01-14-2006, 11:40 PM
<!--QuoteBegin-->QUOTE<!--QuoteEBegin-->The Politics of Cultural Studies
by Francis Mulhern
Among the more striking intellectual phenomena of these putatively postmodern times is the rise, in the metropolitan academy, of the new discipline of cultural studies. I say "new" because cultural studies properly understood was never merely the organized study of "culture"; it was, from the start, a directed, self-consciously oppositional program of theoretical and empirical investigation. Today, an idea that first took institutional shape as an annex of Birmingham University's English Department has developed to fill out the entire repertoire of academic activity: specialized degree and graduate programs, a new generation of teachers who, unlike their improvising mentors, are graduates trained in the discipline, professional associations, high-profile conferences, networks that cross continents. Corporate publishers devote whole catalogues to the written output of cultural studies, which by now includes not only the prolific research in the field, but also histories of the discipline itself, bulky course readers, and not a few bluffer's guides. At the same time as building its own impressive organization, cultural studies proposes, with increasing success, to remodel teaching and research in other areas of the academy, notably those of literary studies, history, sociology, and women's studies. The radical minority intervention of thirty years ago is now increasingly widely relayed as a new general formula for work across the entire range of what, for convenience, we may call the human sciences.
The feeling of incongruity - or of simple unreality - that this development must induce in a lucid observer is sharpened by the reflection that it has come about in historical conditions that, on the face of things, should have tended to frustrate it. The years in which cultural studies - a self-defined project of radical innovation and reconstruction - has flourished have been ones of severe financial austerity for the academic institutions that house the subject (especially but not only in Britain) and of setback and disorientation for the radical movements that have been its inspiration. The cultural studies boom is an impressive reality, but no one should rush to celebrate it as a simple tale of progress. While acknowledging, as is proper, the individual and collective achievements that cultural studies has made possible, we should pause for some necessary critical reflection on the general logic of the project as a mode of cultural analysis, and on what is called cultural politics.
I attempt this here in the form of five brief notes, beginning with a definition of cultural studies as a distinctive trend in cultural analysis, going on to dwell on some paradoxes of life and thought in the discipline, and closing with some general critical remarks on the relationship that is at stake in it, namely that between culture and politics.
1
The classic definition of what came to be cultural studies was proposed by Raymond Williams: it would investigate the creation of meaning in and as a formative part of "a whole way of life," the whole world of sense-making (descriptions, explanations, interpretations, valuations of all kinds) in societies understood as historical material human organizations. In the first place, then, cultural studies called for a drastic expansion of the field of analysis, beyond the boundaries maintained by the literary criticism from which it emerged: all social meanings are eligible for scrutiny. However, this does not suffice to define it. The older tradition of cultural criticism (or kulturkritik, the standard German term which I prefer to use here, in roman type from now on, on the grounds that the familiar English words are too familiar to hold the strict definition my argument calls for) gave special importance to the study of everyday meaning. Writers in this tradition, like the literary critics F.R. and Q.D. Leavis in England, or the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in Spain, or the younger Thomas Mann in Germany, responded passionately to the new "mass" culture of democracy and commercialized literacy, but always in a spirit of high-minded, traditionalist revulsion. Unlike them, cultural studies proposes a procedural equalization of its data: in other words, while poetry and popcorn advertisements may not be of equal value in any plausible moral terms, both are potentially interesting as carriers of social meanings and in that precise sense should be approached with equal analytic seriousness. However, this distinction, like the first, is insufficient to characterize cultural studies, which is not merely a style of anthropology, devoted to the study of society as a set of symbolic processes. There is a third specification, the crucial one. Cultural studies did not merely extend the range and social sensibility of kulturkritik; it set out to challenge the whole system of values that supported the older tradition, a whole system of cultural authority, and to explore, if not quite establish, the forms of an alternative authority. This is the sense in which cultural studies is defended as "intrinsically political."
