The Anti-Political Populism of Cultural Studies
Gitlin, Todd
The academic tendency called cultural studies fiercely disbelieves that there are any unmoved movers at work in history. So proponents of cultural studies should not be taken aback by the view...
...History was being written "from the bottom up...
...On this view, to dwell on the centrality of popular culture is more than an academic's way of filling her hours...
...It has its reasons...
...Especially in Britain, they encountered programs in literary studies that had little place for the culture these students—let alone their families—actually lived...
...Perhaps the millions had not actually been absorbed into the hegemonic sponge of mainstream popular culture...
...Thus, too, the feminist fascination with the fictions and talk shows of daytime "women's television"—in this view, the dismissal of these shows as "trivial," "banal," "soap opera," and so on, follows from the patriarchal premise that what takes place within the four walls of the home matters less than what takes place in a public sphere established (not coincidentally) for the convenience of men...
...Cultural studies often claims to have overthrown hierarchy, but what it actually does is invert it...
...The object of attention is certified as worthy of such not by being "the best that has been thought and said in the world" but by having been thought and said by or for "the people"—period...
...the emphasis on the active production (or "construction") of meaning...
...Consolation: here is an explanation for the rise of academic cultural studies during precisely the years when the right has held political and economic power longer and more consistently than at any other time in more than a half century...
...In part, too, the bulking up of popular culture and the connected phenomenon of celebrity stem from the declining grip of the institutions that traditionally imparted identity to the young: occupation, class, religion...
...There is defiance, too, as much as hope...
...There is energy at work...
...The cultural student, singing their songs, analyzing their lyrics, at the same time sings their praises...
...In the prevailing schools of cultural studies, to study culture is not so much to try to grasp cultural processes but to choose sides or, more subtly, to determine whether a particular cultural process belongs on the side of society's angels...
...Is it the particular form of capitalism practiced by multinational corporations in a deregulatory era...
...Where the market flatters the individual, cultural studies flatters the group...
...Are the communities of African-Americans or AfroCaribbeans suffering...
...Seeking to find political energies in audiences who function as audiences, rather than in citizens functioning as citizens, the dominant current in cultural studies is pressed willy-nilly toward an uncritical celebration of technological progress...
...Having overrated the radical potential of students, they sought to compensate for the error by seeking out "radical chains" among other social groups...
...In Britain, Labour, union, feminist, and antiracist momentum continued through the 1970s, though their conspicuousness masked the fact that the left had become a minority—a fact that became clear with the election of Margaret Thatcher in 1979...
...What was setting in, at these different paces, was a twilight of Labour and Democratic power...
...The founding generation were deeply involved with the British New Left...
...q This essay is derived from a chapter in Cultural Studies in Question, edited by Marjorie Ferguson and Peter Bolding, Sage Publications, 1997...
...Two of their influential elders, Richard Hoggart and Raymond Williams, derived from the industrial working classes, and so did many of their students...
...It is not simply that the market in popular culture grew enormously after World War II, but that from the 1960s on, the young have come to define themselves by their taste, especially in popular music...
...One need not be unduly vexed by electoral defeats...
...By the same token, if there is to be a significant "opposition," it must first find a base in popular culture— and first also turns out to be second, third, and fourth, since popular culture is so much more accessible, so much more porous, so much more changeable than the economic and political order...
...It was not simply conflict but "contestation," or confrontation...
...What the group wants, buys, demands is ipso facto the voice of the people...
...romance fiction (Janice Radway, Reading the Romance, 1984...
...Where once Marxists looked to factory organization as the prefiguration of "a new society in the shell of the old," today they tend to look to sovereign culture consumers...
...The sociological judgment that popular culture is important to people blurs into a critical judgment that popular culture must therefore be valuable...
...If we wish to do politics, let us organize groups, coalitions, demonstrations, lobbies, whatever...
...Unabashedly, the populism of cultural studies prides itself on being political...
...it is a useful certification of the people and their projects...
...The combination of new opportunities and external frustrations brought a new wave of academic attention to popular culture...
...The process of labeling is circular, since it has been predetermined whether a particular group is, in fact, hegemonic or resistant...
