Page 105 - Contemporary Cultural Theory

STRUCTURALISM

Eagleton’s version of “institutional” analysis derived essentially from
Williams, Bennett’s own would move in a progressively Foucauldian
direction. No doubt there are, as Dollimore has stressed, certain very
clear affinities between British cultural materialism and North American
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Foucauldian “new historicism”. But their near conflation by Easthope
seems unwarranted. Bennett himself had worked with Stuart Hall
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at the Open University and convened U203, “Popular Culture”, an
interdisciplinary undergraduate course which in 1982 had attracted
over a thousand students. As Easthope notes, U203 was “the most
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ambitious, serious and comprehensive intervention in cultural studies
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in Britain”. In 1987 Bennett became the first Director of the Institute
for Cultural Policy Studies at Griffith University in Brisbane, Australia.
Both Bennett himself and his Australian and British co-workers clearly
envisaged cultural policy studies as a quite distinctive politico-cultural
project. Their shift toward cultural policy was never simply pragmatic.
Rather, it evolved from out of a distinctively Foucauldian vision of
the political rôle of the intellectual.
The underlying theoretical rationale behind this commitment to
cultural policy studies is most clearly argued in Bennett’s Outside
Literature. In a reversal of Williams’s intellectual journey towards
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Marxism, Bennett here sets out to exorcise the ghosts of his own misspent
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Marxist youth. Bennett argues that recent Marxist and quasi-Marxist
criticism has aimed to secure a political relevance for itself “by going
back to being…a set of interpretive procedures oriented towards the
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transformation of the consciousness of individual subjects”. This was,
of course, the traditional function of the “universal intellectual”. For
Bennett, by contrast, the Foucauldian notion of the “specific intellectual”
demands “more specific and localized assessments of the effects of
practices of textual commentary conducted in the light of the
institutionally circumscribed fields of their social deployment”. Rather
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than denounce the world, Bennett will reform the university and as
much else of the culture industries as seems practically reformable. For
Bennett, then, a “specific intelligentsia” can only effectively prosecute
an essentially technocratic micro-politics. Cultural policy studies will
thus stand in relation to cultural studies much as Fabian social engineering
once did to sociology. Bennett aspires, in short, to examine “the truth/
power symbiosis which characterizes particular regions of social
management—with a view not only to undoing that symbiosis but
also…installing a new one in its place”. 84

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