2
This idea of an expanded, level field of study is a matter of principle rather than of actual practice. No one, no professional collective, can pretend to study "everything," and the notion of a truly indifferent selection of materials is self-contradictory. There are basic choices to make; and, for all the variety of its possible realizations and the diversity of institutional circumstance, cultural studies has seemed rather constant in its sense of priorities. Its main field of analysis has been the same range of social phenomena that so alarmed and repelled traditional kulturkritik: the "mass" cultural forms and practices of advanced capitalism - cinema, television, popular journalism, advertising, shopping. And its leading polemical theme, which flatly opposes the stock conviction of kulturkritik, has been that such culture is not a mere opiate, successfully designed to induce passivity in a homogenized mass, but on the contrary that popular participation in it is active, deliberate, selective, and even subversive.
These linked alterations of field and perspective are crucial for any socialist theory of culture. If the dogmatic propositions of kulturkritik were in fact valid - and some Marxists, most notably Herbert Marcuse, have veered close to that view - then the classical understanding of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class would amount to little more than a sectarian piety. When Antonio Gramsci affirmed that all human beings are intellectuals, even though only some are assigned the social function and status of "intellectual," it was in just that classical spirit. However, the decisive aspect of Gramsci's formula is its twofold character: it asserts not only the material possibility of liberation but also the established fact of domination. The leading tendency in cultural studies has struck a different emphasis. Insofar as cultural studies neglects to integrate "high" cultural forms and practices into its field of analysis, it compromises its own theoretical ambition, which is to analyze "whole ways of life," or, in other, more pointed terms, the existing social relations of culture in their totality. And insofar as it insists, one-sidedly, on the active and critical element in popular cultural usages, it tends to overlook the overwhelming historical realities of inequality and subordination that condition them. These tendencies jointly work against the development of properly critical theory and analysis; claiming to supersede kulturkritik, they actually offer something more like a compensatory reaction to it.
A minority in cultural studies has stood out against these tendencies, but without much success. "Populism" is one charge laid against the majority inclination, and with good reason. But populism, in all its varieties, sees itself as oppositional; there is a still graver charge that might be laid here. Given that most metropolitan popular culture today takes the form of commodified recreation or aestheticized subsistence activity, all organized as a market in "life-styles," the spontaneous bent of cultural studies is actually conformist - at its worst, the theoretical self-consciousness of satellite television and shopping malls.
3
This is a worst-case account, granted. Against it must be set the evidence of remarkable energy and talent, and a remarkable record of work. But it prompts further reflection on the meaning of the received conviction that cultural studies is necessarily on the left or, as we are repeatedly told, in a phrase that is both emphatic and apparently empty, "intrinsically political."
There is no doubt that cultural studies has attempted to further emancipatory social aims - socialist, feminist, antiracist, anti-imperialist. Its intervention has been in those substantial, specified senses political. But it is romantic to go on thinking of cultural studies as an "intervention." It is now an instituted academic activity, and academic activity, whatever its intrinsic merits, is inevitably not the same thing as a political project. What happens when an oppositional tendency becomes a budget-holding discipline, offering credentials, careers, and research funds? More or less what any realistic observer would expect. No academic discipline may honorably or realistically apply political tests to its students and teachers. The day cannot be far off - indeed, it has probably arrived already - when the first real professionals of the discipline, trained in it and now pursuing it as a scholarly career, take their places in classrooms to give the introductory lecture on "subversion" or some other such routine syllabus heading. This is not just a sour hypothesis - if we seek a precedent, we need only recall the case of F.R. Leavis and his circle, whose militant, truculently anti-academic style of literary criticism was widely copied, becoming in the end quite conventional but retaining its oppositional mannerisms. It is useless to moralize; but leftist practitioners in cultural studies have need of far greater ironic self-consciousness than their new "political" discipline seems inclined to encourage.
4
This recall of Leavis prompts further thought about the relationship between kulturkritik and cultural studies - and this time in the dimension where they appear most deeply opposed, that of politics.
