Cultural Studies

Theory and Practice

Chris Barker, Emma A. Jane

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781473968349
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

"This book presents a magisterial overview of Cultural Studies, and of studies of culture more broadly. It synthesizes a bewildering range of writers and ideas into a comprehensible narrative. It's respectful to the history of ideas and completely cutting edge. I learned a lot – you will too."
- Professor Alan McKee, University of Technology Sydney "The role of culture in spatial, digital and political settings is a vital aspect of contemporary life. Barker and Jane provide an excellent introduction to Cultural Studies' relationship to these core issues, both through a clear explanation of key concepts and thinkers, alongside well chosen examples and essential questions."
- Dr David O?Brien, Goldsmiths, University of London With over 40, 000 copies sold, Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice has been the indispensable guide to studying culture for generations of students. Here is everything students need to know, with all the key concepts, theories and thinkers in one comprehensive, authoritative yet accessible resource. Teaching students the foundations of cultural studies - from ideology, representation and discourse to audiences, subcultures and cultural policy - this revised edition:

• Fully explores the ubiquity of digital media culture, helping readers analyse issues surrounding social media, surveillance, cyber-activism and more
• Introduces students to all the key thinkers they'll encounter, from Stuart Hall and Michel Foucault to Judith Butler and Donna Haraway
• Balances the classics with cutting edge theory, including case studies on e-commerce, the self-help industry, the transgender debate, and representations of race
• Embraces popular culture in all of its diversity, from drag kings and gaming, to anime fandom and remix cultures
• Is re-written throughout with a new co-author, making it a more enjoyable read than ever.

Unmatched in coverage and used world-wide, this is the essential companion for all students of cultural studies, culture and society, media and cultural theory, popular culture and cultural sociology.

Part One Culture and Cultural Studies

1 An Introduction to Cultural Studies

Given the title of this book – Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice – it would be reasonable to expect a comprehensive account of cultural studies, including summaries and discussions of its main arguments and substantive sites of intellectual enquiry. Indeed, this is what has been attempted. However, we want to open this account of cultural studies with a kind of ‘health warning’ regarding the scope of the book.

Concerning This Book

Selectivity

Any book about cultural studies is necessarily selective and likely to engender debate, argument and even conflict. To offer a truly comprehensive account of cultural studies would be to reproduce, or at least to summarize, every single text ever written within the parameters of cultural studies. Not only would this be too mammoth a task for any writer, but also the problem would remain of deciding which texts warranted the nomination. Consequently, this book, like all others, is implicated in constructing a particular version of cultural studies.

We do offer, under the rubric of ‘culture and cultural studies’, some (selective) history of the field. However, most of the later chapters, the sites of cultural studies, draw on more contemporary theory. Indeed, in order to make the book as useful as possible in as many different geographical places as possible, there is a stress on theory over context-specific empirical work (though theory is also context-specific and the text does try to link theory with empirical work). In doing so, we deploy a good number of theorists who would not describe themselves as working within cultural studies but who have something to say which has informed the field. Thus, writers like Tony Bennett, Paul Gilroy, Lawrence Grossberg, Stuart Hall, Meaghan Morris and Paul Willis would probably accept a description of their work as ‘cultural studies’. However, though extremely influential, neither Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida nor Roland Barthes would have described themselves in this way, just as Anthony Giddens would not adopt this self-nomination today.

This book is a selective account because it stresses a certain type of cultural studies. In particular, we explore that version of cultural studies which places language at its heart. The kind of cultural studies influenced by poststructuralist theories of language, representation and subjectivity is given greater attention than a cultural studies more concerned with the ethnography of lived experience or with cultural policy. Nevertheless, both do receive attention and we are personally supportive of both.

Cultural studies does not speak with one voice, it cannot be spoken with one voice, and we do not have one voice with which to represent it.

The title of this book is somewhat over-ambitious in its claims. Not only is this a selective account of cultural studies, it is also one that draws very largely from work developed in Britain, the United States, Continental Europe (most notably France) and Australia. We draw very little from the growing body of work in Africa, Asia and Latin America. As such, it would be more accurate to call this text ‘western cultural studies’. We simply do not feel qualified to say how much cultural studies, as we understand it, is pertinent to the social and cultural conditions of Africa (though we do acknowledge that the rapid growth of the cybersphere is producing a multitude of digital cultures which have transnational qualities).

The language-game of cultural studies

Further, this book tends to gloss over differences within western cultural studies, despite doubts about whether theory developed in one context (e.g. Britain) can be workable in another (e.g. Australia) (Ang and Stratton, 1996; Turner, 1992). Nevertheless, we want to justify this degree of generalization about cultural studies. We maintain that the term ‘cultural studies’ has no referent to which we can point. Rather, cultural studies is constituted by the language-game of cultural studies. The theoretical terms developed and deployed by persons calling their work cultural studies are what cultural studies ‘is’. We stress the language of cultural studies as constitutive of cultural studies and draw attention at the start of each chapter to what we take to be important terms. Subsequently, each of these concepts, and others, can be referred to in the Glossary at the end of the book.

These are concepts that have been deployed in the various geographical sites of cultural studies. For, as Grossberg et al. have argued, though cultural studies has stressed conjunctural analysis, ‘which is embedded, descriptive, and historically and contextually specific’, there are some concepts in cultural studies across the globe which form ‘a history of real achievements that is now part of the cultural studies tradition’, and to do without which would be ‘to willingly accept real incapacitation’ (1992: 8). Concepts are tools for thinking and acting in the world.

