CULTURE:THENEEDFORA
CLEAR AGENDA
Lesley Johnson
History is the subject of a structure whose site
is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled
by the presence of the now.
Walter Benjamin (1939/1977:26) argued for a history to conjure up images of a
humane future. His preoccupation was with a history, a set of images, that not
only would stir the imagination, but feedaction. This paper takes as its starting
point that all history is a fabrication, formed always within the concerns of the
present, by the politics of the present. It argues that in studying popular culture
wemust ask what does it do, what is its agenda its project for the present and
the future? And it suggests that this field of study in Australia will be useful when
it provides a history that not only criticallyreassesses the nationalist myths of
Anzac and the rural tradition, but gives us quite different images of our past and
our present.
In a paper on the social production of popular memories, Keith Tribe warns of
the danger for women's history or people's history in believing their task to be one
of retrieval 'of a neglected point of view' (Tribe 1981) or of restoring the whole
truth to historical discourse. History, he argues, is not a collection of past events,
some of which have been neglected or excluded by previous historians. As
afabrication, a combining together of materials within a specific theo retical
framework, all history, he insists, is perpetually constructed within a specific
conjuncture. To put women into history is not tounlock its real truth, but to
engage in politics, to seek to strengthen the political demands of the women's
movement. But, by the same token, to engage in women's history or people's
history is not ofnecessity politically progressive. We have always to ask what does
it do, what is the object of this history?
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) has sought to deal
with contemporary and historical issues with a clear sense of engagement or
commitment, of being clear about the objectof their work. Popular culture as a
field of study in England is most closely identified with the style of analysis
developed by this Centre.
1
This paper will proceed by giving a brief account of their cultural studies approach
as it has recently been discussed by two of the main figures associated with the
CCCS. It will then go on to discuss thoseaccounts and the subsequent agenda
which has been proposed for the study of popular culture. This proposal will be
explored and extended, and finally, compared with Australian trends in the field
ofpopular culture.
Cultural Studies
Founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964, the CCCS at first worked within a
framework heavily influenced by Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson;
a framework which has since been characterized by members of the Centre as
'culturalist' (Johnson 1979). In a discussion of cultural studies since the late
1950s, Stuart Hall analysed the projects of these three authors as acts of
'recovery,' ofconstituting traditions. Hoggart, in his book, The Uses of
Literacy, both re-presented a tradition of cultural debate about 'mass
society' and
a
tradition
of
English
working-class
culture.
Raymond
Williams in Culture and Society constituted the culture-and-society tradition of
a particular group of English intellectuals and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the
English Working Class recovered a tradition of working-class political culture.
Between them, says Hall, these books were the founding impulse for cultural
studies, but not, he insists, in the sense of their being text-books for a new
academic discipline. As intellectual works, they were 'focused by, organized
through and constituted responses to, the immediate pressures of the time and
society in which they were written' (Hall 1980:58). Their projects of recovery, of
constituting specific traditions, were clearly formed in this manner as a means
of engagement with contemporary concerns. In thus defining the space of cultural
studies, they had also prescribed an approach to culture.
In characterizing these authors as 'culturalist,' both Stuart Hall and Richard
Johnson have identified the focus of this paradigm (as they have described it) in
questions
about
how
people
experiencetheir
conditions
of
life.
The culturalist's method is to begin with experience or 'culture' and to read down
from there: to look at other structures and relations from a prior understanding of
how they arelived. The second moment of cultural studies, as depicted by
Hall and Johnson, was ushered in by the arrival of structuralism(s) on
the intellectual scene. Within this paradigm it was argued that, on the contrary,
experience was not the ground of analysis; it was not an authenticating source.
Experience was the effect or product of classifications, frameworks, language or
discourses; and the focus of cultural
Both Hall and Johnson in constructing the history of cultural studies emphasize
shifts in paradigms or significant breaks. Certainly the work of the CCCS, as
represented by works such as Resistance throughRituals (a collection of papers on
youth culture) and On Ideology (papers on various theoretical approaches to
ideology), appears remarkably different. The terms, the level of analysis, the foci
appearquite opposed. The first concentrates on popular resistance, detailed
empirical studies of culture, an emphasis on experience, and a reading of cultures
as expressions of class relations; the second on theoretical concepts, structures of
domination and the work of intellectuals. Both Hall and Johnson conclude their
accounts with a discussion of the necessity to make the best elements of both
paradigms and to pursue questions about the dialectic between conditions and
consciousness, between conditions and culture.
