Page 219 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

ContCultural Theory Text Pages 4/4/03 1:42 PM Page 210

Contemporary Cultural Theory

readers, cultural studies should aim to adjust the social institu-
tions that shape those consciousnesses.
Like Williams, Bennett envisaged criticism’s supersession by
a kind of cultural studies that would be essentially sociological
in character. Their different understandings of sociality, though,
pointed towards very different kinds of cultural sociology.
As Williams made clear, his own objections to criticism were
levelled not so much at judgement per se, which seemed to him
‘inevitable’, but at the peculiar ‘pseudo-impersonality’ of literary-
critical judgement (Williams, 1979, pp. 334–6). Indeed, his
generally humanist reading of the importance of social agency
and of social consciousness, and his continuing sense of class
loyalty, actually required non-specialist value judgements of a
more or less explicit kind. For if the long revolution was to be
continued, then everyday arguments, about culture and society,
politics and letters, must succeed in changing people’s minds, that
is, in ‘transforming’ the ‘consciousness of individual subjects’, to
translate the proposition from humanist into post-structuralist
terms. This is exactly what Bennett objected to: the attempt to
change people’s minds through rational debate. There is no
other way to proceed, of course, for a politics that is both demo-
cratic and, as it were, inspired ‘from below’. For Bennett, however,
the specific intelligentsia should aim at a very different type of
politics, at once both micropolitical and ‘from above’. In short,
he aimed to examine ‘the truth/power symbiosis that charac-
terises particular regions of social management—with a
view...to [not only] undoing that symbiosis but also
. . . installing a new one in its place’ (p. 270). The term used for
this kind of work is ‘cultural policy studies’.

CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL POLICY

Since the Second World War, most western governments have
tended to regard cultural policy of one kind or another as a neces-
sary, albeit often relatively minor, contribution to the maintenance
of ‘national identity’. In the first instance, then, these policies were
developed in relation to essentially national frameworks. But over

210