclass intellectual traditions, working-class community-pattern, and a working-class structure of feeling. (Thompson 1968: 73)

The working class did not arise as a necessary by-product of the factory system. It is, of course, possible to overemphasize the communality of vision between these three figures. Hoggart’s recollections of Hunslett are deeply impressionistic and carry, within their care and anger, a romanticism bordering on sentimentality. The upshot of this is a model of culture which, although vibrant and valuable in its own right, is nevertheless passive, receptive and tending towards complacency. Williams has a much more voluntaristic view of culture and sees it as a dynamic. But despite his illumination of working-class culture as real and not merely the overshadowed residue in a high-culture-dominated society, his Leavis-like view of culture as a totality incorporates the former and enables it to contribute, thus deradicalizing its potential. Thompson, Marxist from the outset, forbids the notion of a common culture and predicates his account on autonomy, challenge, conflict and, above all, class struggle. Hall, beyond introducing Hoggart, Williams and Thompson as forebears of ‘cultural studies’, further divides its contemporary practice between ‘two paradigms’ – the culturalist and the structuralist, the difference being that in culturalism ‘the stress is placed on the making of culture rather than on its determined conditions’ and in structuralism ‘the stress is placed on the specific nature of those supposedly irreducible formal properties which characterize the structure of different types of signifying practice and distinguish them one from another’ (Hall in Bennett et al. 1981: 10–11). The triumvirate are all culturalists and the structuralists, though an imprecise category, are broadly followers of de Saussure, like Lévi-Strauss, Foucault and Barthes, all discussed earlier. Hall’s two paradigms live on, though less contentiously than before, with the British historicists resisting the generalizing and decontextualizing theoreticity of the structuralists with their all too comprehensive and deterministic conception of ideology. However, the development of a neo-Gramscian perspective through the work of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, under

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210 cultural studies: what is it? the directorship of Hall himself, meant that a softer mediation between agency and all-encompassing structure was provided through the concept of hegemony. ‘Cultural studies’ was saved from an early, and wasteful, internecine conflict. It was the establishment of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, initially under Richard Hoggart and then most notably under Stuart Hall for over a decade, that probably did more than any other intellectual or institutional initiative in this country to provide a solid and recognizable foundation for what is now known as ‘cultural studies’. The Centre generated a shared problematic (the Gramscian sense of ideology), a set of methods and strategies – albeit loose – for research (such as ethnography), a particular range or perhaps strata of substantive topics (like ‘subcultures’) and a group of young, ambitious and multi-disciplinary theorists (for example, Hebdige, Gilroy, McRobbie, Willis, Cohen, Walkerdine, Morley) sprouting out of an imaginative postgraduate programme into film, media, cultural and communication studies departments and providing a momentum of enthusiasm, research and publication that has not waned up to the present. In this way the CCCS itself has constituted the ‘third paradigm’ of ‘cultural studies’, and its network. Referring back to Hall’s sense of ‘old lines of thought’ we might suggest three other contributions to, or starting points for, modern ‘cultural studies’, which though not unexplored remain unacknowledged in their lineage. The first is a near contemporary of the triumvirate, namely the novelist and critic George Orwell. His observations on popular fiction in relation to a sense of the ‘dominant ideology’, his analyses of the absence of a working-class presence in nineteenth-century fiction (other than through the representation of a ‘mob’), his falsely prophetic 1984 views on mass culture/mass audience through the ever-increasing power and penetration of the mass media, and his Hoggart-like romanticism in reconstructing working-class community and home life would all seem to qualify him for, at least, a passing reference on the road to ‘cultural studies’. In a working-class home . . . you breathe a warm, decent, deeply human atmosphere which is not so easy to find elsewhere. I should say that a manual worker, if he is in steady work and drawing good wages . . . has a better chance of being happy than an ‘educated’ man. (Orwell 1937: 45)


