by Douglas Kellner
Many different versions of cultural studies have emerged in the past decades.
While during its dramatic period of global expansion in the 1980s and 1990s, cultural
studies was often identified with the approach to culture and society developed by the
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in Birmingham, England, their sociological,
materialist, and political approaches to culture had predecessors in a number of currents
of cultural Marxism. Many 20thcentury Marxian theorists ranging from Georg Lukacs,
Antonio Gramsci, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, and T.W. Adorno to Fredric Jameson
and Terry Eagleton employed the Marxian theory to analyze cultural forms in relation to
their production, their imbrications with society and history, and their impact and
influences on audiences and social life. Traditions of cultural Marxism are thus important
to the trajectory of cultural studies and to understanding its various types and forms in the
present age.
The Rise of Cultural Marxism
Marx and Engels rarely wrote in much detail on the cultural phenomena that they
tended to mention in passing. Marx’s notebooks have some references to the novels of
Eugene Sue and popular media, the English and foreign press, and in his 1857-1858
“outline of political economy,” he refers to Homer’s work as expressing the infancy of
the human species, as if cultural texts were importantly related to social and historical
development. The economic base of society for Marx and Engels consisted of the forces
and relations of production in which culture and ideology are constructed to help secure
the dominance of ruling social groups. This influential "base/superstructure" model
considers the economy the base, or foundation, of society, and cultural, legal, political,
and additional forms of life are conceived as “superstructures" which grow out of and
serve to reproduce the economic base.
In general, for a Marxian approach, cultural forms always emerge in specific
historical situations, serving particular socio-economic interests and carrying out
important social functions. For Marx and Engels, the cultural ideas of an epoch serve the
interests of the ruling class, providing ideologies that legitimate class domination.
“Ideology” is a critical term for Marxian analysis that describes how dominant ideas of a
given class promote the interests of that class and help cover over oppression, injustices,
and negative aspects of a given society. On their analysis, during the feudal period, ideas
of piety, honor, valor, and military chivalry were the ruling ideas of the hegemonic
aristocratic classes. During the capitalist era, values of individualism, profit, competition,
and the market became dominant, articulating the ideology of the new bourgeois class
that was consolidating its class power. Ideologies appear natural, they seem to be
common sense, and are thus often invisible and elude criticism.
Marx and Engels began a critique of ideology, attempting to show how ruling
ideas reproduce dominant societal interests serving to naturalize, idealize, and legitimate
the existing society and its institutions and values. In a competitive and atomistic
capitalist society, it appears natural to assert that human beings are primarily selfinterested and competitive by nature, just as in a communist society it is natural to assert
that people are cooperative by nature. In fact, human beings and societies are extremely
complex and contradictory, but ideology smoothes over contradictions, conflicts and
negative features, idealizing human or social traits like individuality and competition
which are elevated into governing conceptions and values.
Many later cultural Marxists would develop these ideas, although they tended to
ascribe more autonomy and import to culture than in classical Marxism. While Marx’s
writings abound with literary reference and figures, he never developed sustained models
of cultural analysis. Instead, Marx focused his intellectual and political energies on
analyzing the capitalist mode of production, current economic developments and political
struggles, and vicissitudes of the world market and modern societies now theorized as
“globalization” and “modernity.”
The second generation of classical Marxists ranging from German Social
Democrats and radicals to Russian Marxists focused even more narrowly on economics
and politics. Marxism became the official doctrine of many European working class
movements and was thus tied to requirements of the political struggles of the day from
Marx’s death in 1883 and into the twentieth century.
A generation of Marxists, however, began turning concentrated attention to
cultural phenomena in the 1920s. Perry Anderson (1976) interprets the turn from
economic and political analysis to cultural theory as a symptom of the defeat of Western
Marxism after the crushing of the European revolutionary movements of the 1920s and
the rise of fascism. In addition, theorists like Lukacs, Benjamin, and Adorno, who
instituted a mode of Marxist cultural analysis, were intellectuals who had deep and
abiding interest in cultural phenomena.
The Hungarian cultural critic Georg Lukacs wrote important books like Soul and
Form (1900) and Theory of the Novel (1910) before he converted to Marxism and briefly
participated in the Hungarian revolution. The ultra-Marxist Lukacs of the early 1920s
intently developed philosophical and political dimensions of Marxism before returning to
cultural analysis later in the 1920s. In Russia, exile, he withdrew internally from
Stalinism, while working on a series of literary texts that have underappreciated
importance for cultural studies.
Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel connects the rise of the European novel to the
emergence and triumph of the bourgeoisie and capitalism. Its highly-delineated
individual protagonists corresponded to the individualism promoted by bourgeois society
and the lessons learned in the course of the characters’ experiences often conveyed useful
instruction, reproducing the ideology of bourgeois society. For Lukacs, literary forms,
characters, and content must all be interpreted as articulations of historical contexts in3
which narrative itself takes on diverse forms and functions in dissimilar environments.
His important contributions for cultural studies in this regard constitutes a resolute
historicizing of the categories of cultural form and analysis, as well as reading cultural
texts within a specific historical milieu and using the interpretations of texts to illuminate
in turn their historical setting.