These assessments or histories of cultural studies by Hall and Johnson, which
now have appeared in a number of different contexts, can themselves be
interpreted as acts of recovery, of constituting traditions, precisely in the manner
of their predecessors. They are not simply engaged in providing an account of
cultural studies as handy references for students and academic courses.
Representing cultural studies as formed by two theoretical breaks or paradigms
serves as a means of hailing a new set of concerns, signalling its need and marking out the terrain. In particular, in re-calling theculturalist paradigm they place
on the agenda a particular style of analysis one that emphasizes detailed
studies of particular sites and an aspect of its politics the insistence that the
cultural is not merely a reflection of something else, but the site of a particular
politics which cannot merely be reduced to something else, nor be trivialized
as being outside the realm of real political struggle.
These histories have, in part, been formed by the intellectual con text in which
Hall
and
Johnson
work.
Numerous
critiques
of
structuralism
and its theoreticism have been mounted and vigorous debates have raged about
the value of this particular paradigm. E.P. Thompson's virtriolic attack in The
Poverty of Theory (1979) and the various replies to him have continued this
debate well beyond thepoint at which Hall and Johnson produced their histories
(Anderson 1980; Samuel 1981). But, at another level, these accounts have
been formed by and can be said 'to constitute responses to' the changing political
context of their work. In proclaiming the return to questions about how structures
of dominance are lived, and in asserting the need to look at both conditions and
consciousness, they announce a
3
political agenda for intellectual work in the field of cultural studies. These
questions are proposed as political questions as ways of thinking about, and
intervening in, the present historical conjuncturein England. The turn to popular
culture as a field of study in the past four or five years is a product of this agenda.
Popular Culture
The Study of popular culture in England, as represented by Hall (1981), Johnson
(1979), the CCCS and the introduction of an Open University course in this field,
seeks to construct an understanding of what is seen as a profound shift in the
political and ideological consensus in that society. The transformation identified
became most noticeable with the increasing success of Margaret Thatcher;
but major changes had already been noted before this time. The CCCS, for
example, had begun to analyse what it identified as 'a crisis in hegemony' in a
number of different sites. In the work for Policing the Crisis,produced by Stuart Hall
and others, and the work of the Education group, whose book appeared much later
Unpopular Education the CCCS was examining the growing crisis for the
social democratic
consensus
and
the
manner
in
which
a
new,
conservative, authoritarian consensus was being constructed. In effect, the
success of Margaret Thatcher at the election polls in 1979 gave a
particular urgency to this project. The questions posed examined the construction
of a new consensus in sites such as the media, the courts and parliamentary
politics, but also asserted the need to analyse the manner in which these
processes had effected changes in the consciousness of large sections of the
population. Popular culture as a field of study, then, was to be conceived within
this terrain as being the study ofboth the production of ideologies, and the
relationship between these ideologies and the practical ideologies or common
sense, as it was now referred to, of different sections of the population.
Stuart Hall's paper 'Notes on Deconstructing the Popular' (l981) states these
issues in forceful terms. In this paper he defines popular culture as a site of
struggle. It is the site where 'the people' in various forms. The people, says Hall,
do not exist as such; 1 but ways of representing 'the people' do which seek either to
constitute them as saying 'yes' to power in forms, for example, such as 'the
nation,' unified and acquiescent to the present social and political arrangements
or, as a popular democratic force against the power bloc. The study of popular
culture examines those discourses, their sites and processes of production. But
it also seeks, says Hall, to examine how those discourses re-organize,
disorganize or become sedimented into
culture; it is the culture provided for themasses or for the mass market. This is
the definition around which a debate has been constructed about popular culture
as manipulative versus popular culture as the truly authentic culture of the
people or the working-classes. In Australia the debate has been conducted frequently by recruiting figures such as Adorno and Benjamin as representing either
side (e.g. Docker 1982). Hall rejects this definition of popular culture and the
terms of the debate. Such modes of discussing culture, he says, raise important
questions about the cultural industries and the production of culture; but it is not
a matter of people being cultural dupes or there being an authentic popular
culture outside the field of cultural power and domination. Hall insists on the
need to examine culture as a site of 'continuous and necessarily uneven and
unequal struggle' in which the dominant culture works constantly to enclose and
confine all cultural forms within its definitions. Cultural forms are never wholly
corrupt or wholly authentic: they are 'deeply contradictory' (Hall 1981:233).