The second source derives from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and has a substantive rather than a theoretic core. This is the Victorian ‘centre’ for contemporary cultural studies, the ‘centre’ being the East End of London and its contributions being Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, Jack London’s People of the Abyss, Charles Booth’s Life and Labour of People in London, Walter Besant’s East London, James Greenwood’s Low Life Deeps, the novels of Charles Dickens and Arthur Morrison, and the writings of Henry James, Mearns, Sims, Engels and many, many more. These urban spectators picked up on and gave voice to the outcast and inarticulate culture of a working class delineated and ghettoized morally, politically, economically, and even geographically and architecturally. Their work is informed by no clear theory of ideology but by a ‘bitter cry’ on behalf of ‘the whole way of life of a people’ informed by observation, demography and epidemiology. Their practices have been most cynically described in terms that modern ‘cultural studies’ would equally well need to refute: ‘being at home in the city’ was represented as a privileged gaze, betokening possession and distance, that structured ‘a range of disparate texts and heterogeneous practices which emerge in the nineteenth century city – tourism, exploration/discovery, social investigation, social policy.’ A powerful streak of voyeurism marked all of these activities; the ‘zeal for reform’ was often accompanied ‘by a prolonged, fascinated gaze’ from the bourgeoisie. (Pollock quoted in Walkowitz 1992: 16)

Such a description reveals the flâneur, both as an ancient and modern phenomenon. The final source of neglected antecedents derives from sociology in the USA and has two tributaries. The first leads from the isolated East Coast study published in 1943 by William Foote Whyte and called Street Corner Society. This is now hailed as a classic sociological exercise in the methodology borrowed from anthropology, known as ‘participant observation’. Whyte lived for a number of years with an Italian–American gang, as a quasi-member, initially engaging in their nefarious activities and at all times eliciting their cooperation and support in his study of their shared lives. The second emerges from the neo-Chicago School (discussed

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212 cultural studies: what is it? in more detail in Chapter 9), following in the wake of G.H. Mead, Park and Burgess and now under the leadership of Everett C. Hughes and involving such figures as Becker, Roth, Geer, Strauss, Davis and Goffman. All of these middle-class students were encouraged to carry out their postgraduate research also in the form of participant observation, through living in and acting-out social roles that would otherwise be wholly foreign to them. They have provided us with a series of sensitive and subjective accounts of the symbolic interaction involved in being a cab-driver, a trainee nurse, a hairdresser, a TB patient, a jazz musician and even a druguser. Their sense of the politic behind their ‘cultural’ studies is captured in their phrase ‘the sociology of the underdog’. So, cultural studies: what is it? I shall conclude with a list of attributes deriving from Agger’s (1992) formulation: 1. Cultural studies operates with an expanded concept of culture. It rejects the assumptions behind the ‘culture debate’ and thus rejects the high/low culture binary or, indeed, any attempt to re-establish the grounds for any cultural stratification. It adheres more closely to the anthropological view of culture as being ‘the whole way of life of a people’, though it does not subscribe to the view of culture as a totality. 2. Following from the above, cultural studies legitimates, justifies, celebrates and politicizes all aspects of popular culture. It regards popular culture as valuable in its own right and not a ‘shadow phenomenon’ nor simply a vehicle for ideological mystification. 3. The proponents of cultural studies, as representative of their age, recognize the socialization of their own identities through the processes of mass media and communication that they seek to understand. 4. Culture is not viewed in stasis, as fixed or as a closed system. Cultural studies regards culture as emergent, as dynamic and as continual renewal. Culture is not a series of artefacts or frozen symbols but rather a process. 5. Cultural studies is predicated upon conflict rather than order. It investigates, and anticipates, conflict both at the level of face-to-face interaction but also, and more significantly, at the level of meaning. Culture cannot be viewed as a unifying principle, a source of shared understanding or a mechanism for legitimating the social bond. 6. Cultural studies is ‘democratically’ imperialistic. As all aspects of social life are now ‘cultured’ then no part of social life is excluded from its


interests – opera, fashion, gangland violence, pub talk, shopping, horror films and so on . . . they are no longer colonized, canonized or zoned around a central meaning system. 7. Cultural representations are viewed by cultural studies at all levels – inception, mediation and reception, or production, distribution and consumption. 8. Cultural studies is interdisciplinary, it acknowledges no disciplinary origin, it encourages work on the interface of disciplinary concerns and it acknowledges a shifting and sprightly muse. 9. Cultural studies rejects absolute values – it does what it wants (and sometimes, it shows!).