For all its differing national and disciplinary colorations, kulturkritik was a stable intellectual phenomenon. Its exponents normally claimed to speak from an authoritative center of values, which might be characterized as "human" or "universal" or "traditional," and for which the most favored summarizing term was culture. Their self-defined task was to defend the interests of culture in this sense against the advancing threats of modernity, which might be epitomized in intellectual specialization or industrial technology or commercialism or "the masses," and for which the classic summarizing term was civilization. Kulturkritik was invariably elitist: it was an indisputable truth that culture must always be a minority affair, to be sustained in the face of general indifference and incomprehension. The particular political options of its advocates were variable, from right to left, but in all cases they were secondary, for the inborn desire of kulturkritik was to assert a kind of social authority that would transcend the "merely" political. In effect, the key distinction between culture, the realm of essential values, and civilization, the realm of social "machinery," made it impossible to conceive of politics as a meaningful social activity at all.
Cultural studies has striven to overthrow kulturkritik. It has proposed an alternative understanding of "civilization" and "the masses," discovering activity, choice, and significance where kulturkritik could see only stupefaction and automatism, and it has done so in the name of radical social goals. Yet there is something curious here. Cultural studies, of course, has repeatedly challenged liberal and conservative thinking, but it has, if anything, been more preoccupied with what it perceives as the shortcomings of the left. Now it is true that there are many to perceive, but cultural studies has focused on one above all others: its persistent suggestion - the signature-tune of the discipline in effect - is that the analysis of popular culture does not merely enhance political understanding, but in some sense invalidates and supersedes the inherited political traditions of the left. In other words, cultural studies seeks to subordinate the merely political (the old concepts "class," "state," "struggle," "revolution," and the like) to the higher authority of popular culture. And in doing this, it faithfully repeats the basic pattern of kulturkritik. It does indeed negate kulturkritik, but only as a mirror-image reverses its original, preserving the form intact. Here if any where lies the source of the paradoxes that make up the life of the interventionist discipline called cultural studies.
5
How, then, may we try to think through the relationship between cultural theory and politics? I have claimed that cultural studies reiterates a specific, strong understanding of the relationship, and, by implication, that this understanding is false, and liable to compromise the sincere political intentions of the left in the discipline. By way of conclusion, I would like to venture an alternative way of thinking about the "political" status of socialist cultural theory.
The relationship between culture and politics has been subject to two kinds of reductionism on the left. We can, without regret, discard one major option: the familiar political reductionism, for which the communist movement became notorious, which categorizes all cultural initiative in the terms of an already given programmatic scheme, and whose sense of human possibilities begins and ends with the political bottom line. But we now have an alternative reductionism, this time of a culturalist variety, promoted in the academy under the leadership of cultural studies and in the wider world as postmodern wisdom. This reductionism honors all manifestations of cultural difference as political, so encouraging particularism and a narcissistic dissolution of politics in the necessary stricter sense. If the first acknowledged culture only as a political instrument, the second has effectively dissolved the very possibility of politics, and indeed, I would argue, the possibility of culture itself as a field of political struggle.
A socialist cultural theory must recognize both the possibilities and the limitations of cultural practices. It must be able to acknowledge that such practices are both more and less than politics. Though culture is a contested terrain, a space for political struggle, it cannot be only a political theater; nor can it wholly encompass the political. The first principle of a socialist theory of culture would say that the typical state of the politics-culture relationship is discrepancy. This may not seem a very glamorous proposition, but it must be emphasized once we expand the field of "culture" to include the totality of social meanings or "a whole way of life." For while this expanded understanding may be vital for socialist cultural theory, it also creates its own conceptual problems.
If culture is the totality of social meanings, and if political activity is aimed at the totality of social relations within a given space (as a truly emancipatory politics must surely be), it may look at first as if culture and politics really are the same thing, as cultural studies is now prone to assume. We cannot say, in principle, that one kind of social content is political and another not; if culture covers the whole society, it seems that any cultural tendency can legitimately call itself "political."
