Page 13 - Cultural Theory

Edwards-3516-Introduction.qxd 5/9/2007 5:57 PM Page 2

••• Tim Edwards •••

culture, media theory, visual analysis, and so on – following their growing importance
throughout the western world and beyond in the twentieth century – started to force
these two previously separate disciplines, and even worlds, to collide, leading to what
is now commonly recognized as the ‘turn to culture’. This is perhaps most succinctly
defined by Stuart Hall in his essay on the centrality of the cultural (Hall, 1997). Here,
Hall defines the cultural turn according to two key dimensions: first, the substantive
turn to culture in terms of empirically demonstrable developments in the media,
economy, technology and most significantly globalization; and, second, the episte-
mological turn to culture in terms of the more philosophical break with Marxism and
the rise of poststructural theory centred on new, and much more fluid, notion of
language – and indeed culture – in particular. This somewhat dualist sense of the turn
to culture also informs the collection of essays here which are divided into three parts:
the first focusing on the legacy of sociological theory, the second considering some
more contemporary theorists, and the third concerned with more empirical, or at least
topical, dimensions of contemporary theory.
The first five chapters focus on the legacy of the classical tradition in sociology and
the importance of the Frankfurt School in understanding more contemporary cultural
theory more particularly. Key within this is the supposed ‘break’ with Marxism that is
commonly seen to lead to the formation of cultural studies yet this is variously demon-
strated to be as mythical as it is real. John Scott’s chapter on Humanist Marxism in par-
ticular pulls apart the so-called rupture between cultural studies and Marxist theory and
focuses on the continuities. Starting with the work of Lukács, Scott shows how the
Frankfurt School acted as a forerunner for more contemporary notions of the cultural
economy, particularly in its perception of the need to complement economic analysis
with cultural study. Chris Rojek, in Chapter 2, while berating the belated and uneven
legacy of the work of Simmel for cultural studies, also argues strongly that Simmel’s work
on money and the metropolis, as a form of what Frisby calls ‘sociological impression-
ism’, not only constitutes one of the most important analyses of modernity but a pri-
mary ‘entrée’ or route into more contemporary cultural analysis (Frisby, 1981). One
might also cite the growing sociology of consumption as one example of such a legacy.
Similarly, in keeping with Scott’s trajectory, Kellner, in Chapter 3, re-evaluates the sig-
nificance of the Frankfurt School and the work of Walter Benjamin more particularly
as potential forerunners of contemporary media studies. Indeed, in illustrating their
influences upon work as diverse as that of the Birmingham School for Contemporary
Cultural Studies and Raymond Williams, Todd Gitlin and Jûrgen Habermas, Kellner
shows how the break with Marxism is often misplaced, and that this centres more upon
the rise of a more particular form of poststructural and postmodern theory. This is a
theme picked up in the following two chapters which consider a couple of more partic-
ularly British traditions in sociology. Rojek’s direct consideration of the work of Stuart
Hall and the Birmingham School for Contemporary Cultural Studies, in Chapter 4, fol-
lows Kellner’s logic in detecting a linguistic turn rather than a cultural turn as critical in
causing the drift away from more directly Marxist theorizing. Hall’s influential essay on
en/decoding is pivotal here in highlighting the growing significance of anti-essentialist
theorizing, often influenced in turn by the rise of identity politics such as feminism and

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