British Cultural Studies

Graeme Turner

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134528325
• Edición: 3
• Categoría: Art
• Categoría: Popular Culture in Art

is a comprehensive introduction to the British tradition of cultural studies. Turner offers an accessible overview of the central themes that have informed British cultural studies: language, semiotics, Marxism and ideology, individualism, subjectivity and discourse. Beginning with a history of cultural studies, Turner discusses the work of such pioneers as Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, E. P.Thompson, Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. He then explores the central theorists and categories of British cultural studies: texts and contexts; audience; everyday life; ideology; politics, gender and race.
The third edition of this successful text has been fully revised and updated to include:
* How to apply the principles of cultural studies and how to read a text
* An overview of recent ethnographic studies
* Discussion of anthropological theories of consumption
* Questions of identity and new ethnicities
* How to do cultural studies, and an evaluation of recent research methodologies
* A fully updated and comprehensive bibliography

Part I

FIRST PRINCIPLES

Chapter 1
The idea of cultural studies

Writing in 1983, Richard Johnson, a former director of the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, revised the grammar in the title of his paper ‘What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?’ to read ‘What are cultural studies anyway?’. It is a significant shift. There are many ideas about what constitutes the centre of cultural studies. Seemingly, many of the arguments about the shape of the field and the appropriateness of specific practices within it are driven by the original disciplinary orientation of individual contributors. Thus, historians tend to be suspicious of the textual analysis practised by those who originally trained as literary critics; the literary critics in turn are often suspicious of the way in which sociologists or ethnographers accept statements from their subjects without sufficient analysis and interpretation. Recently, some sociologists have been broadly critical of humanities-based cultural studies research that overlooks the usefulness of political economy. It would be a mistake to see cultural studies as a new discipline, or even a discrete constellation of disciplines. Cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field where certain concerns and methods have converged; the usefulness of this convergence is that it has enabled us to understand phenomena and relationships that were not accessible through the existing disciplines. It is not, however, a unified field, and much of this book will be taken up with mapping lines of argument and division as well as of convergence.

All of that said, cultural studies does contain common elements: principles, motivations, preoccupations and theoretical categories. In this chapter I will outline the most basic of these at an introductory level. I will return to develop them more fully in later chapters.

LANGUAGE AND CULTURE

In Chapter 2 I will sketch out the beginnings of British cultural studies within English literary studies, looking at the contributions of Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart in some detail. At this stage only a couple of points need to be made about the way in which this tradition began.

Customarily, cultural studies is seen to begin with the publication of Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy (1958) and Raymond Williams’ Culture and Society 1780–1950 (1966; first published in 1958) and The Long Revolution (1975; first published in 1961). Both Hoggart and Williams can be placed within a tradition of English literary criticism generally identified with F. R. Leavis and noted for its concentration on the forms of literary texts and on their moral/social significance. What was impressive about both Hoggart and Williams was their ability to mobilize their methods of textual criticism so as to ‘read’ cultural forms other than literature: popular song, for instance, or popular fiction. But there were clear limits: both writers suffered from the lack of a method that could more appropriately analyse the ways in which such cultural forms and practices produced their social, not merely their aesthetic, meanings and pleasures. To reconnect the texts with society, with the culture and the individuals that produced and consumed them, involved a fundamental reorientation. One was required to think about how culture was structured as a whole before one could examine its processes or its constitutive parts.

As Iain Chambers (1986: 208) has suggested, ‘Explanations based on the idea of totality, on the rational frame that connects the most distant and complex parts, are characteristic of the great Continental schools of thought’: Marxism, classical sociology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, semiotics. The European influence on British cultural studies largely came, in the first instance at least, from structuralism. Structuralism has many variants, but its common characteristic is an interest in the systems, the sets of relationships, the formal structures that frame and enable the production of meaning. The original structuralist stimulus registered within British cultural studies was not, however, a theory of culture, but rather a theory of language. Within most of what follows, language looms as the most essential of concepts, either in its own right or through being appropriated as a model for understanding other cultural systems.

Saussure

Ferdinand de Saussure’s theory of language is our starting point.¹ Common-sense understandings of the function of language would see it as a system for naming things; seemingly, an object turns up in the material world, we apply a name to it and communicate this to others, and the word enters into usage. Saussure sees it differently. For him, language is amechanism that determines howwe decidewhat constitutes ‘an object’ in the first place, let alone which objects might need naming. Language does not name an already organized and coherent reality; its role is far more powerful and complex. The function of language is to organize, to construct, indeed to provide us with our only access to, reality.