Lukacs’ early historicist cultural studies were enriched in the 1920s in his turn to
Marxism in which he used theories of the mode of production, class and class conflict,
and Marx’s analysis of capital to provide economic grounding for his socio-cultural
analysis. History now was constructed by a mediation of economy and society and
cultural forms are understood in their relation to socio-historical development within a
mode of production, while cultural forms, properly interpreted, illuminate their historical
circumstances. Thus, Lukacs’ readings of Balzac, Zola, Thomas Mann, Kafka, and other
writers provide models of how to read and analyze critical texts in specific sociohistorical situations.
Lukacs’ prescriptive aesthetic valorized critical (and socialist) realism as the
model for progressive art and assaulted modernist aesthetics, a position that was strongly
rejected by subsequent Western Marxists from the Frankfurt School through British
cultural studies. The late Lukacs also turned to more dogmatic political forms of Marxian
ideology critique and formally renounced his earlier utopianism that saw literature as a
mode of reconciliation between individuals and the world and art as a way of overcoming
alienation.
Ernst Bloch, by contrast, stressed the utopian dimensions of Western culture and
the ways that cultural texts encoded yearnings for a better world and a transformed
society. Bloch’s hermeneutic approach to Western culture looked for visions of a better
life in cultural artifacts from the texts of Homer and the Bible to modern advertising and
department store show-case displays (1986). This utopian impulse contributes to cultural
studies a challenge to articulate how culture provides alternatives to the existing world
and images, ideas, and narratives that can promote individual emancipation and social
transformation, perspectives that would deeply inform the Frankfurt School and
contemporary theorists like Fredric Jameson.
For the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci, the ruling intellectual and
cultural forces of the era constitute a form of hegemony, or domination by ideas and
cultural forms that induce consent to the rule of the leading groups in a society. Gramsci
argued that the unity of prevailing groups is usually created through the state (as in the
American revolution, or unification of Italy in the 19th century), the institutions of "civil
society" also play a role in establishing hegemony. Civil society, in this discourse,
involves institutions of the church, schooling, the media and forms of popular culture,
among others. It mediates between the private sphere of personal economic interests and
the family and the public authority of the state, serving as the locus of what Habermas
described as "the public sphere."
In Gramsci’s conception, societies maintained their stability through a
combination of "domination," or force, and "hegemony," defined as consent to
"intellectual and moral leadership." Thus, social orders are founded and reproduced with
some institutions and groups violently exerting power and domination to maintain social
boundaries and rules (i.e. the police, military, vigilante groups, etc.), while other
institutions (like religion, schooling, or the media) induce consent to the dominant order
through establishing the hegemony, or ideological dominance, of a distinctive type of
social order (i.e. market capitalism, fascism, communism, and so on). In addition,
societies establish the hegemony of males and dominant races through the
institutionalizing of male supremacy or the rule of a governing race or ethnicity over
subordinate groups.
Gramsci’s key example in his Prison Notebooks (1971) is Italian fascism that
supplanted the previous liberal bourgeois regime in Italy through its control of the state
and exerted, often repressive, influence over schooling, the media, and other cultural,
social, and political institutions. Hegemony theory for Gramsci involves both analysis of
constitutive forces of domination and the ways that particular political forces achieved
hegemonic authority, and the delineation of counterhegemonic forces, groups, and ideas
that could contest and overthrow the existing hegemony. An analysis, for instance, of
how the regimes of Margaret Thatcher in England and Ronald Reagan in the United
States in the late 1970s and early 1980s won power would dissect how conservative
groups gained dominance through control of the state, and the use of media, new
technologies, and cultural institutions such as think tanks and fund-raising and political
action groups. Explaining the Thatcher-Reagan hegemony of the 1980s would require
analysis of how rightist ideas became dominant in the media, schools, and culture at
large. It would discuss how on a global level the market rather than the state was seen as
the source of all wealth and solution to social problems, while the state was pictured as a
source of excessive taxation, overregulation, and bureaucratic inertia.
Gramsci defined ideology as the ruling ideas which present the “social cement"
that unifies and holds together the established social order. He described his own
"philosophy of praxis" as a mode of thought opposed to ideology, which includes, among
other things, a critical analysis of ruling ideas. In "Cultural Themes: Ideological Material"
(1985), Gramsci notes that in his day the press was the dominant instrument of producing
ideological legitimation of the existing institutions and social order, but that many other
institutions such as the church, schools, and different associations and groups also played
a role. He called for sustained critique of these institutions and the ideologies that
legitimate them, accompanied by creation of counter institutions and ideas that would
produce alternatives to the existing system.
Gramsci’s critique of the dominant mode of culture and media would be taken up
by the Frankfurt School and British cultural studies providing many valuable tools for
cultural criticism. The concepts of ideology and utopia and historical-materialist cultural
analysis developed by Lukacs and Bloch, influenced the trajectory of Frankfurt School
cultural studies.
The work of the Frankfurt School provided what Paul Lazarsfeld (1942), one of
the originators of modern communications studies, called a critical approach, which he
distinguished from the "administrative research." The positions of Adorno, Lowenthal,
and other members of the inner circle of the Institute for Social Research were contested
by Walter Benjamin, an idiosyncratic theorist loosely affiliated with the Institute.