But there is a fundamental misconception here. Both culture and politics can be understood as encompassing the totality of social relations, but they do so in distinctive ways. Politics differs from other social practices by virtue of its role in determining the character of social relations. Even when it operates entirely in the zone of meaning - as word and image, say - political practice is regulated by its specialized function. It is a deliberative practice, normally oriented to decisions; the controlling question is always, What is to be done.? In peaceful democratic conditions, it is an injunctive practice, a struggle for effective consent. And in the last resort, it turns to resources that cannot be reduced to culture: the means of physical coercion.
Cultural practices, which we may understand rather less abstractly as those whose principal function is to produce meanings, are not of this kind. They share the same world of meaning; they are rich in political suggestion; but they lack, have no need of, those specialized characteristics: it is not the function of culture to determine the nature of social relations by means of deliberation, injunction, and coercion. The implications of this distinction were perceived by Gramsci: cultural judgment and political judgment are by nature distinct and, moreover, tend not to coincide.
Cultural practices may treat any and all differences as absolute (as Georg Lukacs once remarked, there are no united fronts in the realm of art and ideas). Politics, in seeking to being about or to forestall some particular state of affairs, to secure this or that general condition of existence, cannot treat difference in the same way. It must be able to bridge the kinds of difference that cultural practices may regard as absolute, to create solidarities in pursuit of specific ends. At the same time, and for the same reason, political interests may make it necessary to promote division within what looks like a field of cultural affinity. For instance, to achieve a political goal (state-funded nursery provision, for instance), it may be necessary to draw out class and sex-gender antagonisms within a community of religious belief. Viewed in the perspective of any given cultural interest, a political demand is always either too much or too little; and the political complaint against culture is always of the same kind. Each, with regard to the other, is both sectarian and ecumenical.
This is the fundamental distinction that cultural studies elides. There is no space here to explore the historical reasons for this, but something can be said about its consequences. From the beginning, cultural studies has tended to dissolve politics into culture. Even Raymond Williams, who remained politically engaged and active outside the field of culture proper, in retrospect conceded that he had inflated the possibilities of cultural politics, and never quite escaped that tendency in his theoretical work. Yet he and other early practitioners of socialist cultural studies did at least two important things: first, while refusing the reduction of culture to political instrumentality in the Stalinist manner, they acknowledged its importance as a terrain of struggle, especially in the era of consumer capitalism and "mass" media. Second, they insisted on the legitimacy of "popular" culture, against the elitist tendency to dismiss it as so much narcotic mystification. Popular culture in capitalist society never existed outside relations of domination, or beyond the imperatives of commodification; yet within those relations and imperatives, "the masses" were never only passive and subordinate. Popular culture was marked by both subordination and resistance.
Cultural studies today is not only furthering the dissolution of politics into culture but in the process is also squandering the legacy of its pioneers. It leaves no room for politics beyond cultural practice, or for political solidarities beyond the particularisms of cultural difference. Indeed, there is hardly room even for a politics of cultural contestation. There is no space, and in fact no need, for struggle if all popular culture, abstracted from "high" culture and from the historical realities of inequality and domination, is already active and critical, if television and shopping are already theaters of subversion. But if nothing lies beyond these cultural manifestations, then the subordination of "the masses," their submission to consumer capitalism, must be as thorough as the exponents of kulturkritik assumed it was. Here is the deepest paradox of cultural studies: that it ends by confirming and even celebrating this antidemocratic judgment.
<i>Francis Mulhern is a professor in the School of English, Cultural, and Communication Studies at Middlesex University in London. A preliminary version of this article has appeared in Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (London).