...The general student movement was finished, except for brief episodes, leaving behind a range of identity-based movements, feminist, gay, and race-based...
...Here, in a disk couraging time, popular culture emerges as a consolation prize...
...Cultural experience, in other words, dovetailed with the leftover political quest for a class, or its equivalent, that might lead the way to radical change...
...Is capitalism the trouble...
...Class inequality may have soared, ruthless individualism may have intensified, the conditions of life for the poor may have worsened, racial tensions may have mounted, unions and social democratic parties may have weakened or reached an impasse, but never mind...
...One need not endorse the misleading slogan that we live in an "information society" to recognize that electronics and telecommunications are central to the wealthy economies...
...In the United States, in the early to mid-1970s, many (chiefly male) veterans of the American student movement found themselves in an impasse...
...Others came from the once colonized periphery, and/or were women and/or gays and lesbians...
...A chastened, realistic cultural studies would divest itself of political pretensions...
...Or perhaps the only reason poilitics looked unavailing was that the wrong culture was hegemonic...
...Whatever the case, popular culture might take the sting out of political defeat...
...There is conviction, élan, passion...
...The default is an effect more than a cause...
...The idea was that cultural innovation was daily insinuating itself into the activity of ordinary people...
...Andrea Press, Women Watching Television, 1991...
...It embraces the sufficiency of markets...
...The contrast with the rest of the West is illuminating...
...In the United States, and then elsewhere, issues of the legitimacy of various ways of life—questions of sexuality, abortion, drugs, multiculturalism— came to loom large in political discourse...
...and many others...
...They relate not only to the music but through the music to a sense of cultural membership...
...If "the revolution" had receded to the point of invisibility, it would be depressing to contemplate the victory of a hegemonic culture imposed by strong, virtually irresistible media...
...It offers no resistance to the primacy of visual and nonlinear culture over the literary and linear...
...In varying degrees, left-wing intellectuals in France, Italy, Scandinavia, Germany, Spain and elsewhere retain energizing attachments to Social Democratic, Green, and other left-wing parties...
...Racism...
...Let us not think that our academic work is already that...
...The odds are indeed stacked against serious forward motion in conventional politics...
...let us do politics...
...Political power is not only beyond reach, but functional majorities disdain it, finding the government and all its works contemptible...
...To these projects in the social sciences were added, crucially, the postmodernist turn in philosophy and "theory"—the rejection of hierarchies of value...
...They could be understood as an avant-garde social movement...
...The sting fades from the fragmentation of the organized left, the metastasis of murderous nationalism, the twilight of socialist dreams virtually everywhere...
...This tendency in cultural studies—I think it remains the main line—lacks irony...
...It is this premise that gives cultural studies its aura of political engagement— or at least political consolation...
...To use one of the buzzwords of "theory," there is a "slippage" from analysis to advocacy, defense, upward "positioning...
...The control of popular culture is held to have become decisive in the fate of contemporary societies—or at least it is the sphere in which opposition can find footing, find breathing space, rally the powerless, defy the grip of the dominant ideas, isolate the powers that be, and prepare for a "war of position" against their dwindling ramparts...
...Theorists of a "new working class" were quickly outdistanced by theorists and advocates of a "Third World Revolution," with the majority of humanity cast in the role of surrogate world proletariat...
...If reading, study sessions, rallies, and lovemaking took place against a background of rock music, they wanted to know, why shouldn't the academy pay attention...
...Its attempt to legitimize the ecstasies of the moment confirms the collective withdrawal from democratic hope...
...They may have been taught to revere Beethoven, but at least equally came to revere Chuck Berry telling Beethoven to roll over and tell Tchaikovsky the news...
...To the contrary: it embraces technological innovation as soon as the latest developments prove popular...
...The academy's intellectual style in the 1970s was conducive to an interest in the new cultural tendencies...
...It is charged with surveying the culture, assessing the hegemonic import of cultural practices and pinpointing their potentials for "resistance...
...These audiences would no longer be seen simply as confirming their "normality" with a safe, brief, wellbounded, vicarious acquaintanceship with deviance...