Benjamin, writing in Paris during the 1930s, discerned progressive aspects in new
technologies of cultural production such as photography, film, and radio. In "The Work
of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1969), Benjamin noted how new mass
media were supplanting older forms of culture whereby the mass reproduction of
photography, film, recordings, and publications replaced the emphasis on the originality
and "aura" of the work of art in an earlier era. Freed from the mystification of high
culture, Benjamin believed that media culture could cultivate more critical individuals
able to judge and analyze their culture, just as sports fans could dissect and evaluate
athletic activities. In addition, processing the rush of images of cinema created, Benjamin
believed, subjectivities better able to parry and comprehend the flux and turbulence of
experience in industrialized, urbanized societies.
Himself a collaborator of the prolific German artist Bertolt Brecht, Benjamin
worked with Brecht on films, created radio plays, and attempted to utilize the media as
organs of social progress. In the essay "The Artist as Producer" (1999 [1934]), Benjamin
argued that progressive cultural creators should "refunction" the apparatus of cultural
production, turning theater and film, for instance, into a forum of political enlightenment
and discussion rather than a medium of "culinary" audience pleasure. Both Brecht and
Benjamin wrote radio plays and were interested in film as an instrument of progressive
social change. In an essay on radio theory, Brecht anticipated the Internet in his call for
reconstructing the apparatus of broadcasting from one-way transmission to a more
interactive form of two-way, or multiple, communication (in Silberman 2000: 41ff.)-- a
form first realized in CB radio and then electronically-mediated computer
communication.
Moreover, Benjamin wished to promote a radical cultural and media politics
concerned with the creation of alternative oppositional cultures. Yet he recognized that
media such as film could have conservative effects. While he thought it was progressive
that mass-produced works were losing their "aura," their magical force, and were opening
cultural artifacts for more critical and political discussion, he recognized that film could
create a new kind of ideological magic through the cult of celebrity and techniques like
the close-up that fetishized certain stars or images via the technology of the cinema.
Benjamin was thus one of the first radical cultural critics to look carefully at the form and
technology of media culture in appraising its complex nature and effects. Moreover, he
developed a unique approach to cultural history that is one of his most enduring legacies,
constituting a micrological history of Paris in the 18th century, an uncompleted project
that contains a wealth of material for study and reflection (see Benjamin 2000 and the
study in Buck-Morss 1989).
Max Horkheimer and T.W. Adorno answered Benjamin's optimism in a highly
influential analysis of the culture industry published in their book Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which first appeared in 1948 and was translated into English in 1972.
They argued that the system of cultural production dominated by film, radio
broadcasting, newspapers, and magazines, was controlled by advertising and commercial
imperatives, and served to create subservience to the system of consumer capitalism.
While later critics pronounced their approach too manipulative, reductive, and elitist, it
provides an important corrective to more populist approaches to media culture that
downplay the way the media industries exert power over audiences and help produce
thought and behavior that conforms to the existing society.
The Frankfurt School also provide useful historical perspectives on the transition
from traditional culture and modernism in the arts to a mass-produced media and
consumer society. In his path-breaking book The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, Jurgen Habermas further historicizes Adorno and Horkheimer’s analysis of the
culture industry. Providing historical background to the triumph of the culture industry,
Habermas notes how bourgeois society in the late 18th and 19th century was distinguished
by the rise of a public sphere that stood between civil society and the state and which
mediated between public and private interests. For the first time in history, individuals
and groups could shape public opinion, giving direct expression to their needs and
interests while influencing political practice. The bourgeois public sphere made it
possible to form a realm of public opinion that opposed state power and the powerful
interests that were coming to shape bourgeois society.
Habermas notes a transition from the liberal public sphere which originated in the
Enlightenment and the American and French Revolution to a media-dominated public
sphere in the current stage of what he calls "welfare state capitalism and mass
democracy." This historical transformation is grounded in Horkheimer and Adorno's
analysis of the culture industry, in which giant corporations have taken over the public
sphere and transformed it from a site of rational debate into one of manipulative
consumption and passivity. In this transformation, "public opinion" shifts from rational
consensus emerging from debate, discussion, and reflection to the manufactured opinion
of polls or media experts. For Habermas, the interconnection between the sphere of
public debate and individual participation has thus been fractured and transmuted into
that of a realm of political manipulation and spectacle, in which citizen-consumers ingest
and absorb passively entertainment and information. "Citizens" thus become spectators of
media presentations and discourse which arbitrate public discussion and reduce its
audiences to objects of news, information, and public affairs. In Habermas's words:
"Inasmuch as the mass media today strip away the literary husks from the kind of
bourgeois self-interpretation and utilize them as marketable forms for the public services
provided in a culture of consumers, the original meaning is reversed" (1989: 171).
Habermas's critics, however, contend that he idealizes the earlier bourgeois public
sphere by presenting it as a forum of rational discussion and debate when in fact many
social groups and most women were excluded. Critics also contend that Habermas
neglects various oppositional working class, plebeian, and women's public spheres
developed alongside of the bourgeois public sphere to represent voices and interests
excluded in this forum (see the studies in Calhoun 1992). Yet Habermas is right that in7
the period of the democratic revolutions a public sphere emerged in which for the first
time in history ordinary citizens could participate in political discussion and debate,
organize, and struggle against unjust authority. Habermas's account also points to the
increasingly important role of the media in politics and everyday life and the ways that
corporate interests have colonized this sphere, using the media and culture to promote
their own interests.