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Publication Information: Article Title: The Politics of Cultural Studies. Contributors: Francis Mulhern - author. Magazine Title: Monthly Review. Volume: 47. Issue: 3. Publication Date: July-August 1995. Page Number: 31+. COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group</i>
by Francis Mulhern
Among the more striking intellectual phenomena of these putatively postmodern times is the rise, in the metropolitan academy, of the new discipline of cultural studies. I say "new" because cultural studies properly understood was never merely the organized study of "culture"; it was, from the start, a directed, self-consciously oppositional program of theoretical and empirical investigation. Today, an idea that first took institutional shape as an annex of Birmingham University's English Department has developed to fill out the entire repertoire of academic activity: specialized degree and graduate programs, a new generation of teachers who, unlike their improvising mentors, are graduates trained in the discipline, professional associations, high-profile conferences, networks that cross continents. Corporate publishers devote whole catalogues to the written output of cultural studies, which by now includes not only the prolific research in the field, but also histories of the discipline itself, bulky course readers, and not a few bluffer's guides. At the same time as building its own impressive organization, cultural studies proposes, with increasing success, to remodel teaching and research in other areas of the academy, notably those of literary studies, history, sociology, and women's studies. The radical minority intervention of thirty years ago is now increasingly widely relayed as a new general formula for work across the entire range of what, for convenience, we may call the human sciences.
The feeling of incongruity - or of simple unreality - that this development must induce in a lucid observer is sharpened by the reflection that it has come about in historical conditions that, on the face of things, should have tended to frustrate it. The years in which cultural studies - a self-defined project of radical innovation and reconstruction - has flourished have been ones of severe financial austerity for the academic institutions that house the subject (especially but not only in Britain) and of setback and disorientation for the radical movements that have been its inspiration. The cultural studies boom is an impressive reality, but no one should rush to celebrate it as a simple tale of progress. While acknowledging, as is proper, the individual and collective achievements that cultural studies has made possible, we should pause for some necessary critical reflection on the general logic of the project as a mode of cultural analysis, and on what is called cultural politics.
I attempt this here in the form of five brief notes, beginning with a definition of cultural studies as a distinctive trend in cultural analysis, going on to dwell on some paradoxes of life and thought in the discipline, and closing with some general critical remarks on the relationship that is at stake in it, namely that between culture and politics.
1
The classic definition of what came to be cultural studies was proposed by Raymond Williams: it would investigate the creation of meaning in and as a formative part of "a whole way of life," the whole world of sense-making (descriptions, explanations, interpretations, valuations of all kinds) in societies understood as historical material human organizations. In the first place, then, cultural studies called for a drastic expansion of the field of analysis, beyond the boundaries maintained by the literary criticism from which it emerged: all social meanings are eligible for scrutiny. However, this does not suffice to define it. The older tradition of cultural criticism (or kulturkritik, the standard German term which I prefer to use here, in roman type from now on, on the grounds that the familiar English words are too familiar to hold the strict definition my argument calls for) gave special importance to the study of everyday meaning. Writers in this tradition, like the literary critics F.R. and Q.D. Leavis in England, or the philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset in Spain, or the younger Thomas Mann in Germany, responded passionately to the new "mass" culture of democracy and commercialized literacy, but always in a spirit of high-minded, traditionalist revulsion. Unlike them, cultural studies proposes a procedural equalization of its data: in other words, while poetry and popcorn advertisements may not be of equal value in any plausible moral terms, both are potentially interesting as carriers of social meanings and in that precise sense should be approached with equal analytic seriousness. However, this distinction, like the first, is insufficient to characterize cultural studies, which is not merely a style of anthropology, devoted to the study of society as a set of symbolic processes. There is a third specification, the crucial one. Cultural studies did not merely extend the range and social sensibility of kulturkritik; it set out to challenge the whole system of values that supported the older tradition, a whole system of cultural authority, and to explore, if not quite establish, the forms of an alternative authority. This is the sense in which cultural studies is defended as "intrinsically political."