Precisely because they function on the terrain of the 'popular,' he argues, the
provided commercial cultural forms carry elements of recognition, of display ing
their responsiveness to, the forms in which the people already recognize
themselves, or experience their lives.
The second concept purports to be descriptive or anthropological: it equates
popular culture with all the things 'the people' do and enjoy. Embedded in this
notion, says Hall, is an opposition between the elite or dominant culture and the
culture of the 'periphery.' This distinction is valuable in drawing our attention to
the way in which particular institutions such as schools work to create and police
this opposition. But it is not a descriptive definition says Hall; it relies on a notion
of the people versus the non-people, a distinction precisely constituted by the
discourses about culture conducted in such institutional sites. Cultural forms
have no fixed position on this hierarchy, but move up and down according to
their recruitment to these discourses of legitimate and non-legitimate culture.
Stuart Hall rejects these two definitions, then, and proposes to speak of
popular culture as the site where 'the people' are constituted, are fought or
struggled over, and struggle. In particular, his concern is with the processes by
which 'the people' are defined as consenting to the exercise of power over their
lives, to the handing over of power; versus their being defined as opposed to
such relations of
5
The problem for Hall and others working within a similar frame work is not
simply a question of evidence. It is not a matter of it being easier to study the
production of ideologies in newspapers,political debates or police records. The
problem lies in the theoretical status of concepts such as consciousness, or the
popular consciousness or the national popular culture. In his papers on popular
culture and cultural studies Hall has argued for a necessarily dialectic
has to be understood as being one form through which the working-class has been
represented. Indeed, as Stuart Hall (unpub.:14) points out, these particular cultural
practices emerged at a specific historical moment the 1880s and 90s and
disappeared again fairly quickly. A cultural practice or style cannot be identified
as truly authentic or organic to a particular class.
Third, discussions of popular culture frequently become consumed by theoretical
debates: in particular, whether popular culture is totally manipulated or possibly
authentic, and whether to focus on the'text,' the 'context' or both: whether to
be culturalist, structuralist, formalist, semiotic and so on. These debates in the
Australian setting rarely address the politics of intellectual work except in
simplisticterms
of
'left
optimism' versus 'left
pessimism.' Nellie
Melba,
Ginger Meggs and Friends is an important example. The editors in their introduction
provide a useful summary of the cultural-to-structuralist history of cultural
studies as told by Hall and Johnson, but it is a bleached version of their
accounts. In this introductory essay, Dermody et al (1982:52) argue for the
necessity to break down the dichotomy between text and context, as they
characterize the debate, to study 'the text in all its aspects.' This project overrides
the political consideration that forms the Hall/Johnson histories. Similarly,
the articles which make up the book tend to veer to one side or the other of the
dichotomy as presented in the editors' introduction; the book as a whole evades
raising serious questions about the politics of popular culture. As Andrew Milner
(1982) points out, for example, the book fails to examine the centrality of images
of Australian nationalism to popular and radical cultural forms.
The reason for this lacuna is, ironically, partly recognized by the editors of this
book. They point to the way in which cultural studies emerges in England out of
the culturalist tradition; whereas inAustralia, cultural history derives from a
tradition of radical nationalism. But this insight is channelled into a consideration of
the way in which the text-versus-context issue has been posed in Australia, by this
tradition of left nationalism, rather than an analysis of the politics of its approach
to cultural studies. The failure to address the issue of nationalism in studies of
Australian cultural history in particular of popular culture stems from the way
in which they, the editors themselves, have been formed by this tradition and its
politics. This book represents a continuation of that tradition, rather than its deconstruction. The study of popular culture becomes the celebratory restitution of
a neglected past or point of view, where true, authentic, Australian values are to
be found in opposition to the manipulative, consumer culture of America or the
imperialist, elitist culture of Britain.
9
2.
3.
4.
5.
Milner also points out that some of the papers in this collection
themselves subscribe to a form of radical nationalizm.
6.
11
References
Anderson, P., (1980) Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verso.
Benjamin, W., (1977) 'Theses on the Philosophy of
in Illuminations, (trans.) Harry Zohn, London: Fontana/Collins.
History,'
XIV,
12
Samuel,
R.,
(ed.)
(1981) People's
Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
History
and
Socialist
Spearitt, P., and Walker, D., (eds.) (1979) Australian Popular Culture, Sydney: Allen
and Unwin.
Thompson, E.P., (1979) The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin Press.
Tribe, K., (1981) 'History and the Production of Memories,' Popular Television and
Film, Tony Bennett et al {eds.).