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INDEX

absolutism: cultural standards 3–5; see also critical judgement; relativism Adorno, Theodor 87, 89, 122; critique of mass culture 106; culture industry 108–9; Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 109 aesthetics: of dialectical materialism 83; Kant’s influence 46; philosophical tradition 12; styles and subcultures 139–40 Agger, B. 212–13 Alexander, Geoffrey 28 alienation, subjectivism in art 78 Althusser, Louis 69; ideological state apparatuses 115–16; ‘interpellation’ 116, 122; on Marx’s epistemological break 184 anomie, in urban life 181 anthropology: as colonialism 95;

ethnography 35; evolution of societies 31–3; evolutionism 41; Geertz’s ‘thick description’ 60–2; Lévi-Strauss and structuralism 62–3; pattern theory of culture 36–8; relativism and historicalism 33–6; social structure and culture 29–36; structural-functionalism 38–41; urban culture and 187 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 12 Arnold, Matthew 18, 33; Culture and Anarchy 21; literary-romantic tradition 20–4 Barrett, Michelle 204 Barth, R. 185, 186 Bateson, Gregory 37 Baudelaire, Charles 173, 183 Baudrillard, Jean 140; ‘end of society’ 200, 201; postmodernism 191; simulacra 7, 166

226 index Bauman, Zygmunt 199–200 Becker, 212 Bell, Daniel 111, 199 Benedict, Ruth 37 Benjamin, Walter 65, 101, 201; Arcades Project 89, 183; The Author as Producer 87; modernity 86–9; urban culture 174; ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ 7, 87, 166 Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation 15–16; panopticon 172 Berger, John 154 Bernstein, Basil 28, 117, 127, 130 Besant, Walter, East London 211 Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies see Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies Boas, Franz 35 Booth, Charles, Life and Labour of People in London 211 Bottomore, Tom 25, 108; concept of culture 120 Bourdieu, Pierre: cultural reproduction 115–16, 126–32; cultural unconscious 131; on the established order 114, 115; the habitus 130–1; intellectual field 129–30; interpreting art 158 Bradley, F. H. 102 Brake, Mike, on subculture 151–2 Brecht, Bertolt 87 bricolage 139 Britain: concept of culture 10; growth of cultural studies 206–7; industry and progress 20–1 Browitt, J. 205–6

Bryson, N. 158, 160, 164; transformations 169–70 Burger, T. 47 Callinicos, A. 197 capitalism: market economy 108; Marxism and 73–5; post-capitalist society 199–200; Weber’s ‘spirit’ of 53–5 Carlyle, Thomas 7, 22, 33; literary-romantic tradition 18–20; Signs of the Times 18 Castells, Manuel, urban culture 173, 184–5 Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies 152; establishment of 209–10; subcultures and 134–40 Centre for European Studies 115 Chaney, D. 2 Chicago School 211–12; subcultures and 140, 142; and urban culture 181–3 Christianity: and evolutionary theory 30; and Nietzsche 194; Weber and Protestant ethic 54–5 Cicourel, A. 117 civil society, Mills on collapse of 109 civilization: classifications of 31–2; concept of culture and 7–10 Cixous, Hélène 199 Clarke, John 135, 136; on hegemony 137–8; subcultures 140 class: Arnold’s divisions 22; Goldmann’s structuralism and 84–5; habitus 131; Marxist analysis of 70–3; politics of 113; subcultures and 135–6, 138; Williams’s critique of elitism 90–3 Cohen, A. 185, 186, 210 Coleridge, William 33, 46; Constitution of Church and State 16–18, 19

index communism 87 community: Bourdieu’s habitus 130–1; Gemeinschaft in urban culture 178–80; subcultures and 148–9 Comte, Auguste: Law of Three Stages 159; on observation 159–60 ‘Conditions for Successful Degradation Ceremonies’ (Garfinkel) 124–5 Connor, S. 202 Cook, D. 202 Cooley, Charles 180 critical judgement, and relativism 4–6 ‘Cultural Philosophers’ 44–9 cultural reproduction: Althusser’s ISAs 115–16; Bourdieu and 126–32; concept of 114–15, 120–1; Durkheim on ensuring solidarity 123–4; ethnomethodology 124–5; structuralist perspective 125–6 cultural stratification: aspects of 94–8; colonialism and domination 95–7; Frankfurt School on 106–10; by gender 97–8; positive view of mass culture 110–13; threat of mass culture 105–6; values in literature 98–104 cultural studies 2; academic growth of 205–6; Agger’s formulation of 212–13; Birmingham CCCS 134–40; Gramsci and 80; politics of subculture 133; ‘sociology of the underdog’ 211–12; structuralism-culturalism 209 culture: as arts and intellect 12; cognitive 11; collective society 11; concept of 1–3, 6–7, 117–20;