...From the late 1960s onward, as I have said, the insurgent energy was to be found in movements that aimed to politicize specific identities—racial minorities, women, gays...
...Culture wars" became routine, if not in the population at large, at least among elites...
...Speaking cavalierly of "opposiSPRING • 1997 • 81 Cultural Studies tion" and "resistance" permits—rather, cultivates— a certain sloppiness of thinking, making it possible to remain "left" without having to face the most difficult questions of political selfdefinition...
...The consumer sovereignty touted by a capitalist society as the grandest possible means for judging merit finds a reverberation among its ostensible adversaries...
...In North America, there has been tremendous growth over the last fifteen years in the number of people who identify with cultural studies, claim to be doing it, establish programs of it, recruit for it, debate purposes and methodologies in it...
...television fiction (Tamar Liebes and Elihu Katz, The Export of Meaning, 1990...
...Rigorous practitioners of cultural studies should be more curious about the world that remains to be researched— and changed...
...Perhaps, if we imagine a harder headed, less wishful cultural studies, free of the burden of imagining itself to be a political practice...
...There was an upsurge in social history, especially in the study of historically subordinated populations—women, African-Americans, workers, the colonized...
...Few of the central problems of contemporary civilization are seriously contested within the narrow band of conventional discourse...
...By taking defiant popular culture seriously, one takes the defiers seriously and furthers their defiance...
...They were frequently the first members of their families to attend university...
...One must underscore that this is not simply because of cultural studies' default...
...As the tide went out, they found themselves beached...
...By the late 1960s, they were imbibing a youth culture itself filled with crossover high-cultural masterworks of modernism— the Beatles with their puns, sitars, and echoes of Stockhausen...
...David Morley, one of the key researchers in cultural studies, and one of the most reflective, has himself deplored this tendency in recent audience studies...
...It would not claim to be politics...
...Practitioners of cultural studies, like the rest of the academic left, are frequently elusive...
...With time, what began as compensation hardened— became institutionalized—into a tradition...
...For leftists, the spirit of an insurgent class was no longer available...
...The radical upsurge of the late 1960s had culminated, then, in anticlimax and undertow...
...Now, in effect, "the cultural is political," and more, it is regarded as central to the control of political and economic resources...
...It substitutes an obsession with popular culture for coherent economic-political thought or a connection with mobilizable populations outside the academy and across identity lines...
...But in the Anglo-American world, including Australia, these conditions scarcely obtain...
...The popularity of popular culture is what makes it interesting—and not only as an object of study...
...Stanley Aronowitz has observed, more or less accurately (leave aside the question of scale), that "cultural studies is a social movement...
...The largely female audiences for these shows would no longer be dismissed as distracted voyeurs, but praised as active participants in the exposure and therefore politicizing of crimes like incest, spousal abuse, and sexual molestation...
...To say that popular culture is "worth attention" in the scholarly sense is, for cultural studies, to say something pointed: that the people who render it popular are not misguided when they do so, not fooled, not dominated, not distracted, not passive...
...Leave aside the question of whether all of them want rap...
...In the late 1960s, riding the wave of the student movement, they had envisioned a revolutionary breakthrough in the politics of the Western world...
...Against the unabashed elitism of conventional literary and art studies, cultural studies affirms an unabashed populism in which all social activities matter, all can be understood, all contain cues to the social nature of human beings...
...It confirms— and reinforces—the current paralysis: the incapacity of social movements and dissonant sensibilities to imagine effective forms of public engagement...
...Eventually, the popular culture of marginal groups (punk, reggae, disco, feminist poetry, hip-hop) was promoted to a sort of counterstructure of feeling, and even, at the edges, a surrogate politics—a sphere of thought and sensibility thought to be insulated from the pressures of hegemonic discourse, of instrumental reason, of economic rationality, of class, gender, and sexual subordination...
...Perhaps they were freely dissenting...
...They, like the rest of their societies, were saturated with popular culture at a time when leftist commitments were tinged with poignancy...
