The Uses of Cultural Studies

A Textbook

Angela McRobbie

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781446232590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

?What McRobbie manages to do so skilfully is to show how each [author], regardless of his or her particular disciplinary location, makes a significant contribution to the project of cultural studies. It should be essential reading for students studying culture? - THES

?I?ll be recommending that students buy this text and teaching from it extensively over the course of the module. This is an excellent text by a concise, clear and important British scholar which will help introduce students to the opportuntities they have to study contemporary life meaningfully.? - Dr Stuart Robertson, University of Central England

?An inspirational take on cultural studies - past, present and future. It is both a student text and considerably more than that. It is written with admirable clarity, but so too with fire, passion and much good sense? - Bill Schwarz, Queen Mary, University of London

?This is an important book. It will be the first textbook in cultural studies that does what a truly useful textbook is supposed to do - in the very act of summarizing and representing the field, it recreates it anew and moves it further along? - Lawrence Grossberg, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

?This is one of the most useful textbooks in a long time? - Michele Barrett, Queen Mary, University of London

Students of cultural studies frequently struggle with the subject?s primary texts. For example, the work of Hall, Bhabha and Butler can be complex. Having grappled with these texts however, the student is then confronted with having to apply these insights to their own areas of study.

The heart of this book comprises a series of extended critical chapters on six of the foundational theorists of cultural studies - Hall, Bhabha, Butler, Gilroy, Bourdieu and Jameson. By looking at the key themes and central dynamics of these writers work, Angela McRobbie introduces their work and their contribution.

Alongside these chapters, McRobbie has added six shorter essays which demonstrate how one might actually do cultural studies using insights from these six key theorists.

Aimed at students of cultural studies this book offers an introduction to both the theory and practice of cultural studies. It also provides readers with an opportunity to regard Angela McRobbie ?in dialogue? with six of today?s leading cultural studies theorists. As such it will be eagerly welcomed by all students of media and cultural theory.

1

Stuart Hall and the Inventiveness of Cultural Studies

GUIDE TO THE CHAPTER
Media–Politics–Ideology I	Search for a Method
Case Study Panorama	Television and National Unity
Media–Politics–Ideology 2	Changes in Political Communications
Media–Politics–Ideology 3	Journalism as Critique
Breaking the Spell of the Welfare State	Stuart Hall Meets the Iron Lady
From Unity to Difference?	Multi-cultural Questions
Extended Notes	Stuart Hall Meets Tony Blair

Media–Politics–Ideology 1

In this chapter I extrapolate from the full range of Stuart Hall’s work in order to concentrate on three exemplary moments. These are the moments of television (mid-1970s), the ‘authoritarian populism’ of Thatcherism (late 1980s), and multi-culturalism (2000a, 2000b). I provide both an elucidation of these texts and also an account of their inter-connectedness, despite the years between them. The first of these marks the time when Stuart Hall was focusing on the media, in this case television, and was exploring the possible usefulness of Althusser’s theory of ideology for understanding the day-to-day practices of political communications, in particular the relation between the media, the state and politics. This was also the period of Hall’s work when an explicitly Marxist analysis was most prominent. There was an overriding concern with how in an advanced capitalist society, the underlying class relations of power only became apparent in the ‘last instance’, for the reason that the big ideological institutions possessed their own autonomy. Their operations appeared to be quite disconnected from the economy, its modes of production and the organisation of labour. This autonomy and an ethos of neutrality served the capitalist order all the more effectively, with conflicts between spheres, for example, between journalists and politicians, producing an illusion of separate interests, while in reality masking the consensus or unity in regard to those fundamentally capitalist elements of the existing social order, which must, at all costs, be protected, secured and reproduced. Hence the use of the term ‘complex unity’. The very terms by which these institutions conducted their daily operations were so naturalised that they became the means by which those millions of people who came into contact with such spheres, (mis)-recognised and (possibly) understood the world. To the extent that institutions like the press or television perpetuated themselves according to routine practices based on professional and technical codes and conventions, they also reproduced the very structures of the capitalist society.