context of social interaction 58; four types of 11–12; ‘high’ 8, 21, 111; idea of ‘civilization’ 7–10; literary-romantic tradition 16–24; pattern theory of 36–8; philosophical tradition 12–16; production and Marxism 121–2; as social category 12; social structure and 117–20; standards of 3–5; symbolic views of 26–8; theory 2–3; Weber’s spirit of 53–6 Darwin, Charles 11, 30 Dawson, A. 187–8 Debord, Guy 140, 157 Derrida, Jacques: Grammatology 198; post-structuralism 196–8 Descartes, René 13, 156, 193 deviancy theory 152; see also subcultures Dickens, Charles 211 difference: politics of 98; see also subcultures Dilthey, Wilhelm 44, 76 Downes, D., subcultures 145–6 Durkheim, Émile 14; anomie 181; cities and moral density 180–1; The Division of Labour 55, 123; function of education 127; and Lévi-Strauss 62; mechanical and organic solidarity 151; The Rules of Sociological Method 123; social facts 25–6; social structure 35, 38, 117, 144; symbolic view of culture 26–8 Dworkin, Andrea 97 Dylan, Bob 3–4 Eagleton, Terry 196 education: Bourdieu and cultural reproduction 126–32; power

227

228 index relations and 115; subculture underachievers 142–3 Eggan, F. 29–30 Elias, Norbert 10 Eliot, T. S. 90, 203; After Strange Gods 102; cultural stratification 102–4; The Idea of a Christian Society 102; Notes Towards the Definition of Culture 102–4 Ellis, Bret Easton 200 Ellul, Jacques 106 empiricism 157; visual perception 167–8 Engels, Friedrich: consciousness and life 64; Dialectics of Nature (with Marx) 66–7; personal taste in art 71 Enlightenment thought 192–3 epistemology: observation and 155–9; postmodernism 191 ethnography, subcultures 134–5 ethnomethodology, cultural reproduction 124–5 Evans-Pritchard, Edward 41–2 evolutionary theory 30, 41 Fanon, Frantz 95–6 fascism 87, 107, 109 Feher, D. 195 feminism: cultural stratification 98; post-structuralism and 199 Ferracuti, F. 142 Feuerbach, Ludwig, Marx and 66–7 Feyerabend, Paul 200 Firth, Raymond 42, 119 Fischer, E. 93 Fortes, Meyer 40 Foucault, Michel 191; the panopticon 172; post-structuralism 197–8 Frank, A. G. 96 Frankfurt School 10, 87

Frazer, James G., The Golden Bough 33 Freud, Sigmund 75 Frisby, D. 56 Fromm, Erich 107 functionalism 38–40 Gans, H. J., on popular culture 111–12 Garfinkel, Harold 52, 60; ‘Conditions for Successful Degradation Ceremonies’ 124–5; social action 118 Geertz, Clifford: bricolage 139; interpretive anthropology 60–2; men without culture 6 gender, cultural stratification 97–8 Gerbner, G. 111 Germany: concept of Kultur 9; romanticism 87 Gestalt theory 168–9 gifts, Lévi-Strauss on potlatch 62–3 Gilroy, P. 135, 210 globalization, Marxist view of 73 Goffman, Erving 97, 158, 212 Golding, William, Lord of the Flies 6 Goldmann, Lucien 65, 88; genetic structuralism 83–6 Gombrich, Ernst 158, 164 Goodman, Nelson 158 Gordon, M. 143 Gramsci, Antonio 65; compared to Lukács 79; hegemony 79–82, 115, 137; The Prison Notebooks 80; role of the intellectual 79, 82–3 Greenwood, James, Low Life Deeps 211 Gurvich, Georges 150, 180 Haag, Ernest van den 106 Habermas, Jürgen 56; metaphors of 119