Cultural Marxism was highly influential throughout Europe and the Western
world, especially in the 1960s when Marxian thought was at its most prestigious and
procreative. Theorists like Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel group in France, Galvano
Della Volpe, Lucio Colletti, and others in Italy, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, and
cohort of 1960s cultural radicals in the English-speaking world, and a large number of
theorists throughout the globe used cultural Marxism to develop modes of cultural studies
that analyzed the production, interpretation, and reception of cultural artifacts within
concrete socio-historical conditions that had contested political and ideological effects
and uses. One of the most famous and influential forms of cultural studies, initially under
the influence of cultural Marxism, emerged within the Centre for contemporary cultural
studies in Birmingham, England within a group often referred to as the Birmingham
School.
British Cultural Studies
While the Frankfurt School arguably articulates cultural conditions in the stage of
state monopoly capitalism or Fordism that produced a regime of mass production and
consumption, British cultural studies emerged in the 1960s when, first, there was
widespread global resistance to consumer capitalism and an upsurge of revolutionary
movements, and then emergence of a new stage of capital, described as "post-Fordism,"
postmodernity, or other terminology that attempted to describe a more variegated and
contested social and cultural formation. Moreover, the forms of culture described by the
earliest phase of British cultural studies in the 1950s and early 1960s articulated
conditions in an era in which there were still significant tensions in England and much of
Europe between an older working class-based culture and the newer mass-produced
culture whose models and exemplars were the products of American culture industries.
The initial project of cultural studies developed by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams,
and E.P. Thompson attempted to preserve working class culture against onslaughts of
mass culture produced by the culture industries. Thompson’s inquiries into the history of
British working class institutions and struggles, the defenses of working class culture by
Hoggart and Williams, and their attacks on mass culture were part of a socialist and
working class-oriented project that assumed that the industrial working class was a force
of progressive social change and that it could be mobilized and organized to struggle
against the inequalities of the existing capitalist societies and for a more egalitarian
socialist one. Williams and Hoggart were deeply involved in projects of working class
education and oriented toward socialist working class politics, seeing their form of
cultural studies as an instrument of progressive social change.
The early critiques in the first wave of British cultural studies of Americanism
and mass culture in Hoggart, Williams, and others during the late 1950s and early 1960s,
thus paralleled to some extent the earlier critique of the Frankfurt school, yet valorized a
working class that the Frankfurt school saw as defeated in Germany and much of Europe
during the era of fascism and which they never saw as a strong resource for emancipatory
social change. The 1960s work of the Birmingham school was continuous with the
radicalism of the first wave of British cultural studies (the Hoggart-Thompson-Williams
“culture and society” tradition) as well as, in important ways, with the Frankfurt school.
Yet the Birmingham project also eventually paved the way for a postmodern populist turn
in cultural studies.
It has not been widely recognized that the second stage of the development of
British cultural studies -- starting with the founding of the University of Birmingham
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in 1963/64 by Hoggart and Stuart Hall --
shared many key perspectives with the Frankfurt school. During this period, the Centre
developed a variety of critical approaches for the analysis, interpretation, and criticism of
cultural artifacts (see Hall 1980b; Johnson 1986/7; McGuigan 1992; and Kellner 1995).
Through a set of internal debates, and responding to social struggles and movements of
the 1960s and the 1970s, the Birmingham group engaged the interplay of representations
and ideologies of class, gender, race, ethnicity, and nationality in cultural texts, including
media culture. The Birmingham scholars were among the first to study the effects of
newspapers, radio, television, film, and other popular cultural forms on audiences. They
also focused on how various audiences interpreted and used media culture in varied and
different ways and contexts, analyzing the factors that made audiences respond in
contrasting ways to media texts.
The now classical period of British cultural studies from the early 1960s to the
early 1980s continued to adopt a Marxian approach to the study of culture, one especially
influenced by Althusser and Gramsci (see, especially Hall 1980a). Yet although Hall
usually omits the Frankfurt school from his narrative, some of the work done by the
Birmingham group replicated certain classical positions of the Frankfurt school, in their
social theory and methodological models for doing cultural studies, as well as in their
political perspectives and strategies. Like the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies
observed the integration of the working class and its decline of revolutionary
consciousness, and studied the conditions of this catastrophe for the Marxian project of
revolution. Like the Frankfurt school, British cultural studies concluded that mass culture
was playing an important role in integrating the working class into existing capitalist
societies and that a new consumer and media culture was forming a new mode of
capitalist hegemony.
Both traditions engaged the intersections of culture and ideology and saw
ideology critique as central to a critical cultural studies. Both perceived culture as a mode
of ideological reproduction and hegemony, in which cultural forms help to shape the
modes of thought and behavior that induce individuals to adapt to the social conditions of
capitalist societies. Both also conceived of culture as a potential form of resistance to
capitalist society and both the earlier forerunners of British cultural studies, especially9
Raymond Williams, and the theorists of the Frankfurt school viewed high culture as
containing forces of resistance to capitalist modernity, as well as ideology. Later, British
cultural studies would valorize resistant moments in media culture and audience
interpretations and use of media artifacts, while the Frankfurt school tended, with some
exceptions, to conceptualize mass culture as a homogeneous and potent form of
ideological domination -- a difference that would seriously divide the two traditions.