...Designated meritocratically for the replenishment of ruling classes and elite institutions, they encountered condescension alongside encouragement...
...Insurgent sociologists were turning away from the dismissive "collective behavior" diagnosis of social movements as, in effect, neurotic symptoms, and taking seriously the professed intentions of activists...
...Well, they have rap...
...Anthropologists were bringing ethnographic methods to bear on cultural life in the "home countries...
...The right may have taken possession of 10 Downing Street, the White House, and Congress—and as a result of elections, embarrassingly enough!—but at least one is engage in cultural studies...
...To unearth reason and value, brilliance and energy in popular culture is to affirm that the people have not been defeated...
...What now certifies worthiness is the popularity of the object, not its formal qualities...
...The spirit of the moment was to survey the field and define the combat in terms imported from political struggles...
...The place where these movements could most easily prevail was in the culture...
...To put it more neutrally, the political aura of cultural studies is supported by something like a "false consciousness" premise: the analytical assumption that what holds the ruling groups in power is their capacity to muffle, deform, paralyze, or destroy contrary tendencies of an emotional or ideological nature...
...Above all, in a word, cultural studies has SPRING • 1997 • 79 Cultural Studies veered into populism...
...In this way, cultural studies extended the New Left symbiosis with popular culture...
...But it is not clear where to draw the line against the celebratory tendency when one is inhibited from doing so by a reluctance to criticize the cultural dispositions of the groups of which one approves...
...It would be less romantic about the world—and about itself...
...The populism of cultural studies is fundamental to its allure, and to the political meaning its adherents find there, for cultural studies bespeaks an affirmation of popularity tout court...
...Observing the immensity of the audiences for Oprah Winfrey and her legions of imitators, many in cultural studies upended the phenomenon by turning the definitions around...
...The other move in cultural studies was to claim that culture continued radical politics by other means...
...Clearly, cultural studies answers to passions and hopes imported into its precincts from outside...
...On this view, marginalized groups in the populace continue to resist the hegemonic culture...
...At least popular culture had vitality, rebelliousness, oppositional spirit—as, by implication, did the people who made it popular...
...The grid of meaning that was discerned within (or imposed upon) popular culture was imported from radical politics...
...One need not be preoccupied by the ways in which the political culture's center of gravity has moved rightward—or rather, one can put this down to the iron grip of the established media institutions...
...entertainment is America's second most remunerative export, after aerospace...
...Bob Dylan with his debt to Allen Ginsberg...
...Antidemocracy...
...One purports to stand four-square for the people against capitalism, and comes to echo the logic of capitalism...
...the insistence on self-challenging reflexivity...
...Into the universities, they carried not only their cultural points of reference but a certain texture of popular-culture experience...
...If anything, the reverse: the premise is that popular culture is popular because and only 80 • DISSENT Cultural Studies because the people find in it channels of desire, pleasure, initiative, freedom...
...One cannot say that cultural studies diverts energy from a vigorous politics that is already in force...
...There, the association of culture with excellence and traditional elites remains strong...
...In part, the ascendancy of cultural studies derives from the growth of its object of attention— the boom in the scale of popular culture, and its significance in the lives of Western societies from the 1960s on...
...Still, insofar as cultural studies makes claims for itself as an insurgent politics, the field is presumptuous and misleading...
...television in general (John Fiske, Television Culture, 1987...
...There is something more going on in cultural studies than the pursuit of tenure...
...Unconventional politics, such as it is, is mostly fragmented and self-contained along lines of racial, gender, and sexual identities...
...The early cultural studies group at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies employed methods from all three fields to investigate the social history of the present— of working-class and dissident youth populations, television personages, and viewers...
...He maintains that to understand that "the commercial world succeeds in producing objects . . . which do connect with the lived desires of popular audiences" is "by no means necessarily to fall into the trap . . . of an uncritical celebration of popular culture...
...In the United States, despite tremendous energies and gains among women and gays, the 1970s were a time of standoff, which in the 1980s turned to defeat for the left...
...If the people are on the right side, then what they like is good...
...Is there a chance of a modest redemption...
...The same happened in Latin America, with the decline of left-wing hopes...