The article, ‘The “Unity” of Current Affairs Television’, was first published in the Working Papers in Cultural Studies series by the University of Birmingham, Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This was an in-depth examination of a pre-election edition of the UK BBC television programme Panorama broadcast in October 1974 (Media Group, 1976). The article shows how at Birmingham in the early 1970s a research object (that is, the single programme) was constructed as a collective undertaking.¹ Although the field of political communications was already established in British and American sociology, Hall et al. look instead to the French Marxist philosopher Althusser and the Italian Marxist Gramsci, to other Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies work, and to official documents and reports produced within the broadcasting industry. Only one sociological text is referred to, Stan Cohen and Jock Young’s Manufacture of News (Cohen and Young, 1973). Hall et al. take issue with existing academic work on this kind of topic. They part company from the ‘conspiracy thesis’ where ‘programming is depicted as the public voice of a sectional but dominant political ideology’ (Hall et al., 1976: 60). This implies top-down control in a mechanistic and absolutist way. There are also problems with the ‘displacement thesis’ which sees broadcasters as holding power largely in their own hands as television finds a more autonomous role for itself (ibid.: 60). This disavows the complexity of the subtle intersections and ongoing, if distanced, relations between media and state. And likewise there are many problems with the ‘laissez-faire’ thesis. This posits television as a kind of window on the world, a medium which merely reflects on events. Hall et al. propose a starting point which considers that television ‘never deliver(s) one meaning’ (and here we see the influence of Barthes (1972) and his claim about the inherent polysemy of meaning), but rather offers a range of meanings, where there is nonetheless a preferred meaning to which the viewer is guided or directed. The delivery of such a preferred meaning is the benchmark of success for what is understood to be good television, but the production of such a preferred reading is the outcome of extremely hard work on the part of the programme-makers. Ideological work of this sort is also labour, and this requires the gathering and selecting of items for inclusion, and organising these while also implementing certain technical and professional codes of practice. The right nuance of meaning can never be assured; there is always the potential for breaks, disruptions and leakiness. Moment by moment there is very deft footwork going on, so that the desired outcome is secured.

Far from there being a conspiracy between broadcasters and politicians to pull the wool over the eyes of viewers and electorate, (the crude left analysis), Hall et al. suggest that in such a complex society as our own, the relation between television and state is one of relative autonomy (following Althusser’s famous (1971) essay on the ‘ideological state apparatus’). Broadcasters and journalists operate according to their own professional encoding practices and are not answerable in any direct way to the politicians, even when they are working for a state-funded organisation like the BBC, except in the last instance. The 1976 article examines in detail the nature of the relation between media, the state and politics at a critical time when what seems to be at stake is the unity of the country itself. Hall et al.’s approach (one followed through subsequently in Hall’s own work) is to bring together a historical contextualisation of the socio-political climate of the time, with a structuralist reading of a key text (in this case Panorama), as a means of producing an understanding of how ideology operates within the terrain of ordinary television, in this case an unexceptional (if lively) pre-election edition of a familiar current affairs programme. Underpinning the lengthy analysis is a claim that a single programme can indeed play a key role in the production of a certain kind of common sense about the terms and conditions through which the political is conducted within a mass media environment. This then justifies what we might describe as a micrological approach to questions of media (as signifying practice) and power.

Many of the issues covered in the article are directly relevant and familiar today. Stuart Hall was considering a moment when the BBC found itself under close scrutiny. There was a good deal of discussion about broadcasters having too much power, there were claims that the BBC focused unduly on comment and analysis when it should be simply reporting. These criticisms were directed towards current affairs programmes for the reason that current affairs values required wide knowledge and expertise. The journalists were expected to ‘signpost their knowledgeability’, and provide insight in an authoritative manner. This depth of analysis routinely applied to various topics made the politicians nervous or jittery, as Hall et al. imply.² This anxiety was in turn connected with the various concerns about national unity and the perceived dangers emanating from nationalists and others. At a time of great political strife in Northern Ireland and in the run up to an election, a good deal was at stake in regard to public opinion. A series of industrial disputes had challenged the Tory government and forced an election in February of 1974. The second election of that year was called as the Labour government attempted to secure a better majority. Alongside the confrontations with the trade unions, and the ongoing conflict in Northern Ireland, there were also challenges from the Welsh and Scottish nationalists as well as the fraught question of entry into Europe. The edition of Panorama broadcast three days before the election with the title ‘What Kind of National Unity?’, provided the authors with an ideal opportunity to examine the means by which controversial issues were tackled on air and how a satisfactory outcome was sought on behalf of all the parties involved.

Case Study: Panorama

The analysis draws on semiology to examine the programme sequence by sequence, and to show how a combination of codes, visual and verbal, lexical and kinesic produce a whole programme with a unified ‘communicative structure’. According to the norms and conventions governing this genre of television, current affairs content is ‘encoded’. The ideal is for the decoding moment (that is, the moment of reception) to confirm the successful encoding as a kind of transparency effect. This is sought by means of orchestrating a particular combination of levels of connoted meaning, so that the viewer easily registers this overall preferred meaning. In the edition of Panorama this preferred meaning is, first, that there is a win for the Labour Deputy Leader Jim Callaghan on the basis of his successfully taking command of the television debate, second, an overall win for the prevailing norms of parliamentary democracy as a two-party system, and third, a win for the programme itself wherein its own ‘complex unity’ somehow alludes to or connotes that of the country as a whole and is thus a comforting microcosm.

