Page 71 - Cultural Theory

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••• Douglas Kellner •••

British cultural studies and the Frankfurt School were both founded as fundamentally
transdisciplinary enterprises that resisted established academic divisions of labour.
Indeed, their boundary-crossing and critiques of the detrimental effects of abstract-
ing culture from its socio-political context elicited hostility among those who were
more disciplinary-oriented and who, for example, believed in the autonomy of cul-
ture and renounced sociological or political readings. Against such academic formal-
ism and separatism, cultural studies insists that culture must be investigated within
the social relations and system through which culture is produced and consumed,
and that thus analysis of culture is intricately involved in the study of society, poli-
tics, and economics. Employing Gramsci’s model of hegemony and counter-
hegemony, it sought to analyze ‘hegemonic’, or ruling, social and cultural forces of
domination and to seek ‘counter-hegemonic’ forces of resistance and struggle. The
project was aimed at social transformation and attempted to specify forces of domi-
nation and resistance in order to aid the process of political struggle and emancipa-
tion from oppression and domination.
Some earlier authoritative presentations of British cultural studies stressed the
importance of a transdisciplinary approach to the study of culture that analyzed its
political economy, process of production and distribution, textual products, and
reception by the audience – positions remarkably similar to the Frankfurt School. For
instance, in his classical programmatic article, ‘Encoding/Decoding’, Stuart Hall
began his analysis by using Marx’s Grundrisse as a model to trace the articulations of
‘a continuous circuit’, encompassing ‘production–distribution–consumption–
production’ (1980b: 128ff.). Hall concretizes this model with a focus on how media
institutions produce meanings, how they circulate, and how audiences use or decode
the texts to produce meaning.
In many versions of post-1980s cultural studies, however, there has been a turn to
what might be called a postmodern problematic that emphasizes pleasure, con-
sumption, and the individual construction of identities in terms of what McGuigan
(1992) has called a ‘cultural populism’. Media culture from this perspective produces
material for identities, pleasures, and empowerment, and thus audiences constitute
the ‘popular’ through their consumption of cultural products. During this
phase – roughly from the mid-1980s to the present – cultural studies in Britain and
North America turned from the socialist and revolutionary politics of the previous
stages to postmodern forms of identity politics and less critical perspectives on media
and consumer culture. Emphasis was placed more and more on the audience, con-
sumption, and reception, and displaced engaging in production and distribution of
texts and how texts were produced in media industries.
The forms of cultural studies developed from the late 1970s to the present, in
contrast to the earlier stages, theorize a shift from the stage of state monopoly capi-
talism, or Fordism, rooted in mass production and consumption to a new regime of
capital and social order, sometimes described as ‘post-Fordism’ (Harvey, 1989), or
‘postmodernism’ (Jameson, 1991), and characterizing a transnational and global cap-
ital that valorizes difference, multiplicity, eclecticism, populism, and intensified con-
sumerism in a new information/entertainment society. From this perspective, the
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