2
This idea of an expanded, level field of study is a matter of principle rather than of actual practice. No one, no professional collective, can pretend to study "everything," and the notion of a truly indifferent selection of materials is self-contradictory. There are basic choices to make; and, for all the variety of its possible realizations and the diversity of institutional circumstance, cultural studies has seemed rather constant in its sense of priorities. Its main field of analysis has been the same range of social phenomena that so alarmed and repelled traditional kulturkritik: the "mass" cultural forms and practices of advanced capitalism - cinema, television, popular journalism, advertising, shopping. And its leading polemical theme, which flatly opposes the stock conviction of kulturkritik, has been that such culture is not a mere opiate, successfully designed to induce passivity in a homogenized mass, but on the contrary that popular participation in it is active, deliberate, selective, and even subversive.
These linked alterations of field and perspective are crucial for any socialist theory of culture. If the dogmatic propositions of kulturkritik were in fact valid - and some Marxists, most notably Herbert Marcuse, have veered close to that view - then the classical understanding of socialism as the self-emancipation of the working class would amount to little more than a sectarian piety. When Antonio Gramsci affirmed that all human beings are intellectuals, even though only some are assigned the social function and status of "intellectual," it was in just that classical spirit. However, the decisive aspect of Gramsci's formula is its twofold character: it asserts not only the material possibility of liberation but also the established fact of domination. The leading tendency in cultural studies has struck a different emphasis. Insofar as cultural studies neglects to integrate "high" cultural forms and practices into its field of analysis, it compromises its own theoretical ambition, which is to analyze "whole ways of life," or, in other, more pointed terms, the existing social relations of culture in their totality. And insofar as it insists, one-sidedly, on the active and critical element in popular cultural usages, it tends to overlook the overwhelming historical realities of inequality and subordination that condition them. These tendencies jointly work against the development of properly critical theory and analysis; claiming to supersede kulturkritik, they actually offer something more like a compensatory reaction to it.
A minority in cultural studies has stood out against these tendencies, but without much success. "Populism" is one charge laid against the majority inclination, and with good reason. But populism, in all its varieties, sees itself as oppositional; there is a still graver charge that might be laid here. Given that most metropolitan popular culture today takes the form of commodified recreation or aestheticized subsistence activity, all organized as a market in "life-styles," the spontaneous bent of cultural studies is actually conformist - at its worst, the theoretical self-consciousness of satellite television and shopping malls.
3
This is a worst-case account, granted. Against it must be set the evidence of remarkable energy and talent, and a remarkable record of work. But it prompts further reflection on the meaning of the received conviction that cultural studies is necessarily on the left or, as we are repeatedly told, in a phrase that is both emphatic and apparently empty, "intrinsically political."
There is no doubt that cultural studies has attempted to further emancipatory social aims - socialist, feminist, antiracist, anti-imperialist. Its intervention has been in those substantial, specified senses political. But it is romantic to go on thinking of cultural studies as an "intervention." It is now an instituted academic activity, and academic activity, whatever its intrinsic merits, is inevitably not the same thing as a political project. What happens when an oppositional tendency becomes a budget-holding discipline, offering credentials, careers, and research funds? More or less what any realistic observer would expect. No academic discipline may honorably or realistically apply political tests to its students and teachers. The day cannot be far off - indeed, it has probably arrived already - when the first real professionals of the discipline, trained in it and now pursuing it as a scholarly career, take their places in classrooms to give the introductory lecture on "subversion" or some other such routine syllabus heading. This is not just a sour hypothesis - if we seek a precedent, we need only recall the case of F.R. Leavis and his circle, whose militant, truculently anti-academic style of literary criticism was widely copied, becoming in the end quite conventional but retaining its oppositional mannerisms. It is useless to moralize; but leftist practitioners in cultural studies have need of far greater ironic self-consciousness than their new "political" discipline seems inclined to encourage.
4
This recall of Leavis prompts further thought about the relationship between kulturkritik and cultural studies - and this time in the dimension where they appear most deeply opposed, that of politics.