The encoding process requires what the authors describe as ideological work, ‘each level makes its own kind of sense but each, in the television discourse is incomplete without the other. Thus the moment when the two are brought into alignment with each other is the moment when the sense of a particular part of the process is completed, by the over-determination of one system on another’ (Hall et al., 1976: 66). What the study is aiming to describe is the connotational meaning as it has been ‘ideologically inflected and structured’ by the broadcasters (ibid.: 67). The term ‘prefer’ indicates how meaning is not entirely fixed, and the term ideology indicates the presence of a political intention in the attempt to achieve successful encodings. The segments of the programme comprise a kind of jostling for position by media and politicians alike, within, however, the contours of a ‘prestructured topic’. This topic is constructed through an assumption about the British parliamentary system being normatively a two-party rule, which is seemingly under threat but is, however, invoked and confirmed by the organisation of the programme. ‘On the underlying Unity the broadcasters assume a consensus’ (ibid.: 75). This assumption of consensus is what Hall et al. perceive as critical to the ideological process. The textual analysis tracks the process whereby control of the topic shifts, within these constraints, from the first half of the programme to the second, through the visual and verbal combination of elements. The most important part of the programme is the live debate between Jim Callaghan (the Labour Deputy Leader) and his fellow contenders David Steel (Liberal) and William Whitelaw (Conservative). The analysis shows how a slip by the presenter, where he gives away something of his own (apparently Liberal) political preferences (by using the word ‘dogma’ to describe a Labour position), allows the slightly aggrieved Callaghan to then take control of the way the subsequent debate develops. Callaghan comes up with a Labour strategy for unity (the social contract with the unions) which he is able to pose against the threat to unity and to parliamentary democracy itself.

Hall et al. then follow Callaghan’s interventions where he ignores or abandons ‘preferred conventions’ and ‘gestures his way into a commanding position’. ‘To appreciate the importance of Callaghan’s gestural acts it must be pointed out that he and Whitelaw are afforded symmetrical space’ (ibid.: 86). He gets away with taking command because of the ‘precise nature of the balance between the media and politics in current affairs television … especially at election times’. The ‘transparency effect’ requires both the politicians to abide by certain media rules while the media ‘guard against the charge of selectivity or bias by …presenting the politicians “live” or “in their own words” thus creating a seemingly neutral space’ (ibid.: 87). The relation between media and politics is therefore akin to that between the seemingly neutral state and politics. If the state is then the ‘organiser of hegemony’ Hall et al. concur that the media too works hegemonically. The preferred reading of the programme is one in which Callaghan appears to win the debate, but is it because of the breach by the presenter? The authors argue it is also because Callaghan, with his skillful performance, abides by the rules of the programme but then, in the aftermath of the slip by the presenter, is able to take advantage while also showing off his expertise as a consummate speaker and hence natural political leader. During the minutes of live debate the operation of the media rules do indeed guard against bias in that all participants are given more or less equal time and space. What is confirmed, then, in the programme is the good health and unity of the parliamentary system as such. Panorama (and implicitly the BBC) is therefore the custodian and ‘guardian of unity’. The problems the programme is concerned with are those ‘which have registered with … the established Parliamentary parties’.

The ideological effect of television in this instance is to make the parliamentary form of the state a ‘natural, taken for granted formation’, and the ‘power to define’ means being able to flag the various leads and topics. Ideology is not then ‘a media trick’, but a set of structuring devices which provide the frame for all that is seemingly open and apparent, which in turn becomes a hallmark for a particular definition of politics. The conventions of balance and neutrality in current affairs are such that they ensure the reproduction of the ‘structure in dominance’. This is the crux of Althusser’s argument about the ideological state apparatuses – their relative autonomy enables them to reproduce the prevailing conditions of political power. But this is no easy task; social reproduction requires extremely hard work, hence the careful navigation through awkward moments. Since underlying and motivating politics and the state are issues of class struggle and contestation, the ideological effect of media is to restore and maintain existing class relations. But this is never completely achieved; there are always new possibilities for disruption. The ideological work of the media is to safeguard the terms by which politics defines itself, and to ritualistically and repetitively invoke these so as to ward off alternative or competing definitions as to what constitutes the political. The weak points in the process of transmission where the preferred meaning is never entirely secure are also the points for other more radical possibilities to emerge. This is where meaning could be made to be other than what it already is.

