Getting nearer to the end of Couldry and I am even more disappointed than before. Here is a passage I thought was insightful:
Major institutions (such as the media) focus identities and reflexivity, but at the same time disaggregate people, making it difficult for them to identify with particular others. We need, paradoxically, to think more about the reverse side [???] of culture: the “cultures” and cultural encounters we do not have. That means, in turn, thinking seriously about the processes of naturalization which protect disorder, uncertainty, and unevenness from being articulated, from being visible. How is the sense of a coherent cultural ‘inside’ created and maintained?
Cultural studies—through its engagement with the realities of mediated culture, and its historic concern with the interconnections of culture and power—is well placed to contribute to these questions, provided it maintains the two-way accountability outlined here.
I’ll come back to this last caveat in a moment. First I’d like to say that, on the whole, I think this is a pretty important set of concerns. In fact, I’d say that they are really the kind of concerns that have occupied the major Cultural Studies theorists since the beginning. They are what separates CS from the isolated ethnographies of anthropology, psychological case studies, and network TV news human interest stories. Though CS surely has a focus on finding out how people navigate this terrain and, possibly helping them do this to an extent, it has never shied away from thinking about how cultures function. This has meant thinking about the mechanisms of their reproduction, especially at the point that these mechanisms have become industrialized and the goal of reproducing a particular kind of (consuming, disciplined, what have you) subject has become a multi-billion dollar industry, global in scale.
None of this is to deny the agency that people have to make meaning, the role that they play in this process. Couldry has a nice way of speaking to this. Earlier in this chapter, he paraphrases parts of Elsbeth Probyn’s argument in Sexing the Self—the parts he approves of—as being that, “Although the self can only come into being by working through a series of practices that are socially shared (and therefore transcend the individual), there is significant causal input from the self: the self is active in that process” (121). This is what Couldry means about us having a “two-way” accountability in our method. A fairly uncontroversial statement: throughout the book he insists on us understanding these institutions as being “limiting” rather than “determining” of the selves individuals are able to realize. Again, something that has been re-hashed and insisted upon in one way or another throughout the disciplinary debates over cultural studies.
Notably, the most obvious person for him to argue with here would have been Raymond Williams, who famously defined “determination” as “never only the setting of limits, it is also the application of pressures” [1977, p87] I think it very shoddy of Couldry to have overlooked (avoided? cowered from?) dealing with this line of reasoning, but I find it fairly indicative of the general drift of CS since Williams tried to reel it back in by declaring himself a Marxist, Hall decided to give up on all that in order to have it both ways in the USA, and everyone else involved in Cultural Studies became obsessed with identity. In fact, at this point, to even hint at the fact that these institutions have a serious efficacy on people’s psyche causes quite an uproar—especially when the argument shifts into the cosmopolitan gear of globalization speak, a register that Couldry spends a good deal of his study flirting with, yet mostly to deny that the political boundaries that still divide the populations of the world have too much of an effect on people’s “culture” because they can have lots of different ideas, even if they aren’t allowed to have them on both sides of the border.
Okay, I’m starting to get snarky. The disappointing, even disgusting, part of Couldry’s argument for me was that, like Richard Johnson (who, except for a couple of sections on Williams early books, seems to be the only early Cutlural Studies scholar that Couldry paid much attention to—and even then just the one essay that everyone has read) he is really more interested in the stuff that doesn’t make him sound like a crusty Marxist. The passage above is one of only a few moments when he articulates a real need to pay attention to the material—not just with the requisite lip service, but giving a real theoretical reason to do so: it helps us to get at the question “How is a coherent cultural ‘inside’ maintained?” I intentionally left off the page number of this quote because it depresses me. He provides a clear, articulate reason to consider the original question of Cultural Studies on page 130 of a 144 page book, having spent a total of 2 pages previous to this explaining the importance of political economy. Granted, he places this centrally in his original outline of what is necessary in Cultural Studies, but then he pretty much leaves it to one side.