From the beginning, British cultural studies was highly political in nature and
investigated the potentials for resistance in oppositional subcultures. After first valorizing
the potential of working class cultures, they next indicated how youth subcultures could
resist the hegemonic forms of capitalist domination. Unlike the classical Frankfurt school
(but similar to Herbert Marcuse), British cultural studies turned to youth cultures as
providing potentially new forms of opposition and social change. Through studies of
youth subcultures, British cultural studies demonstrated how culture came to constitute
distinct forms of identity and group membership and appraised the oppositional potential
of various youth subcultures (see Jefferson 1976 and Hebdige 1979). Cultural studies
came to focus on how subcultural groups resist dominant forms of culture and identity,
creating their own style and identities. Individuals who conform to dominant dress and
fashion codes, behavior, and political ideologies thus produce their identities within
mainstream groups, as members of specific social groupings (such as white, middle-class
conservative Americans). Individuals who identify with subcultures, like punk culture, or
black nationalist subcultures, look and act differently from those in the mainstream, and
thus create oppositional identities, defining themselves against standard models.
But British cultural studies, unlike the Frankfurt school, did not adequately
engage modernist and avant-garde aesthetic movements, limiting its attentions by and
large to products of media culture and “the popular.” However, the Frankfurt school
engagement with modernism and avant-garde art in many of its protean forms is arguably
more productive than the ignoring of modernism and to some extent high culture as a
whole by many within British cultural studies. It appears that in its anxiety to legitimate
study of the popular and to engage the artifacts of media culture, British cultural studies
turned away from so-called “high” culture in favor of the popular. But such a turn
sacrifices the possible insights into all forms of culture and replicates the bifurcation of
the field of culture into a “popular” and “elite” (which merely inverts the
positive/negative valorizations of the older high/low distinction). More important, it
disconnects cultural studies from attempts to develop oppositional forms of culture of the
sort associated with the “historical avant-garde” (Burger 1984). Avant-garde movements
like Expressionism, Surrealism, and Dada wanted to develop art that would revolutionize
society, which would provide alternatives to hegemonic forms of culture.
The oppositional and emancipatory potential of avant-garde art movements was a
primary theme of the Frankfurt school, especially Adorno, and was largely neglected by
many schools of British cultural studies. Yet, it is interesting that engaging avant-garde
forms and movements was central to the project of Screen, which was in some ways the
hegemonic avant-garde of cultural theory in Britain in the 1970s, with powerful influence
throughout the world before the rise to prominence of the Birmingham School. In the10
early 1970s, Screen developed a founding distinction between “realism” and
“modernism” and carried out a series of critiques of both bourgeois realist art and the
sorts of media culture that reproduced the ideological codes of realism. In addition, they
positively valorized avant-garde modernist aesthetic practices, which were championed
for their political and emancipatory effects. This project put Screen theory in profound
kinship with the Frankfurt school, especially Adorno, though there were also serious
differences.
British cultural studies developed systematic critiques of the theoretical positions
developed by Screen in the 1970s and early 1980s which were never really answered
(Hall et al 1980). Indeed, what became known as ‘screen theory” itself fragmented and
dissolved as a coherent theoretical discourse and practical program by the 1980s. While
many of the critiques of Screen theory developed by British cultural studies were
convincing, the emphasis on avant-garde practices championed by Screen and the
Frankfurt school constitute a productive alternative to the neglect of such practices by
current British and North American cultural studies.
British cultural studies -- like the Frankfurt school -- insists that culture must be
studied within the social relations and system through which culture is produced and
consumed, and that thus analysis of culture is intimately bound up with the study of
society, politics, and economics. The key Gramscian concept of hegemony led British
cultural studies to investigate how media culture articulates a set of dominant values,
political ideologies, and cultural forms into a hegemonic project that incorporates
individuals into a shared consensus, as individuals became integrated into the consumer
society and political projects like Reaganism or Thatcherism (see Hall 1988). This project
is similar in many ways to that of the Frankfurt school, as are their metatheoretical
perspectives that combine political economy, textual analysis, and study of audience
reception within the framework of critical social theory.
British cultural studies and the Frankfurt school were both founded as
fundamentally transdisciplinary enterprises that resisted established academic divisions of
labor. Indeed, their boundary-crossing and critiques of the detrimental effects of
abstracting culture from its socio-political context elicited hostility among those who are
more disciplinary-oriented and who, for example, believe in the autonomy of culture and
renounce sociological or political readings. Against such academic formalism and
separatism, cultural studies insists that culture must be investigated within the social
relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed, and that thus
analysis of culture is intimately bound up with the study of society, politics, and
economics. Employing Gramsci’s model of hegemony and counterhegemony, it sought to
analyze “hegemonic,” or ruling, social and cultural forces of domination and to seek
“counterhegemonic” forces of resistance and struggle. The project was aimed at social
transformation and attempted to specify forces of domination and resistance in order to
aid the process of political struggle and emancipation from oppression and domination.
Some earlier authoritative presentations of British cultural studies stressed the
importance of a transdisciplinary approach to the study of culture that analyzed its11
political economy, process of production and distribution, textual products, and reception
by the audience -- positions remarkably similar to the Frankfurt school. For instance, in
his classical programmatic article, “Encoding/Decoding,” Stuart Hall began his analysis
by using Marx’s Grundrisse as a model to trace the articulations of “a continuous circuit,”
encompassing “production - distribution - consumption - production” (1980b: 128ff.).