index habitus, Bourdieu’s concept of 130–1 Hall, Stuart 135; growth of cultural studies 207–10; on subcultures 141 Hare, David 3–4 Harris, K. 149 Harris, Marvin 14 Hartman, G. 43 Harvey, D. 185, 200 Haussman, Baron Georges 183 Hebdige, Dick 130, 136–9, 141, 210; Subculture: The Meaning of Style 134–5; summation of postmodernism 191–2; urban culture 186 Hegel, Georg W. F. 2, 160, 164; and Goldmann 84; rationalist idealism 66; total philosophical system 77 hegemony: alliances of social groups 136–7; Gramsci’s analysis of 79–82, 115; social structure 80–3 Heidegger, Martin 198 Hirst, P. 53, 123 historicalism: in anthropology 34–6; Marxist theory and 122 Hitler, Adolf 178 Hobbes, Thomas 105 Hoggart, Richard 33; growth of cultural studies 207–10; The Uses of Literacy 135, 207–8 Holocaust 9 Homans, G. 150 Hooper, B. 189 Horkheimer, Max: cultural stratification 106, 107; culture industry 108–9; Dialectic of Enlightenment (with Adorno) 109 Hughes, Everett C. 212 Hughes, Robert 163 human nature, anthropology and 33–4

Hume, David 13 Husserl, Edmund 57 Huyssen, J., on postmodernism 190 identity, in urban culture 185–9 ideology 122; concept of culture 10, 11 imperialism and colonialism, sociology of development 95–6 industrialization: Benjamin on 89; Bentham’s response to 15–16; ideal–material dualism 19; literary-romantic tradition 18–24; mass culture and 105–6; mass production 10; social structure and 7; urban 180–1 Irigaray, Luce 199 Ivins, W. 156; perception 167–8 Jackson, P. 149 James, Henry 211 Jameson, Fredric 140 Jay, M. 154, 162; priority of the visual 155; scopic regime 172 Jefferson, Tony 135 Jenkins, R. 186 Jenks, Chris 185 Joseph, Keith 207 Kafka, Franz 78 Kant, Immanuel 2; aesthetics 17; influence on cultural philosophers 45–6; sensibility and understanding 46 Keith, M. 188 Kellner, D. 201 kinship, Lévi-Strauss’s structuralism 63 Kirk, Russell 106 Kluckhohn, Clyde 29; pattern theory of culture 36–8 knowledge: the Natural Attitude 160;

229

230 index neo-Kantianism 48; postmodernism and 200–2; pure versus practical reason 65; sensibility and understanding 46; see also epistemology Kokoschka, Oskar 78 Komarovsky 143 Korsch, Karl 87 Kristeva, Julia 199 Kroeber, Alfred L. 29; pattern theory of culture 36–8 Kroker, A. 202 Kuhn, Thomas S., paradigms of knowledge 47 labour, Marxist view of 121–2 Lacan, Jacques 63 Laclau, Ernst 185 Leavis, F. R.: cultural stratification 98–102; Mass Civilization and Minority Culture 98–9 Leavis, Frank 90 Lee, A. 143 Lefebvre, Henri 184 Lenin, V. I.: and Lukács 76; personal taste in art 71 Lévi-Strauss, Claude: bricolage 139; depth and surface 125; The Gift 62; post-structuralism 196, 199; structuralism 34, 62–3; Vico and 14 Lewis, J. 53 Lichtheim, G. 75 literature: ‘distancing’ 208; Leavis’s minority culture 98–102; literary theory 153; romanticism 16–24, 33; Snow’s ‘two cultures’ 100; socialist realism 77–8 Locke, John 156; An Essay Concerning Human Understanding 12–13 London, Jack, People of the Abyss 211

Lowe, D. 157 Lowenthal 106 Lukács, George 65, 87, 88; compared to Gramsci 79; and Goldmann 84, 85; History and Class Consciousness 76–7; neo-Marxist analysis 74–8; The Theory of the Novel 77–8 Luxemburg, Rosa 76 Lyotard, Jean-François 191; postmodernism 200, 201–2 McGuigan, J. 206 McHale, D. 200 Mack, R. 143 McRobbie, A. 97, 135, 210 Maine, Sir Henry 151, 180 Malinowski, Bronislaw 35, 36; culture versus social structure 119; functionalism of 40–1 Mannheim, Karl 10 Marcuse, Herbert 106; ‘One Dimensional Man’ 7, 110 Marsden, D. 149 Marx, Karl: alienation 7, 19; commodity fetishism 74–5, 86, 121; consciousness and life 64; cultural production 121–2; Dialectics of Nature (with Engels) 66–7; effect of capitalism 54–5; ‘epistemological break’ 184; The German Ideology 67–8, 121; and Goldmann 84; Grundrisse 121; ideas and ideology 69–72; The Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy 73, 121; Das Kapital 73, 74–5, 121; and Marxist theory 64–5; materialism 65–70, 86; Morgan’s classifications 32; nature 165; personal taste in art 71–2; ‘primitive communism’ 14; proletariat and social change