If he were writing this in 1972, I could understand this. If he were arguing with the hardcore political economists in the British New Left (not that there were many) or trying to redirect the hangers on of the Frankfurt School away from this emphasis, I’d understand him spending the better part of his short book on explaining how important it is that we think about the individual, that we understand the issues of hearing their voices and considering the variety of perspectives people can have about a certain mass cultural object, despite the obvious dearth of options available. It would be a cheery ray of sunshine in what was otherwise a dark landscape of the “One-Dimensional Man.” But the fact of the matter is that, if Couldry wanted to outline a methodology of Cultural Studies, something which I agree with as an absolute necessity, the last thing he needs to convince its current adherents of is the importance of the individual over the institutional, of the reality of “cultural flows” over “cultural cohesion:” it’s what they live and breath. It’s the neo-liberal creed that they have absorbed fully into their ideology of cosmopolitan culture (I’ll get to this in a second.) In effect, he’s just another little star in a field that already has, to quote a popular adherent to a similar ideology/rhetorical strategy, “a thousand points of light.”
If this were all that Couldry did, I could simply dismiss him as being historically unaware, like he had gone to sleep before Thatcher took office and had just woken up in the 1990s, without a whole lot of time to absorb the mountains of pabulum that had been produced in the interim. I don’t mean to be dismissive here. Certainly there were changes that needed to be made in the original thinking of Cultural Studies scholars. But what disturbs me is that Couldry seems to know full well all the crtitiques of the early CS scholarship, but seems to have no idea what they were saying or, more importantly, what was being said directly before them. This is important because, although I don’t entirely agree with the trajectory CS has taken, almost all of it was charted from the very beginning, though now it is basically just drifting since it has thrown much of the original engine overboard (again, 3 pages out of 144).
Here, I am especially drawn to Couldry’s characterization of Williams idea of community, which he then tries to make evident in early Cultural Studies scholars like Hebdige and even Hall as having an approach which “depended on seeing cultural experience and expressions as systematic unities” (46). Here he chides these scholars for having a false sense of closure about cultures that they were studying and, predictably, brings up scholars like Garcia-Canclini who talk about “hybrid-culture” and quotes approvingly people who dismiss this early work as being ignorant of “the subjective aspects of the struggle.” Ok. Fine. I haven’t read all that has been written in these early years. And certainly there was an early emphasis on communities as the objects of analysis—particularly working class communities. Hence, as Viriginia Nightingale points out in her recounting of early audience studies Studying Audiences: The Shock of the Real (you gotta love the equivocation in that title!), while [I’m paraphrasing here] the first studies began with the audience and looked at their cultural consumption patterns, the items they latched onto or the way that they felt about particular popular cultural products, later studies were constituted around the objects themselves from the beginning: the study became of fans of a certain product, viewers of Dallas, for instance. No doubt as these studies branched out, the question of where you draw the line of what an audience is, of what a community is becomes fuzzy. By focusing on fans, you cut through that kind of messiness because it all becomes about self-defined communities rather than ones that the analyst has to justify as being coherent.
But the fact of the matter is that, whatever perils early CS could be accused of falling victim to—insularity in its British conception of the Nation and that nations peculiar history of class relations; elisions around gender, race, sexuality, etc.—being overly focused on the smooth operation of cultures is far from an accurate charge. Couldry goes so far as to say that early CS, “leaves little space for thinking about culture in terms of the complexity, perhaps even the resistance, involved in individuals (apparent) accession to wider cultural forms” (48). This last statement floored me because I really can’t believe someone who is obviously so smart and careful as Couldry would think that this is truly the position that CS is in. Perhaps one can abstract their work, set alongside current work, almost thirty years hence, and say that they still weren’t focused enough on conflict within the social field, but from a historical perspective, it is frankly an inexcusably a-historical argument. I daresay it is shamelessly lacking in a cultural studies perspective.
Upon reading this statement, I scrambled for the index of the book. No…no mention there. Then the bibliography—surely there: nope. No the only mention of Talcott Parsons, the theorist that Hall says early Cultural Studies and sociology of conflict scholars were pitted against, is in a parenthetically comment, again, focused on the deficiencies of a thinking about cultures as closed:
This ‘holistic’ model of culture has been extremely influential: it crosses not only anthropology but also sociology (it was at the root of functionalist models of social integration, such as that of Talcott Parsons) and cultural studies, where its influence on Raymond Williams’ early account of culture as a way of life is obvious. (95)
So the only mention of Parsons in the book is to say that he had a model of culture similar to that of early CS. Maybe I missed something, but so far as I understand it, Cultural Studies, in so far as it “rediscovered ideology” in media studies and was related to the work of Becker on deviant and outsider culture, was directly attacking this dominant paradigm of “consensus focused” sociology. Parsons theory of social action basically says that any conflicts that arise are bound to work themselves out and a new consensus is arrived at which takes that into account. More importantly, he interprets the fact that people do certain things as being evidence that they believe in what they do—and, more importantly, they believe they are doing these things in a manner identical to the dominant understanding of what they do. These are the basic presumptions of Parsons. And, moreover, Parsons was committed to figuring out a “general theory” of social action which was less concerned—and basically uninterested—in what people actually believed. The latter was for the “administrative researchers” to worry with. Notably, the administrative researchers were the survey specialists, such as Lazarsfeld, who were able to prove empirically that people at the local level have influence over mass media messages (though mostly those dealing with soap or fashion), but they were working hard with the advertisers to make that connection more direct.