Hall concretizes this model with focus on how media institutions produce meanings, how
they circulate, and how audiences use or decode the texts to produce meaning. Moreover,
in a 1983 lecture published in 1985/1986, Richard Johnson provided a model of cultural
studies, similar to Hall’s earlier model, based on a diagram of the circuits of production,
textuality, and reception, parallel to the circuits of capital stressed by Marx, illustrated by
a diagram that stressed the importance of production and distribution. Although Johnson
emphasized the importance of analysis of production in cultural studies and criticized
Screen for abandoning this perspective in favor of more idealist and textualist approaches
(63ff.), much work in British and North American cultural studies has replicated this
neglect.
Postmodern Turns in Cultural Studies
In many versions of post-1980s cultural studies, however, there has been a turn to
what might be called a postmodern problematic which emphasizes pleasure,
consumption, and the individual construction of identities in terms of what McGuigan
(1992) has called a “cultural populism.” Media culture from this perspective produces
material for identities, pleasures, and empowerment, and thus audiences constitute the
“popular” through their consumption of cultural products. During this phase -- roughly
from the mid-1980s to the present -- cultural studies in Britain and North America turned
from the socialist and revolutionary politics of the previous stages to postmodern forms
of identity politics and less critical perspectives on media and consumer culture.
Emphasis was placed more and more on the audience, consumption, and reception, and
displaced engaging production and distribution of texts and how texts were produced in
media industries.
The forms of cultural studies developed from the late 1970s to the present, in
contrast to the earlier stages, theorize a shift from the stage of state monopoly capitalism,
or Fordism, rooted in mass production and consumption to a new regime of capital and
social order, sometimes described as “post-Fordism” (Harvey 1989), or “postmodernism”
(Jameson 1991), and characterizing a transnational and global capital that valorizes
difference, multiplicity, eclecticism, populism, and intensified consumerism in a new
information/ entertainment society. From this perspective, the proliferating media culture,
postmodern architecture, shopping malls, and the culture of the postmodern spectacle
became the promoters and palaces of a new stage of technocapitalism, the latest stage of
capital, encompassing a postmodern image and consumer culture (see Best and Kellner
2001 and Kellner 2002).
Consequently, the turn to a postmodern cultural studies is a response to a new era
of global capitalism. What is described as the “new revisionism” (McGuigan) severs
cultural studies from political economy and critical social theory. During the postmodern12
stage of cultural studies there is a widespread tendency to decenter, or even ignore
completely, economics, history, and politics in favor of emphasis on local pleasures,
consumption, and the construction of hybrid identities from the material of the popular.
This cultural populism replicates the turn in postmodern theory away from Marxism and
its alleged reductionism, master narratives of liberation and domination, and historical
teleology.
In fact, British cultural studies has had an unstable relationship with political
economy from the beginning. Although Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson grounded
cultural studies in a Marxian model of the circuits of capital (production-distributionconsumption-production), Hall and other key figures in British cultural studies have not
consistently pursued economic analysis and most practitioners of British and North
American cultural studies from the 1980s to the present have pulled away from political
economy altogether. Hall’s swervings toward and away from political economy are
somewhat curious. Whereas in the article cited above Hall begins cultural studies with
production and recommends traversing through the circuits of capital (1980b) and while
in “Two Paradigms” (1980a), Hall proposes synthesizing on a higher level à la the
Frankfurt school “culturalism” and ‘structuralism,” he has been rather inconsistent in
articulating the relationship between political economy and cultural studies, and rarely
deployed political economy in his work.
In the “Two Paradigms” article, for example, Hall dismisses the political
economy of culture paradigm because it falls prey to economic reductionism. Hall might
be right in rejecting some forms of the political economy of culture then circulating in
England and elsewhere, but it is possible to do a political economy of culture à la the
Frankfurt school without falling prey to reductionism yet using the same sort of model of
reciprocal interaction of culture and economy. In particular, the Frankfurt model posits a
relative autonomy to culture, a position that is often defended by Hall, and does not entail
economic reductionism or determinism.
Generally speaking, however, Hall and other practitioners of British cultural
studies either simply dismiss the Frankfurt school as a form of economic reductionism or
simply ignore it. The blanket charge of economism is in part a way of avoiding political
economy altogether. Yet while many advocates of British cultural studies ignore political
economy totally, Hall, to be sure, has occasionally made remarks that might suggest the
need to articulate cultural studies with political economy. In a 1983 article, Hall suggests
that it is preferable to conceive of the economic as determinate in “the first instance”
rather than in “the last instance,” but this play with Althusser’s argument for the primacy
of the economic is rarely pursued in actual concrete studies.
Hall’s analysis of Thatcherism as “authoritarian populism” (1988) related the
move toward the hegemony of the right to shifts in global capitalism from Fordism to
Post-Fordism, but for his critics (Jessop et al 1984) he did not adequately take account of
the role of the economy and economic factors in the shift toward Thatcherism. Hall
responded that with Gramsci he would never deny “the decisive nucleus of economic
activity” (1988: 156), but it is not certain that Hall himself adequately incorporates13
economic analysis into his work in cultural studies and political critique. For example,
Hall’s writing on the “global postmodern” suggests the need for more critical
conceptualizations of contemporary global capitalism and theorizing of relations between
the economic and the cultural of the sort associated with the Frankfurt school. Hall states
(1991):the global postmodern signifies an ambiguous opening to difference and to
the margins and makes a certain kind of decentering of the Western
narrative a likely possibility; it is matched, from the very heartland of
cultural politics, by the backlash: the aggressive resistance to difference;
the attempt to restore the canon of Western civilization; the assault, direct
and indirect, on multicultural; the return to grand narratives of history,
language, and literature (the three great supporting pillars of national
identity and national culture); the defense of ethnic absolutism, of a
cultural racism that has marked the Thatcher and the Reagan eras; and the
new xenophobias that are about to overwhelm fortress Europe.