Media–Politics–Ideology 2

Looking back at this article, almost 30 years after publication, there is a great deal that could be said about the inventiveness of cultural studies. In many ways I take it to be paradigmatic of Hall’s own oeuvre, including the co-authorship. But what is most noticeable about the article is that it is truly work in progress. If the doing of ideological work in the context of the single episode of Panorama required hard labour as the authors argue, this too can be seen in the article itself. Unlike some of the better-known articles by Hall on politics and media, this one reveals the marks and even untidiness of its own construction, in an almost Brechtian way. The authors do not attempt to conceal the way in which they seem to be testing the waters of media analysis, to see how well their reading of Althusser and Gramsci stands up when transplanted into the heartland of the British media and the day-to-day workings of the UK political establishment. They also seem to be assessing how well the ‘Ideological State Apparatuses’ (ISA) essay works, not through a crude application of cultural theory to cultural practice, but by providing an analysis which elucidates, step by step, the theory of ideology. The authors make a compelling case for this approach being much more substantial than the content analysis approaches of media sociology at the time. They attempt to show just how much is at stake in the space and time of a single television programme and thereby make a claim for the micrological politics of meaning. Far from being a relatively unimportant piece of broadcasting when measured against issues of ownership and control of big media corporations (the political economy approach), the authors give an account of the relations between media texts like this one, and the state and politics. The article is not a finished polished object or perfect academic artefact, and by the standards of mainstream social science research it probably falls short precisely because rather than rehearsing its methodological underpinnings, it gestures instead to possibilities for further work (on audiences and reception for example) and it bears the stylistic marks of an intervention drawing on Marxist theory rather than a piece of scholarship respectful of existing sociological work in the field.

The 1976 article also sets a course for the various studies which followed, from Policing the Crisis in the late 1970s, to the work on Thatcherism in the late 1980s (Hall, 1988; Hall et al., 1978). It might be said that there is then a particular ‘complex unity’ in Hall’s own work (more on which later). But if we can see the specific agenda of cultural studies being drafted in the course of this article, we might well ask what kind of issues would arise if we were to undertake a similar analysis today? Even if we restrict ourselves to politics in the UK and the British media (that is, holding globalisation of media at bay), the changes have been momentous. The establishment of the new Scottish parliament and the consequences of devolution for both Scotland and Wales provide new meaning to the question of ‘national unity’. The break-up of Britain argued for by Tom Nairn (1979) has, to some extent, happened, overseen by New Labour and without political trauma. As Hall’s most recent work demonstrates (and as we shall see later in this chapter), anxieties about national belonging and unity continue unabated however, now inflected along the lines of ‘multi-culture’ (Hall, 2000a, 2000b).

Panorama still exists, though located in a slot in the schedules (Sunday night, after the 10 pm news) considered a demotion from the days when it dominated current affairs television.³ There is no longer a single primetime current affairs programme on BBC1, nor does current affairs as a televisual category possess anything like the important status it did in the mid 1970s. To a certain extent its remit has been incorporated into the more extended news coverage to be found across all five terrestial television channels. So that ‘complex unity in difference’ has also undergone transformation. All of the channels now routinely broadcast analysis-oriented current affairs items within the framework of news. Current affairs television has per se been sidelined in favour of entertainment and so called ‘factual television’. As the number of channels has multiplied, the whole world of television has been transformed. There is greater competition, commercialisation, deregulation and all of these have displaced political television from the centre of the airwaves. Some would argue that the tabloidisation effect has made current affairs sometimes sensational, often led by lifestyle topics or else simply marginal. (Students might find it interesting to examine the now-standard use of the ‘dramatic reconstruction’ format in Panorama programmes.) While there is not space here to discuss, in depth, the restructuring of current affairs television, it could be claimed in relation to Hall et al.’s article that current affairs no longer takes its lead for topi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Privilege and Delight
• 1 Stuart Hall and the Inventiveness of Cultural Studies
• 2 Black and Not-black: Gilroy’s Critique of Racialised Modernity
• 3 No Woman, No Cry? Judith Butler and the Politics of Post-feminist Cultural Studies
• 4 Look Back in Anger: Homi Bhabha’s Resistant Subject of Colonial Agency
• 5 ‘Needs and Norms’: Bourdieu and Cultural Studies
• 6 Jameson’s Postmodernity: The Politics of Cultural Capitalism
• Further Materials I: A Mixed Bag of Misfortune? Bourdieu’s Weight of the World
• Further Materials II: Mothers and Fathers, Who Needs Them? Butler’s Antigone
• References
• Index