Cultural studies as politics

It remains difficult to pin down the boundaries of cultural studies as a coherent, unified, academic discipline with clear-cut substantive topics, concepts and methods that differentiate it from other disciplines. Cultural studies has always been a multi- or post-disciplinary field of enquiry which blurs the boundaries between itself and other ‘subjects’. It is not physics, it is not sociology and it is not linguistics, though it draws upon these subject areas. Indeed, there must be, as Hall (1992a) argues, something at stake in cultural studies that differentiates it from other subject areas.

For Hall, what is at stake is the connection that cultural studies seeks to make to matters of power and cultural politics. That is, to an exploration of representations of and ‘for’ marginalized social groups and the need for cultural change. Hence, cultural studies is a body of theory generated by thinkers who regard the production of theoretical knowledge as a political practice. Here, knowledge is never a neutral or objective phenomenon but a matter of positionality, that is, of the place from which one speaks, to whom, and for what purposes.

At the start of the evolution of British cultural studies the idea that the field was politically engaged was taken as a defining characteristic. Today, cultural studies’ alignment with political activism is more controversial – both inside and outside of the field. Grossberg questions such approaches in Cultural Studies in the Future Tense, where he argues that it should not be the job of critical scholars and analysts of the contemporary ‘to offer a normative politics or even morally based political judgments’ or ‘to tell people what they should be or should desire’ (2010: 97). In this book, we support the idea that cultural studies provides a useful way to think about and engage in cultural politics, but we do not wish to be prescriptive about the form these politics might take. We accept that the notion of ‘progressive’ social change is not commonsensical or self-evident, but varies from person to person. Our aim, therefore, is to offer various conceptual and theoretical architectures that might be useful for thinking about and attempting to effect cultural change, but to leave open the question about what these changes ought to be.

The Tea Party

The Tea Party movement in the US advocates for conservative political policies such as reducing the size of government, lowering taxes and promoting free market economics. Supporters make up about 10 per cent of the American population. They feel aggrieved by existing policies and utilize protest methods – such as large, public rallies involving vocal protestors holding placards – that some might associate more with left-wing movements.

• In your view, is the Tea Party a marginalized social group?
• How do its calls for social change compare with those made by, for example, the Occupy movement and its international protests against social and economic inequality?
• How might cultural studies approaches be used to understand the ideals and dynamics of conservative political movements?

The Parameters of Cultural Studies

There is a difference between the study of culture and institutionally located cultural studies. The study of culture has taken place in a variety of academic disciplines (sociology, anthropology, English literature, etc.) and in a range of geographical and institutional spaces. However, this is not to be understood as cultural studies. The study of culture has no origins, and to locate one is to exclude other possible starting points. Nevertheless this does not mean that cultural studies cannot be named and its key concepts identified.

Cultural studies is a discursive formation, that is, ‘a cluster (or formation) of ideas, images and practices, which provide ways of talking about, forms of knowledge and conduct associated with, a particular topic, social activity or institutional site in society’ (Hall, 1997a: 6). Cultural studies is constituted by a regulated way of speaking about objects (which it brings into view) and coheres around key concepts, ideas and concerns. Further, cultural studies had a moment at which it named itself, even though that naming marks only a cut or snapshot of an ever-evolving intellectual project.

Key Thinkers

Stuart Hall (1932–2014)

A West Indian-born British thinker initially associated with the ‘New Left’ of the late-1960s, Hall was the Director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies from 1968 to 1979. It was during this time that an identifiable and particular field called cultural studies began to emerge. Hall is perhaps the most significant figure in the development of British cultural studies. His work makes considerable use of Antonio Gramsci and the concepts of ideology and hegemony, though he also played a significant part in deploying poststructuralism in cultural studies.

Reading: Morley, D. and Chen, D. K-H. (eds.) (1996) Stuart Hall. London: Routledge.

The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies

Cultural studies has been reluctant to accept institutional legitimation. Nevertheless, the formation of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at Birmingham University in the UK in the 1960s was a decisive organizational instance. Since that time, cultural studies has extended its intellectual base and geographic scope. There are self-defined cultural studies practitioners in the USA, Australia, Africa, Asia, Latin America and Europe, with each ‘formation’ of cultural studies working in different ways. While we are not privileging British cultural studies per se, we are pointing to the formation of cultural studies at Birmingham as an institutionally significant moment. By the same token, we note that the controversial closing of the CCCS in 2002 also marked a significant moment in the field’s attempt to respond to critique and keep pace with the rapidly changing nature of its objects and subjects of analyses (see the ‘Criticizing cultural studies’ section below).

Since its emergence, cultural studies has acquired a multitude of institutional bases, courses, textbooks and students as it has become something to be taught. As Jim McGuigan (1997a) comments, it is difficult to see how it could be otherwise, despite the concern that professionalized and institutionalized cultural studies may ‘formalize out of existence the critical questions of power, history and politics’ (Hall, 1992a: 286). Cultural studies’ main location has always been institutions of higher education and the bookshop. Consequently, one way of ‘defining’ cultural studies is to look at what university courses offer to students. This necessarily involves ‘disciplining’ cultural studies.

Disciplining cultural studies

Many cultural studies practitioners oppose forging disciplinary boundaries for the field. However, it is hard to see how this can be resisted if cultural studies wants to survive by attracting degree students and funding (as opposed to being only a postgraduate research activity). In that context, Bennett (1998) offers his ‘element of a definition’ of cultural studies:

• Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field in which perspectives from different disciplines can be selectively drawn on to examine the relations of culture and power.
• ‘Cultural studies is concerned with all those practices, institutions and systems of classification through which there are inculcated in a population particular values, beliefs, competencies, routines of life and habitual forms of conduct’ (Bennett, 1998: 28).
• The forms of power that cultural stud...