For Hall, therefore, the global postmodern involves a pluralizing of culture,
openings to the margins, to difference, to voices excluded from the narratives of Western
culture. But one could argue in opposition to this interpretation in the spirit of the
Frankfurt school that the global postmodern simply represents an expansion of global
capitalism on the terrain of new media and technologies, and that the explosion of
information and entertainment in media culture represents powerful new sources of
capital realization and social control. To be sure, the new world order of technology,
culture, and politics in contemporary global capitalism is marked by more multiplicity,
pluralism, and openness to difference and voices from the margins, but it is controlled
and limited by transnational corporations which are becoming powerful new cultural
arbitrators who threaten to constrict the range of cultural expression rather than to expand
it.
Cultural Studies Goes Global
The dramatic developments in the culture industries in recent years toward merger
and consolidation represent the possibilities of increased control of information and
entertainment by ever fewer super media conglomerates. One could argue already that the
globalization of media culture is an imposition of the lowest denominator homogeneity of
global culture on a national and local culture, in which CNN, NBC, MTV, BBC, the
Murdock channels, and so on impose the most banal uniformity and homogeneity on
media culture throughout the world. To be sure, the European cable and satellite
television systems have state television from Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Sweden, and
Russia, and so on, but these state television systems are not really open to that much
otherness, difference, or marginality. Indeed, the more open channels, like public access
television in the United States and Europe, or the SBS service which provides
multicultural television in Australia, are not really part of the global postmodern, and are
funded or mandated for the most part by the largess of state and are usually limited and
local in scope and reach.14
Certainly, there are some openings in Hall’s global postmodern, but they are
rather circumscribed and counteracted by increasing homogenization within global
culture. Indeed, the defining characteristics of global media culture is the contradictory
forces of identity and difference, homogeneity and heterogeneity, the global and the
local, impinging on each other, clashing, simply peacefully co-existing, or producing new
symbioses as in the motto of MTV Latino which combines English and Spanish:
Chequenos!-- meaning “Check us out!” Globalization by and large means the hegemony
of transnational cultural industries, largely American, as U.S. cultural industries dominate
world markets in film, television, music, fashion, and other cultural forms. Evocations of
the global postmodern diversity and difference should thus take into account
countervailing tendencies toward global homogenization and sameness -- themes
constantly stressed by the Frankfurt school.
For Hall (1991), the interesting question is what happens when a progressive
politics of representation imposes itself on the global postmodern field, as if the global
field was really open to marginality and otherness. But in fact the global field itself is
structured and controlled by dominant corporate and state powers and it remains a
struggle to get oppositional voices in play and is probably impossible in broadcasting, for
instance, where there is not something like public access channels or state-financed open
channels as in Holland. Of course, things look different when one goes outside of the
dominant media culture -- there is more pluralism, multiplicity, openness to new voices,
on the margins, but such alternative cultures are hardly part of the global postmodern that
Hall elicits. Hall’s global postmodern is thus too positive and his optimism should be
tempered by the sort of critical perspectives on global capitalism developed by the
Frankfurt school and the earlier stages of cultural studies.
The emphasis in postmodernist cultural studies arguably articulates experiences
and phenomena within a new mode of social organization. The emphasis on active
audiences, resistant readings, oppositional texts, utopian moments, and the like describes
an era in which individuals are trained to be more discerning media consumers, and in
which they are given a much wider choice of cultural materials, corresponding to a new
global and transnational capitalism with a much broader array of consumer choices,
products, and services. In this regime, difference sells, and the differences, multiplicities,
and heterogeneity valorized in postmodern theory describes the proliferation of
differences and multiplicity in a new social order predicated on proliferation of consumer
desires and needs.
The forms of hybrid culture and identities described by postmodern cultural
studies correspond to a globalized capitalism with an intense flow of products, culture,
people, and identities with new configurations of the global and local and new forms of
struggles and resistance (see Appadurai 1990 and Cvetkovich and Kellner 1997). New
forms of cultural studies that combine traditions from throughout the world replicate the
structure of an expanding and hybridized global culture, producing more varied forms of
cultural studies with proliferation of articles, books, conferences, and internet sites and
discussions throughout the world. From the 1980s through the present, models of cultural15
studies expanded the range of theories, regions, and artifacts engaged, providing a rich
diversity of traditions, originally deeply influenced by cultural Marxism and then taking a
wide variety of forms. Critical cultural studies insisted that the politics of representation
must engage class, gender, race, and sexuality, thus correcting lacunae in earlier forms of
cultural Marxism. British cultural studies successively moved from focuses on class and
culture to include gender, race, ethnicity, sexuality, nation, and other constituents of
identity in their analyses (see the articles collected in Durham and Kellner 2001).