index 108–9; social structures 26, 29; urban industry 180; vision and ideology 161 Marxism: Birmingham cultural studies 135; influence on cultural studies 207; Williams’s critique of 91 mass communication, ideology and 71 mass culture, ‘culture industry’ 108–9 Mauss, Marcel 62 Mayhew, Henry 21; London Labour and the London Poor 211 Mead, George Herbert 212 Mercer, B. 143 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, on perception 155 Mill, John Stuart 22 Mills, C. Wright, The Power Elite 109 Milner, A. 205–6 Mitchell, W. 153, 154, 165; on the visual 158 modernity: Benjamin on 86–9; Enlightenment thought 192–3; and urban culture 176, 188–9; vision 164–5; see also postmodernism morality: cities and 180–1; Eliot and literature 103; and science 46; social bond of 123 Morgan, Lewis Henry 31–2 Morrison, Arthur 211 Muggleton, D. 139–40 Munch, Edvard 78 National Deviancy Conferences 152 Naughton, John 4 New Science (Vico) 13–14 Nicod, J. 158 Nietzsche, Friedrich 86, 94, 197–8; Beyond Good and Evil 195; and

postmodernism 193–5; the Übermensch 194 Observer newspaper 4 Ortega y Gasset, José: ‘Leviathan’ 105; The Revolt of the Masses 105–6 Orwell, George 210 Paglia, Camille 165, 171 Park, Robert 182, 212 Parsons, Talcott 26, 56; general theory of action 58–60; The Social System 28–9; subcultures 140, 142; on Weber 53 Passeron, J.-C. 132 perception, the visual 155 phenomenology, Husserl’s transcendental 57 philosophy: approach to culture 12–16; Heidelberg’s ‘Cultural Philosophers’ 44–6; Lukács and total systems 77; phenomenology 57 Piaget, Jean 84 Pile, S. 188 Plato: allegory of the cave 161; on philosopher-kings 21–2; Republic 104 pluralism 10; positive view of mass culture 110–13; urban culture and 174–5 politics, ‘them’ and ‘us’ 109 Pollock 211 Pope, Alexander 13 Popper, Karl 180 popular culture: Gramsci and 79; positive pluralism 110–13; threat of mass culture 105–6 positivism: metaphor of observation 159–62; the visual and 157

231

232 index post-structuralism: Derrida and 196–8; feminism and 199; Foucault 197–8; and postmodernism 195–9 postmodernism: as an attitude 202–4; changed society and culture 199–204; Nietzsche and 193–5; positions and discourses of 190–3; post-structuralism and 195–9; subcultures and 133–4, 139–40 power relations: Bentham on social control 15–16; subcultures and 133–6; see also cultural stratification praxis 80–1 Quiller-Couch, Sir Arthur 90 race and ethnicity: cultural stratification 96–7; fascism and 107 Radcliffe-Brown, Alfred R. 35, 36; functionalism 38–40, 41 Ranke, Otto 44, 47 Rapport, N. 187–8 Reich, Wilhelm 107 relativism: anthropology and 34–6; critical judgement and 3–5 religion: Durkheim on 27–8; sacred and profane 27 Rickert, Heinrich 44, 47, 48, 76 Riesmann, David 111 Rivers, W. H. R. 36 Roberts, Brian 135 Rocher, Guy 59 Rorty, Richard, mirror of nature 155–6 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14 Ruskin, John 18, 21, 166 Russell, Bertrand 102