For all its differing national and disciplinary colorations, kulturkritik was a stable intellectual phenomenon. Its exponents normally claimed to speak from an authoritative center of values, which might be characterized as "human" or "universal" or "traditional," and for which the most favored summarizing term was culture. Their self-defined task was to defend the interests of culture in this sense against the advancing threats of modernity, which might be epitomized in intellectual specialization or industrial technology or commercialism or "the masses," and for which the classic summarizing term was civilization. Kulturkritik was invariably elitist: it was an indisputable truth that culture must always be a minority affair, to be sustained in the face of general indifference and incomprehension. The particular political options of its advocates were variable, from right to left, but in all cases they were secondary, for the inborn desire of kulturkritik was to assert a kind of social authority that would transcend the "merely" political. In effect, the key distinction between culture, the realm of essential values, and civilization, the realm of social "machinery," made it impossible to conceive of politics as a meaningful social activity at all.
Cultural studies has striven to overthrow kulturkritik. It has proposed an alternative understanding of "civilization" and "the masses," discovering activity, choice, and significance where kulturkritik could see only stupefaction and automatism, and it has done so in the name of radical social goals. Yet there is something curious here. Cultural studies, of course, has repeatedly challenged liberal and conservative thinking, but it has, if anything, been more preoccupied with what it perceives as the shortcomings of the left. Now it is true that there are many to perceive, but cultural studies has focused on one above all others: its persistent suggestion - the signature-tune of the discipline in effect - is that the analysis of popular culture does not merely enhance political understanding, but in some sense invalidates and supersedes the inherited political traditions of the left. In other words, cultural studies seeks to subordinate the merely political (the old concepts "class," "state," "struggle," "revolution," and the like) to the higher authority of popular culture. And in doing this, it faithfully repeats the basic pattern of kulturkritik. It does indeed negate kulturkritik, but only as a mirror-image reverses its original, preserving the form intact. Here if any where lies the source of the paradoxes that make up the life of the interventionist discipline called cultural studies.
5
How, then, may we try to think through the relationship between cultural theory and politics? I have claimed that cultural studies reiterates a specific, strong understanding of the relationship, and, by implication, that this understanding is false, and liable to compromise the sincere political intentions of the left in the discipline. By way of conclusion, I would like to venture an alternative way of thinking about the "political" status of socialist cultural theory.
The relationship between culture and politics has been subject to two kinds of reductionism on the left. We can, without regret, discard one major option: the familiar political reductionism, for which the communist movement became notorious, which categorizes all cultural initiative in the terms of an already given programmatic scheme, and whose sense of human possibilities begins and ends with the political bottom line. But we now have an alternative reductionism, this time of a culturalist variety, promoted in the academy under the leadership of cultural studies and in the wider world as postmodern wisdom. This reductionism honors all manifestations of cultural difference as political, so encouraging particularism and a narcissistic dissolution of politics in the necessary stricter sense. If the first acknowledged culture only as a political instrument, the second has effectively dissolved the very possibility of politics, and indeed, I would argue, the possibility of culture itself as a field of political struggle.
A socialist cultural theory must recognize both the possibilities and the limitations of cultural practices. It must be able to acknowledge that such practices are both more and less than politics. Though culture is a contested terrain, a space for political struggle, it cannot be only a political theater; nor can it wholly encompass the political. The first principle of a socialist theory of culture would say that the typical state of the politics-culture relationship is discrepancy. This may not seem a very glamorous proposition, but it must be emphasized once we expand the field of "culture" to include the totality of social meanings or "a whole way of life." For while this expanded understanding may be vital for socialist cultural theory, it also creates its own conceptual problems.
If culture is the totality of social meanings, and if political activity is aimed at the totality of social relations within a given space (as a truly emancipatory politics must surely be), it may look at first as if culture and politics really are the same thing, as cultural studies is now prone to assume. We cannot say, in principle, that one kind of social content is political and another not; if culture covers the whole society, it seems that any cultural tendency can legitimately call itself "political."