As argued in this entry, there are many important anticipations of key positions of
British cultural studies in cultural Marxism and a wide range of traditions and positions to
draw upon for cultural studies today. Consequently, the project of cultural studies is
significantly broader than that taught in some contemporary curricula that identifies
cultural studies merely with the Birmingham School and their progeny. There are,
however, many traditions and models of cultural studies, ranging from neo-Marxist
models developed by Lukàcs, Gramsci, Bloch, and the Frankfurt school in the 1930s to
feminist and psychoanalytic cultural studies to semiotic and post-structuralist
perspectives (see Durham and Kellner 2001). In Britain and the United States, there is a
long tradition of cultural studies that preceded the Birmingham school (see Davies 1995
and Aronowitz 1993). And France, Germany, and other European countries have also
produced rich traditions that provide resources for cultural studies throughout the world.
The major traditions of cultural studies combine -- at their best -- social theory,
cultural critique, history, philosophical analysis, and specific political interventions, thus
overcoming the standard academic division of labor by surmounting specialization
arbitrarily produced by an artificial academic division of labor. Cultural studies thus
operates with a transdisciplinary conception that draws on social theory, economics,
politics, history, communication studies, literary and cultural theory, philosophy, and
other theoretical discourses -- an approach shared by the Frankfurt school, British cultural
studies, and French postmodern theory. Transdisciplinary approaches to culture and
society transgress borders between various academic disciplines. In regard to cultural
studies, such approaches suggest that one should not stop at the border of a text, but
should see how it fits into systems of textual production, and how various texts are thus
part of systems of genres or types of production, and have an intertextual construction --
as well as articulating discourses in a given socio-historical conjuncture.
Cultural Marxism thus strengthens the arsenal of cultural studies in providing
critical and political perspectives that enable individuals to dissect the meanings,
messages, and effects of dominant cultural forms. Cultural studies can become part of a
critical media pedagogy that enables individuals to resist media manipulation and to
increase their freedom and individuality. It can empower people to gain sovereignty over
their culture and to be able to struggle for alternative cultures and political change.
Cultural studies is thus not just another academic fad, but can be part of a struggle for a
better society and a better life.
References and Further Readings
Anderson, Perry (1976) Considerations on Western Marxism. London: New Left Books.
Benjamin, Walter (1969) Illuminations. New York: Shocken.
_______________ (1999) "The Artist as Producer," in Walter Benjamin,
Collected Writings, Volume II. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press.
_______________ (2000) The Arcades Project. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press.
Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner (2001) The Postmodern Adventure. Science
Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. New York and London:
Guilford and Routledge.
Bloch, Ernst (1986) The Principle of Hope. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Buck-Morss, Susan (1989) The Dialectics of Seeing. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT
Press.
Bürger, Peter (1984 [1974]) Theory of the Avant-Garde. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press.
Calhoun, Craig (1992), ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge: The
MIT Press.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1980a) On Ideology London:
Hutchinson.
______________________________ (1980b) Culture, Media, Language.
London: Hutchinson.
Cvetkovich, Ann and Douglas Kellner (1997) Articulating the Global and the
Local. Globalization and Cultural Studies. Boulder, Co.: Westview Press.
Davies, Ioan (1995) Cultural Studies, and After. London and New York:
Routledge.
Durham, Meenakshi Gigi and Douglas Kellner, editors (2001) Media and Cultural
Studies: KeyWorks. Malden, Mass. and Oxford, UK: Blackwell.
Gramsci, Antonio (1971) Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio
Gramsci. Edited and translated by Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell
Smith. New York: International Publishers.
Gramsci, Antonio (1985) Selections from Cultural Writings, 389-390. Edited by
David Forgacs and Geoffrey Nowell-Smith. London: Lawrence and
Wishart.
Habermas, Jurgen (1989a) Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere.
Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.
Hall, Stuart, et al (1980) Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.
H a l l , S t u a r t ( 1 9 8 0 a ) " C u l t u r a l S t u d i e s a n d problematics t h e C e n t r e : and S o m e problems," in Hall et al, 1980, 15-47.
____________ (1980b) "Encoding/Decoding," in Hall et al, 1980, 128-138.
____________ (1983) "The Problem of Ideology--Marxism Without Guarantees,"
in B. Matthews (ed.) Marx 100 Years On. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
_________________ (1988) The Hard Road to Renewal. London: Verso.
______________ (1991), Lecture on Globalization and Ethnicity, University of
Minnesota, Videotape.
Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell: 1989.
Hebdige, Dick Subculture. The Meaning of Style. London: Methuen.
Horkheimer, Max and T.W. Adorno (1972) Dialectic of Enlightenment. New
York: Herder and Herder.
Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991.
Jefferson, Tony (ed.) (1976) Reistance through Rituals. London: Hutchinson.
Jessop, Bob, et al (1984) "Authoritarian Populism, Two Nations, and
Thatcherism," New Left Review 147:
Johnson, Richard (1986/87) "What is Cultural Studies Anyway?" Social Text 16: 38-80.
Kellner, Douglas (1995) Media Culture. Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between
the Modern and the Postmodern. London and New York: Routledge
___________ (2001) Media Spectacle. London and New York: Routledge, 2003.18
Lazarsfeld, Paul (1941) "Administrative and Critical Comunications Research,"
Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, Vol. IX, No. 1: 2-16.
Lukacs, Georg (1971) The Theory of the Novel. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT University
Press.
McGuigan, Jim (1992) Cultural Populism. London and New York: Routledge.
Williams, Raymond (1961) The Long Revolution. London: Chatto and Windus.
See also: Marxism, Frankfurt School, Birmingham School, cultural populism, Stuart Hall,
Fredric Jameson
Source:(http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/)
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