Sapir, Edward 37 Sargent 143 Saussure, Ferdinand de 196, 199; cultural reproduction 125–6 Sayer, D. 56 Schmalenbach, Herman 180 Schutz, Alfred 164; Lebenwelt/ life-world 56–8 science: biology and society 30–1; methodology 200; and morality 46; scientism 162, 203; Snow’s ‘two cultures’ 100 semiotic systems: Bourdieu and 129; uniforming in reading 171 Shils, E. 111 Sibley, D. 185 Simmel, Georges 76; micro-sociology 150; on the stranger 175 Snow, C. P., ‘two cultures’ 100 social action 118; Geertz on interpreting 60–2; Parsons on 58–60 social processes 118–19 social sciences: methodology 74; visual observation and 157–9; Weber’s methodology 46–56 social structures: Bourdieu and 128; concepts of 25–6; distinguished from culture 117–20; hegemony 80–3; industrialization and 7; Marx on 29; Parsons on 28–9; see also class social theory, selection and abstraction 162–4 society and social relations: collective culture 11; constructed collective 147–8; context for culture 58; literary-romantic thought 16–24; postmodern changes in 199–204; Schutz’s life-world 56–8; symbolic views of 26–8

index sociology: and community 149; different paradigms 164–5; history of culture and 2; ‘of the underdog’ 211–12; sociologists and cultural reproduction 124–5; totalizing concepts 147 Soja, Edward 189 space, urban 184–5, 188 Spencer, Herbert 39, 180 Spender, Dale 97 Stalin, Joseph 76, 79 status 151 Steiner, George 77, 97 structural-functionalism 26; Malinowski’s own path 40–1; Radcliffe-Brown 38–40 structuralism: cultural reproduction 125–6; and ‘culturalism’ 209; Goldmann’s 83–6; Lévi-Strauss 34, 62–3; Marxist 69; and post-structuralism 195–9; Vico and 14 subcultures: Birmingham Centre studies 134–40; bricolage 139; Chicago School and 140, 142; concept of 10; debated idea of 143–55; defining 143; Durkheim and 141; political agendas and 133–4; power relations and 133–6; youth 141, 151–2 subjectivity, Goldmann relocates 85–6 Swingewood, A. 79, 86; on Benjamin 89; on Frankfurt School 109–10; The Myth of Mass Culture 113 Sydie, R. A. 97 symbols, visual representations 156 Thatcher, Margaret 133, 178, 207 Thompson, D. 100 Thompson, E. P. 91; growth of

cultural studies 207–10; Making of the English Working Class 207, 208–9 Thornton, S. 148–9 Timasheff, N. 177, 179 Tönnies, Ferdinand: community and association 151; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft 176–80 Townshend, P. 149 Trotsky, Leon 71 Turgot, Anne Robert Jacques 14–15 Tylor, Edward Burnett 32–3, 35, 41 United States: concept of culture 10; market economy 107–8; personal achievement ethic 183 universalism, Geertz on 61 urban culture: bourgeoisie gaze 211–12; Chicago School and 181–3; community and 185; concepts and character 173–6; fusion with modernity 176; Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft 176–80; identity 185–9; modernity of 188–9; space and 184–5, 188; town planning 184 Urry, J. 179–80, 185 utilitarianism, Bentham and 15 values, cultural standards and 3–5 Van Gogh, Vincent 78 Vico, Giovanni Battista, New Science 13–14 Vienna Circle 159 Virilio, P. 165, 166, 173, 189 visual culture: assumptions of 159; Bentham’s panopticon 172; knowledge from observation 155–9; partial views and perspectives 162–7; positivism and 159–62; priority of seeing 154–5; reflexivity 167–9; scopic

233

234 index regimes 170–1; selection 162–3; transformation 169–70; the ‘visual turn’ 153–4 Walsh, D. 54 Weber, Max 180; and Carlyle 19; and ‘Cultural Philosophers’ 44; ‘ideal type’ 47, 50–3; later influence 76; methodology 46–50; The Methodology of the Social Sciences 50–1; motivations 177; natural and cultural sciences 46, 48; and Parsons 58–9; social webs 61; spirit of culture 53–6; urban organization 180 Whyte, William Foote, Street Corner Society 211 Williams, Raymond 33; on Arnold 22; concept of culture 118, 120; critique of materialism and elitism

90–3; Culture 90; Culture and Society 90, 207; growth of cultural studies 207–10; Keywords 90; The Long Revolution 90; Marxism 65; meaning of culture 1; popular culture 110; urban society 174–5 Wilmott, P. 149 Wilson, Harold 206 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 75, 155 Wolfgang, M. 142 Wolin, R. 88 Wordsworth, William 33 Yinger, M. 144–6 Young, K. 143 Young, M. 149 Young, M. F. D. 129, 131 Zeitlin, I. 53 Zizek, Slavoj 73

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