But there is a fundamental misconception here. Both culture and politics can be understood as encompassing the totality of social relations, but they do so in distinctive ways. Politics differs from other social practices by virtue of its role in determining the character of social relations. Even when it operates entirely in the zone of meaning - as word and image, say - political practice is regulated by its specialized function. It is a deliberative practice, normally oriented to decisions; the controlling question is always, What is to be done.? In peaceful democratic conditions, it is an injunctive practice, a struggle for effective consent. And in the last resort, it turns to resources that cannot be reduced to culture: the means of physical coercion.
Cultural practices, which we may understand rather less abstractly as those whose principal function is to produce meanings, are not of this kind. They share the same world of meaning; they are rich in political suggestion; but they lack, have no need of, those specialized characteristics: it is not the function of culture to determine the nature of social relations by means of deliberation, injunction, and coercion. The implications of this distinction were perceived by Gramsci: cultural judgment and political judgment are by nature distinct and, moreover, tend not to coincide.
Cultural practices may treat any and all differences as absolute (as Georg Lukacs once remarked, there are no united fronts in the realm of art and ideas). Politics, in seeking to being about or to forestall some particular state of affairs, to secure this or that general condition of existence, cannot treat difference in the same way. It must be able to bridge the kinds of difference that cultural practices may regard as absolute, to create solidarities in pursuit of specific ends. At the same time, and for the same reason, political interests may make it necessary to promote division within what looks like a field of cultural affinity. For instance, to achieve a political goal (state-funded nursery provision, for instance), it may be necessary to draw out class and sex-gender antagonisms within a community of religious belief. Viewed in the perspective of any given cultural interest, a political demand is always either too much or too little; and the political complaint against culture is always of the same kind. Each, with regard to the other, is both sectarian and ecumenical.
This is the fundamental distinction that cultural studies elides. There is no space here to explore the historical reasons for this, but something can be said about its consequences. From the beginning, cultural studies has tended to dissolve politics into culture. Even Raymond Williams, who remained politically engaged and active outside the field of culture proper, in retrospect conceded that he had inflated the possibilities of cultural politics, and never quite escaped that tendency in his theoretical work. Yet he and other early practitioners of socialist cultural studies did at least two important things: first, while refusing the reduction of culture to political instrumentality in the Stalinist manner, they acknowledged its importance as a terrain of struggle, especially in the era of consumer capitalism and "mass" media. Second, they insisted on the legitimacy of "popular" culture, against the elitist tendency to dismiss it as so much narcotic mystification. Popular culture in capitalist society never existed outside relations of domination, or beyond the imperatives of commodification; yet within those relations and imperatives, "the masses" were never only passive and subordinate. Popular culture was marked by both subordination and resistance.
Cultural studies today is not only furthering the dissolution of politics into culture but in the process is also squandering the legacy of its pioneers. It leaves no room for politics beyond cultural practice, or for political solidarities beyond the particularisms of cultural difference. Indeed, there is hardly room even for a politics of cultural contestation. There is no space, and in fact no need, for struggle if all popular culture, abstracted from "high" culture and from the historical realities of inequality and domination, is already active and critical, if television and shopping are already theaters of subversion. But if nothing lies beyond these cultural manifestations, then the subordination of "the masses," their submission to consumer capitalism, must be as thorough as the exponents of kulturkritik assumed it was. Here is the deepest paradox of cultural studies: that it ends by confirming and even celebrating this antidemocratic judgment.
<i>Francis Mulhern is a professor in the School of English, Cultural, and Communication Studies at Middlesex University in London. A preliminary version of this article has appeared in Travesia: Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies (London).
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Publication Information: Article Title: The Politics of Cultural Studies. Contributors: Francis Mulhern - author. Magazine Title: Monthly Review. Volume: 47. Issue: 3. Publication Date: July-August 1995. Page Number: 31+. COPYRIGHT 1995 Monthly Review Foundation, Inc.; COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group</i>