This distinction might become clearer if we refer to Saussure’s proposition that the connection between a word and its meaning is not inherent, or natural, but, in most instances, quite arbitrary; the word tree means what it does to us only because we agree to let it do so. The fact that there is no real reason this word should mean what it does is underlined by the fact that there are different words to express the same concept in different languages. Further, there is no ‘natural’ reason the concept itself should be expressed at all. There is no universal law that decrees we should distinguish between trees and, say, flowers, or between trees and grass; that we do so is a matter of convention. Australian Aboriginal cultures discern a multitude of differences among various conditions of what white Australian culture sees as empty desert; their language has many words differentiating what whites simply call ‘bush’ or ‘scrub’. Even the way we ‘see’ the world is determined by the cultural conventions through which we conceptualize the images we receive. When the first colonists arrived in Australia, their early paintings of the indigenous peoples resembled current European aesthetic conventions of ‘the noble savage’. They bore little resemblance to what we now see as the ‘real’ characteristics of Australian Aborigines. Those early painters represented what they saw through the visual ‘languages’ of their time. So, even our idea of the natural world is organized, constituted, through the conventions of its representation: through languages.

When Saussure insists that the relation between a word and its meaning is constructed, not given, he is directing us to the cultural and social dimensions of language. Language is cultural, not natural, and so the meanings it generates are too. The way in which language generates meaning, according to Saussure, is important. Again, he insists that the function of language is not to fix intrinsic meanings, the definitions of those things it refers to, as we might imagine it should. Language is a system of relationships; it establishes categories and makes distinctions through networks of difference and similarity. When we think of the word man we attribute meaning by specifying the concept’s similarity to, or difference from, other concepts; crucially, we will consider what such a word tells us this object is not: not boy, not girl, not woman, and so on. Cultural relations are reproduced through the language system: to extend the previous example, the word man might also generate its meaning in opposition to other concepts – not weak, not emotional, not sensitive, for example – that go to build up a particular cultural definition of the male role within gender relations.

The insights contained within Saussure’s theory of language have a relevance beyond linguistics because they reveal to us the mechanisms through which we make sense of our world. Specific social relations are defined through the place language allocates them within its system of relations. Such an explanation of language endows it with enormous determining power. Reality is made relative, while the power of constructing ‘the real’ is attributed to the mechanisms of language within the culture. Meaning is revealed to be culturally grounded – even culturally specific. Different cultures may not only use different language systems but they may also, in a definitive sense, inhabit differentworlds. Culture, as the site where meaning is generated and experienced, becomes a determining, productive field through which social realities are constructed, experienced and interpreted. The central mechanism through which language exercises its determining function is explained through the notions of langue and parole. Saussure divides the structure of a language system into two categories: langue is the full repertoire of possibilities within a language system – all the things that can be thought and said; parole refers to the specific utterance, composed by selection from the langue. Although langue is an enormous system, it is also a determining, limiting system in that it sets up specific sets of relations that are impossible for any one speaker alone to change (although, as we shall see, the system does contain the potential for change). Any utterance composed within the system is also constrained by it, restricted to the categories it recognizes, the conventions it establishes. In speaking a language we find it immensely difficult not to reproduce its assumptions, its version of the world:

The individual absorbs language before he can think for himself: indeed the absorption of language is the very condition of being able to think for himself. The individual can reject particular knowledges that society explicitly teaches him, he can throw off particular beliefs that society forcibly imposes upon him – but he has always already accepted the words and meanings through which such knowledges and beliefs were communicated to him. … They lie within him like an undigested piece of society.

(Harland 1987: 12–13).

The great contribution of Saussure’s theory is that it directly relates language and culture; some may say it works too well, making it difficult to separate them.

Other signifying systems

Saussure’s next step is outside the specific domain of linguistics.He argues that the principles which structure the linguistic system can also be seen to organize other kinds of communication systems – not only writing, but also non-linguistic systems such as those governing images, gestures or the conventions of ‘good manners’, for instance. Saussure proposes an analogy between the operation of languageandthe operation of all other systems that generatemeaning, seeingthem all as ‘signifying systems’. This analogy has been widely acceptedandadopted.The reasons for its attraction are pretty clear. Language is a signifying system that can be seen to be closely ordered, structured, and thus can be rigorously examined and ultimately understood; conversely, it is also a means of ‘expression’ that is not entirely mechanistic in its functions but allows for a range of variant possibilities. Saussure’s system thus acknowledges or recognizes the power of determining, controlling structures (analogous to langue), as well as the specific, partly ‘free’, individualized instance (analogous to parole). It offers enormous possibilities for the analysis of cultural systems that are not, strictly speaking, languages, but that work like languages. The structuralist anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1966) adopted Saussure’s model to decode the myths, symbolic systems, even the customary practices employed in the preparation of food, of ‘primitive’ societies; and the French semioticianRoland Barthes (1973) applied it to the analysis of the codes and conventions employed in the films, sports and eating habits (among other topics) of contemporary Western societies in Mythologies. For such followers, therewas little doubt that ‘culture…was itself a…signifying practice – and had its own determinate product: meaning’(Hall 1980a: 30).

