John Fiske (1992) maintains that ‘culture’ (in cultural studies) ‘is neither aesthetic nor humanist in emphasis, but political’. Thus, the object of study in cultural studies is not culture defined in the narrow sense, as the objects of aesthetic excellence (‘high art’) nor culture defined in an equally narrow sense, as a process of aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual develop-ment, but culture understood, in Raymond Williams’s (1961) famous appropriation from anthropology, as ‘a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period or a group’. This is a definition of culture which can embrace the first two definitions, but also, and crucially, it can range beyond the social exclusivity and narrowness of these, to include the study of popular culture. Therefore, although cultural studies cannot (or should not) be reduced to the study of popular culture, it is certainly the case that the study of popular culture is central to the project of cultural studies. Finally, cultural studies regards culture as political in a quite specific sense, one which reveals the dominant political position within cultural studies. Stuart Hall (1981), for example, describes popular culture as
an arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture—already fully formed—might be simply ‘expressed’. But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why ‘popular culture’ matters.
Others within cultural studies might not express their attitude to popular culture quite in these terms, but they would certainly share Hall’s concern to think of culture politically.
All the basic assumptions of cultural studies are Marxist. This is not to say that all practitioners of cultural studies are Marxists, but that cultural studies is itself grounded in Marxism. Marxism informs cultural studies in two fundamental ways. First, to understand the meanings of culture we must analyse it in relation to the social structure and its historical contingency. Although constituted by a particular social structure with a particular history, culture is not studied as a reflection of this structure and history. On the contrary, cultural studies argues that culture’s importance derives from the fact that it helps constitute the structure and shape the history. Second, cultural studies assumes that capitalist industrial societies are societies divided unequally along ethnic, gender, generational and class lines. It is argued that culture is one of the principal sites where this division is established and contested: culture is a terrain on which takes place a continual struggle over meaning, in which subordinate groups attempt to resist the imposition of meanings which bear the interests of dominant groups. It is this which makes culture ideological.
Ideology is without doubt the central concept in cultural studies. There are many competing definitions of ideology, but it is the formulation established by Hall (1982), which is generally accepted as the dominant definition within cultural studies. Working within a framework of Gramsci’s (1971) concept of hegemony, Hall developed a theory of ‘articulation’ to explain the processes of ideological struggle (Hall’s use of ‘articulation’ plays on the term’s double meaning: to express and to join together). He argues that cultural texts and practices are not inscribed with meaning, guaranteed once and for all by the intentions of production; meaning is always the result of an act of ‘articulation’ (an active process of production in use). The process is called articulation because meaning has to be expressed, but it is always expressed in a specific context, a specific historical moment, within a specific discourse(s). Thus expression is always connected (articulated) to and conditioned by context. Hall also draws on the work of the Russian theorist Valentin Volosinov (1973 [1929]) who argues that meaning is always determined by context of articulation. Cultural texts and practices are ‘multi-accentual’, that is, they can be articulated with different accents by different people in different contexts for different politics. Meaning is therefore a social production: the world has to be made to mean. A text or practice or event is not the issuing source of meaning, but a site where the articulation of meaning—variable meaning(s)—can take place. Because different meanings can be ascribed to the same text or practice or event, meaning is always a potential site of conflict. Thus the field of culture is for cultural studies a major site of ideological struggle; a terrain of incorporation and resistance; one of the sites where hegemony is to be won or lost.
There are those, within and outside cultural studies, who believe that cultural studies’ model of ideological struggle leads (in some versions almost inevitably) to an uncritical celebration of popular culture: ‘resistance’ is endlessly elaborated in terms of empowerment and pleasure, while incorporation is quietly forgotten. An advocate of this thesis is Jim McGuigan (1992), who claims to identify ‘an uncritical populist drift’ within cultural studies; an uncritical celebration of the ‘popular’ reading. Against this, cultural studies would insist that people make popular culture from the repertoire of commodities supplied by the cultural industries. Cultural studies would also insist that making popular culture (‘production in use’) can be empowering to subordinate and resistant to dominant understandings of the world. But this is not to say that popular culture is always empowering and resistant. To deny the passivity of consumption is not to deny that sometimes consumption is passive; to deny that the consumers of popular culture are not cultural dupes is not to deny that at times we can all be duped. But it is to deny that popular culture is little more than a degraded culture, successfully imposed from above, to make profit and secure ideological control. The best of cultural studies insists that to decide these matters requires vigilance and attention to the details of the production, distribution and consumption of culture. These are not matters that can be decided once and for all (outside the contingencies of history and politics) with an elitist glance and a condescending sneer.
Nor can they be read off from the moment of production (locating meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, etc., in, variously, the intention, the means of production or the production itself). These are only aspects of the contexts for production in use, and it is, ultimately, in production in use that questions of meaning, pleasure, ideological effect, and so on can be (contingently) decided.
John Storey
University of Sunderland
References
Fiske, J. (1992) ‘British cultural studies and television’, in R.C.Allen (ed.) Channels of Discourse, Reassembled, London.
Gramsci, A. (1971) Selections from Prison Notebooks, London.
Hall, S. (1981) ‘Notes on deconstructing “the popular” ’, in R.Samuel (ed.) People’s History and Socialist Theory, London.
——(1982) ‘The rediscovery of ideology: the return of the repressed’, in M.Gurevitch, T.Bennett, J.Curran and J.Woollacott (eds) Culture, Society and the Media, London.
McGuigan, J. (1992) Cultural Populism, London.
Volosinov, V.N. (1973 [1929]) Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, New York.
Williams, R. (1961) The Long Revolution, London.
Further reading
Brantlinger, P. (1990) Crusoe’s Footprints: Cultural Studies in Britain and America, London.
During, S. (ed.) (1993) The Cultural Studies Reader, London.
Fiske, J. (1989) Understanding Popular Culture, London.
Franklin, S., Lury, C. and Stacy, J. (eds) (1991) Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies, London.
Grossberg, L., Nelson, C. and Treichler, P. (eds) (1992) Cultural Studies, London.
Hall, S., Hobson, D., Lowe, A. and Willis, P. (eds) (1980) Culture, Media, Language, London.
Inglis, F. (1993) Cultural Studies, Oxford.
McRobbie, A. (1994) Postmodernism and Popular Culture, London.
Mukerji, C. and Schudson, M. (eds) (1991) Rethinking Popular Culture: Contemporary Perspectives in Cultural Studies, Berkeley, CA.
Storey, J. (1993) An Introductory Guide to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, London.
——(ed.) (1994) Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, London.
Turner, G. (1990) British Cultural Studies: An Introduction, London.
