Cultural studies

Cultural studies

The borderland between textual and social research has been given an innovative, if somewhat eclectic, articulation in cultural studies. Research in this tradition has contributed particularly to extending the concept of texts beyond high-cultural masterpieces by including both popular culture and everyday social practices among the objects of textual analysis. Whereas theory and methodology have been developed in a number of countries in Europe and North and Latin America, drawing on nineteenth-century classics (Durkheim, Marx, Weber) as well as modern European and American pioneers such as Adorno and Horkheimer (1977), Carey (1989), Gans (1974), Hoggart (1957), and Williams (1977), it is fair to say that British cultural studies have led the way over the last two decades. In summary, a Birmingham- Paris axis was established (and, later on, re-exported to the American market), which served to assimilate French social and psychoanalytic theory, including versions of structuralism and semiology, to the critical study of contemporary social and cultural issues (Hall et al., 1980).

28 A handbook of qualitative methodologies

Much work in this tradition revolves around the concept of practices (Williams, 1977), in the sense of meaningful social activities. This concept serves to emphasize a cultural dimension in, and a holistic perspective on, social life, further recognizing the scope for intervention by social agents and the role of meaning for orienting social action. The center of research, thus, is located outside texts and media, which are said to be embedded, along with audiences, in broad social and cultural practices. As part of this framework, studies have examined particular cultural institutions and subcultural groups, and the concept of interpretive communities (Fish, 1979) has been introduced to suggest that audiences are characterized not simply by socioeconomic background variables, but simultaneously by their discursive modes of interpreting cultural forms, which give rise to different constructions of social reality (see also Jensen, 1991; Lindlof, 1988; Radway, 1984). For the humanities and social sciences alike, this work serves as a reminder that the relationship between cultural- discursive and demographic-social formations is not well understood.

The analytical practice of cultural studies is rooted in literary analysis-cum-interpretation, but it emphasizes extratextual frameworks of explanation. Nevertheless, while the categories of analysis are thus grounded in theories of subjectivity and social context, the primary medium of the research remains the interpreting scholar. Furthermore, the focus has tended to be placed on the overarching discourses of culture, rather than their local, empirical producers and recipients. Consequently, although cultural studies refer to the genre in question, its implied reader positions, and associated social uses, the tradition is still preoccupied with the message or discourse of communication. This is in spite of habitual, sometimes ritualistic references to the concreteness, specificity, and difference of cultural practices. The social system is conceived of as a context of diverse discourses which derive from subcultures and interpretive communities based on gender, class, or ethnicity, and which mediate the flow and interpretation of mass communication. In general, though, cultural studies have thrived on the combination of a text-centered methodology with social- systemic theories of discourse.

The theoretical framework rests on two types of assumptions: structuralism and culturalism (Hall, 1980). Where the structuralist element would emphasize the relatively determined nature of social life and cultural forms under industrial capitalism, following Althusser’s (1971) characterization of cultural institutions as

Humanistic scholarship 29

ideological state apparatuses, the culturalist element rather emphasizes the relative autonomy of culture as a site of social struggle and as an agent of change. The lack of public control over, in classic Marxist terms, the means of production, does not in itself entail a similar lack of influence on or through the means of discursive reproduction. The decisive theoretical issue, of course, is the degree of this relative autonomy, which raises major political issues. Whereas people may draw on frames of understanding outside the dominant social order, both as producers of their own cultural practices and as recipients of mass-mediated culture, in order to assert their difference; the question is whether this discursive difference will make a social difference so as to reform macrosocial institutions or deep-seated everyday practices. Unable to answer this classic question of effects, the structuralist and culturalist trends of cultural studies tend to coexist uneasily.

The question of effects suggests other broad issues in the politics of culture. Cultural studies have served an important function within the humanities by re-evaluating popular culture as a both pleasurable and worthy discourse and as a relevant social resource, labeling, for example, television as a modern bard (Fiske and Hartley, 1978). By focusing on the social use and value of literacy and other modes of communication, the humanities have come full circle since the rise of Greek literacy. The question remains, however, in what sense discursive resistance (what Eco [1976:150] has called “semiotic guerilla warfare”) will serve social groups that, though self-reliant in their uses of popular culture, are subject to repression and injustice. The most elaborate argument for the liberating potential of popular culture has been made by John Fiske, who tends to see the audience-public’s pleasure in the media as they now exist, not just as an oppositional stance, but as a first stage in a process of social transformation (Fiske, 1987, 1989; for a critique, see Jensen, 1991). Thus, cultural studies have reiterated the question of how social and discursive levels of structuration are interrelated—which is perhaps the main question for an interdisciplinary field of mass communication research.