In any case, they were part of the machine that tried to help build the consensus that Parsons saw as naturally occurring and it was the collective work of these two arms of the sociological institutions of the post war period—founded in the US but exported to Britain and Western Europe along with the Marshall Plan—and which Cultural Studies was on the forefront of challenging as an intellectual doctrine of the way societies worked precisely by focusing on both the conflict that existed within what appeared to be the smooth functioning of society and the mechanisms which helped to determine that appearance of consensus. In other words, as Hall put it, the “break” with Parsons and the dominant paradigm of sociology and communication studies “occurred precisely at the point where theorists asked ‘but who produces consensus?’ ‘In what interests does it function?’ ‘On what conditions does it depend?’ Here, the media and other signifying institutions came back into question—no longer as institutions which merely reflected and sustained consensus, but as institutions which helped produce consensus and which manufactured consent.” (86) Perhaps Williams wasn’t as well versed in the dominant paradigm of communications and sociological research (it could be excused since he was a literature professor, but his later books prove otherwise) and hence unwittingly reproduced it. In any case, to characterize CS as failing to account for this seems at best ignorant and at worst intellectually dishonest. I know these are tall accusations coming from someone only studying for their PhD, but I don’t know how else to characterize Couldry’s account.
It does, on the other hand, make current CS work, seem much more enlightened. And, when he gets to the part where he is making those final recommendations, wrapping it all up, it does feel so much better to be able to talk about how important it is to understand “common culture” according to the wisdom of Donna Haraway (or, presumably, the students from whom she cribbed most of the essay he draws on) who emphasizes that “common culture” does not mean closure around any one specific located “culture” but rather an aspiration towards dialogue and exchange across difference.” (135) It’s so warm and fuzzy—and with none of those closed cultures those people in the 1970s thought existed: what was up with that anyway? Oh, just one question: if there aren’t closed cultures, if there aren’t similar experiences or structures that bind people in some way, what is the meaning of “difference?” Where does this come from? How can we speak to each other across difference if we’re all just awash in the same cultural flow? As we listen to each voice and hear each individuals articulation of their experience, how do we deal with those perspectives that find immigration the greatest threat their culture? That feel homosexuality is hurting the culture of heterosexual marriage? That argue Islamic extremists are driven by a culture and religion of violence (they can’t do anything peacefully) or by a jealous rage over “our freedoms?” It seems to me that Cultural Studies is in a fantastic position to begin to unravel some of this propaganda, and honoring these individual perspectives is a place to start, but ultimately the real work will be done in taking on those big questions of power rather than being minutely concerned with the variety of interpretations people could have of the last hit movies. I’m getting tired. Hopefully I can pick this up again. Key point I want to make is that, while we’d like to have this cosmopolitan culture, it’s not everybody’s bag and, if we’re really going to respect folks, we’ve got to come up with an answer to that issue (limit of tolerance is intolerance, i.e. I’ll tolerate everything but intolerance, that I can’t tolerate—I think George Will formulated that gem at one time, not that I quote it approvingly). But the fact of the matter is that there are cultures, as ways of life, that do eventually manage to establish some sense of stability and order. Is our position the same as Tyler Cowen, that these getting transformed or destroyed is just part of the process of creation? Or is it more along the lines of Polanyi (Karl)? I realize the reactionary kernel in the latter, but I also think that there is something to be said for the way that capitalism, in particular, is fairly adept at making this sort of destruction of systems of meaning seem uncontroversial, just another kind of progress, anyone in the way is a luddite, but adopting this position seems rather unrigorous and doesn’t open the possibility that, as many critics of development have pointed out, the forces of progress might eliminate some good alternatives that could be more creatively combined or adopted, were it not for the overwhelming force of the powers of enlightenment. Here Escobar seems key, but any number of others would do.