...They did not see why they should have to check their form of life at the gates...
...It is the populism if not the taste of the analyst that has determined the object of attention in the first place...
...The discipline means to cultivate insubordination...
...the search for "local knowledges" as opposed to universal truth...
...If political power was foreclosed, the battlements of culture still 78 • DISSENT Cultural Studies remained to be taken...
...The weight of popular culture has grown outside the world of youth as well...
...How much more reassuring to detect "resistance" saturating the pores of everyday life...
...However unfavorable the balance of political forces, people succeed in living lives of vigorous resistance...
...82 • DISSENT...
...One need not even be rigorous about what one opposes and what one proposes in its place...
...CulSPRING • /997 • 77 Cultural Studies tural activity was, for all these researchers, activity not the absence of something (civilization, literature, politics) but the presence of a form of engagement in the here and now...
...Younger scholars gravitated to cultural studies because it was to them incontestable that culture was politics...
...To do cultural studies, especially in connection with identity politics, was the politics they knew...
...An aura of hope surrounds the enterprise, the hope (even against hope) of an affirmative answer to the inevitable question: Will culture ride to the rescue of the cause of liberation...
...Cultural studies responds to the energies of social and cultural movements—and their eclipse...
...Marxist traditionalists found hope in a redefinition if not revival of a unitary "working class"—a hope that events failed to reward...
...But the tenor of cultural studies was set by the political circumstances of the first waves of cultural students, if I may call them that...
...In this spirit, there emerged a welter of studies purporting to discover not only the "active" participation of audiences in shaping the meaning of popular culture, but the "resistance" of those audiences to hegemonic frames of interpretation in a variety of forms—news broadcasts (Dave Morley, The 'Nationwide' Audience, 1980...
...It would not mistake the academy for the larger society...
...Is it patriarchy (and is that the proper term for a society that has seen an upheaval in relations between women and men in the course of a half-century...
...If one thought about youth culture properly, perhaps some sort of Marxist vision of history might be preserved...
...We would learn more about politics, economy, and society, and in the process, appreciate better what culture, and cultural study, do not accomplish...
...Is this musical style or that literary form "feminist" or "authentically Latino...
...The field of possibilities is frequently reduced to two: for or against the hegemonic...
...Instead, they were left with nostalgia for eras of cogent struggle they knew only at second or third hand...
...It was not simply contestation but the stark and classic contestation between forces of liberation and forces of established repression...
...Culture, in this view, was a field of combat...
...Loved by its partisans, loathed by its enemies, popular culture in the 1960s became a touchstone for controversy and political debate...
...Or perhaps—if one really believed that the personal was the political—they had already been taken...
...Attend to popular culture, study it with sympathy, and one need not dwell on unpleasant realities...
...The situation of cultural studies conforms to the contours of our political moment...
...If the "collective behavior" school of once-conventional sociology had grouped movements in behalf of justice and democratic rights together with fads and fashions, cultural studies now set out to separate movements from fads, to take seriously the accounts of movement participants themselves, and thereby to restore the dignity of the movements— only to end up, in the 1980s, linking movements with fads by finding equivalent dignity in both spheres, so that, for example, dressing like Madonna might be upgraded to an act of "resistance" equivalent to demonstrating in behalf of the right to abortion, and watching a talk show on family violence was positioned on the same plane...
...But the nature of that hegemony, in its turn, is usually defined tautologically: that culture is hegemonic that is promoted by "the ruling group" or "the hegemonic bloc," and by the same token, that culture is "resistant" that is affirmed by groups assumed (because of class position, gender, race, sexuality, ethnicity, and so on) to be "marginalized" or "resistant...
...Cultural studies becomes "cult studs...
...the devaluation of "center" in favor of "periphery...
...So proponents of cultural studies should not be taken aback by the view that cultural studies itself can be analyzed as an object of cultural study...
...Measure this in units of time devoted, the emotional loyalty of the audiences, or the volume of money at stake, and the significance is plain...
...its main idea of the intellect's democratic commitment is to flatter the audience...
Vol. 44 • April 1997 • No. 2
