Page 22 - Contemporary Cultural Theory 3rd edition

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Cultural studies and cultural theory

sense problematic. And it is only in the modern and postmodern
periods that ‘culture’, however defined, has become such. Pre-
modern societies, like the feudalisms of medieval Europe or the
hunting and gathering communities of tribalism, clearly exhibit
behaviours we can easily recognise as ‘cultural’, whether religious
or artistic, educational or ‘scientific’—as Lévi-Strauss reminds
us, ‘primitive’ knowledge can indeed be understood as a kind of
science (Lévi-Strauss, 1966, pp. 13–16). But this is our retrospective
understanding, not their own. Precisely because culture, and
especially religion, remained central to the life of feudal or
tribal societies, they typically possessed no sense of the cultural
as ‘different’ or residual, such as is conveyed by contemporary
western usage. In short, culture has become a theoretical
problem for the West only because it is already socially prob-
lematic. Cultural theory is not, then, simply a particular,
specialist academic discourse, the guiding hand behind a partic-
ular set of empirical, substantive, research problems; it is also, and
more interestingly, the repressed ‘other’ of a society the official
rhetoric of which is provided almost entirely by economics and
politics. Cultural theory is, in fact, one of the central discontents
of our civilisation.
But if culture has indeed become so problematic, why has this
been so? The short answer lies in the nature of socio-cultural
modernisation itself, and in particular in the rise to dominance
of a distinctively capitalist system of economic organisation, in
which goods and services are produced primarily for sale in a
more or less competitive market. This is as true of modern
cultural production as of any other kind of production. Indeed,
a strong case can be made for the view that the book trade was
the first modern capitalist industry: as Febvre and Martin
observe, ‘the printer and the bookseller worked above all and
from the beginning for profit’ (Febvre & Martin, 1976, p. 249).
This historically novel mode of cultural production required, for
its eventual success, not only the general development of capi-
talist forms of organisation, but also a number of factors quite
specific to cultural production itself, such as copyright laws and
techniques of ‘mechanical reproduction’ (cf. Benjamin, 1973).
This unprecedented commercialisation of cultural production

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