SEMIOTICS AND SIGNIFICATION

That cultural product – meaning – is of crucial importance. If the only way to understand the world is through its ‘representation’ to us through language(s), we need some method of dealing with representation, with the production of meaning. In hisACourse in General Linguistics (1960), Saussure suggests the establishment of a ‘science which would study the life of signs within society’. Semiology ‘would teach us what signs consist of, what laws govern them’. Semiologywas to be the mechanism for applying the structural model of language across all signifying systems and for providing a method of analysis that would be ‘scientific’andprecise.While it is not entirely scientific, semiotics – aswe shall call it here – has become a most useful method, the terminology of which is basic to cultural studies and needs to be outlined at least briefly in this section.

The sign

Semiotics allows us to examine the cultural specificity of representations and their meanings by using one set of methods and terms across the full range of signifying practices: gesture, dress, writing, speech, photography, film, television and so on. Central here is the idea of the sign. A sign can be thought of as the smallest unit of communication within a language system. It can be a word, a photograph, a sound, an image on a screen, a musical note, a gesture, an item of clothing. To be a sign it must have a physical form, it must refer to something other than itself, and it must be recognized as doing this by other users of the sign system. The word tree is a sign; the photographic image of Brad Pitt is a sign; the trademark of Coca-Cola is a sign, too. Less obviously, when we dress to go out for a drink or to a club, our selection and combination of items of clothing is a combination of signs; our clothes are placed in relation to other signs (the way we do our hair, for instance) that have meaning for those we will meet there. We intend that these signs will determine our meaning for those we meet, and we fear that the meanings we have attempted to create will not be the meanings taken: for instance, instead of being seen as a part of a particular social scene we may be ‘read’ as poseurs or phonies. In this, as in other situations, we signify ourselves through the signs available to us within our culture; we select and combine them in relation to the codes and conventions established within our culture, in order to limit and determine the range of possible meanings they are likely to generate when read by others.

In order to understand the process of signification, the sign has been separated into its constituent parts: the signifier and the signified. It has become conventional to talk of the signifier as the physical form of the sign: the written word, the lines on the page that form the drawing, the photograph, the sound. The signified is the mental concept referred to by the signifier. So the word tree will not necessarily refer to a specific tree but to a culturally produced concept of ‘tree-ness’. The meaning generated by these two components emerges from their relationship; one cannot separate them and still generate meaning. The relationship is, most often, an arbitrary and constructed one, and so it can change. The mental concept conventionally activated by the word gay, for instance, has shifted over the last twenty or so years, articulating an entirely new set of relations. The ways in which such a shift might occur are of crucial importance to cultural studies, because it is through such phenomena that we can track cultural change.

We need to understand the social dimension of the sign: the ways in which culture supplies us with the signifier, the form, and the signified, the mental concept. A conventional system of classification is of some relevance here: the distinction between literal and associative meanings – or denotation and connotation. According to such a system, we have the literal (denotative) meaning of a word, such as mugging, and the wider social dimension (connotation), where the accretion of associations around the word extends and amplifies its literal meaning. Of course, mugging is not likely to produce utterly literal meanings, free of connotation; there is really only the theoretical possibility that such a thing as a connotation-free, or unsocialized, meaning might exist. Stuart Hall and a group from the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies have written a large book devoted almost solely to the public understandings of this one word – mugging – in Britain, and the cultural and political means through which those understandings were constructed (Hall et al.1978).

Semiotics in practice

Roland Barthes (1973) has, in effect, extended this system of classification into semiotics. In his essay ‘Myth Today’, he has outlined an incremental signifying system in which social meanings attach themselves to signs, just as connotations attach themselves to a word. This culturally enriched sign itself becomes the signifier for the next sign in a chain of signification of ascending complexity and cultural specificity. So, for example, the word outlaw has a...