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Contemporary Cultural Theory

media consumption, nicely symbolised in Hall’s appointment to
the chair of sociology at the British Open University, is a sub-
sequent development, and one that ran against the grain of
Birmingham’s founding moment. It is also misconceived, it seems
to us, if only because the binary organisation of ‘elite’ and
‘popular’ cultures is in the process of being replaced by a large
number of cultural niche markets, each dominated by the same
international media conglomerates and subject to variously
critical or uncritical commentary from the same academic and
media institutions.
Francis Mulhern uses the German word Kulturkritik to denote
the elitist position in this debate, ‘Cultural Studies’ to denote the
populist. There is obvious justification for this usage. Both
Hartman and Williams attached a crucial significance, in the
history of the term ‘culture’, to the legacy of German Romant-
icism, where German Kultur was troped against French
civilisation, as human nature in opposition to mechanical artifice
(Hartman, 1997, pp. 205–7, 210; Williams, 1976, pp. 78–80). It is
this legacy that Mulhern acknowledges in his use of Kulturkritik
to denote not only the German tradition proper, but also the
English tradition of Matthew Arnold, Eliot and Leavis (Mulhern,
2000, pp. xv–xvi). Where Kulturkritik valorises high art, what
Mulhern calls Cultural Studies valorises mass civilisation. But the
two positions are by no means as antithetical as they appear, he
continues, since Cultural Studies actually reproduces the same
‘metacultural’ discursive form as that of traditional Kulturkritik
(p. 156). In either mode, he writes, metacultural discourse ‘invents
an authoritative subject, “good” culture, be it minority or popular,
whose function is to mediate a symbolic metapolitical resolution
of the contradictions of capitalist modernity’ (p. 169).
There is much to be said for the argument, but Mulhern’s
categories are by no means as inclusive as he suggests. As he
acknowledges, Williams’ work was an important exception to this
observation, insofar as it set out to establish a distinctive ‘politics
of culture’ (p. 72) in opposition to both elitist Kulturkritik and
populist Cultural Studies. We would add, however, that quite
apart from these specifically political issues, there has always
been a fourth option in play, where cultural studies is seen as

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