Page 121 - Living Room Wars Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World

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Cultural studies, media reception and the transnational
media system

CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL CRITIQUE

An intense interest in culture is one of the most significant trends in contemporary
communication studies. At the same time, the term ‘culture’ is so widely used and elusive
that its current prominence could obscure the fact that its analysis is being undertaken
from a diversity of perspectives and approaches. The emergence of a set of critical-
cultural approaches to communication, generally called cultural studies, needs to be
distinguished from the less encompassing social-scientific interest in cultural phenomena
displayed within mainstream communication research. To be more precise, in my view
the perceived convergence of disparate scholarly traditions that is hailed by some
observers (e.g. Blumler et al. 1985; Schrøder 1987; Curran 1990) should be embraced
with caution. Although culture may at first sight be a ‘common object of study’
(Rosengren 1988:10) that can contribute to the further loosening up of unproductive
divisions between ‘mainstream’ and ‘critical’ traditions, the theoretical and
methodological, as well as epistemological and political differences between the two
traditions, as I have already discussed in chapter 2, remain impressive and need to be
acknowledged as such.
In brief, ‘culture’ in mainstream communication research is generally conceptualized
in behavioural and functionalist terms, about which ‘objective’ knowledge can be
accumulated through the testing of generalizable hypotheses by way of conventional
social-scientific methods. Such positivist interest in media culture is, in many respects, at
odds with the concerns of cultural studies. In the latter, ‘culture’ is not simply treated as a
discrete object of communication research. It is the contradictory, continuous and open-
ended social process of the production, circulation and consumption of meaning that
cultural studies is about, not ‘culture’ defined as a more or less static, bounded and
objectified set of ideas, beliefs and behaviours. David Chancy has recently put it this
way: ‘The innovation of cultural studies has meant that the crisis of culture has been
firmly placed within the social history of modernity’ (1994:13).
This implies a completely different set of working principles: cultural studies is
interested in historical and particular meanings rather than in general types of behaviour,
it is process-oriented rather than result-oriented, interpretive rather than explanatory.
Most important, what fundamentally divides both traditions is their respective self-
conceptions as intellectual discourse: the scientistic ambitions of social science are
vehemently at odds with those of cultural studies. As an intellectual practice, cultural
studies is positively and self-consciously eclectic, critical and deconstructive (see, e.g.,
1
Hall 1986b; Grossberg et al. 1992). It does not seek paradigmatic status, nor does it obey
established disciplinary boundaries. It is, as Angela McRobbie (1994) has put it, an
‘undisciplined discipline’. Its intellectual loyalties reach beyond the walls of the academy
to the critique of current cultural issues in the broadest sense. Cultural studies forms what
Clifford Geertz (1983) has called a ‘blurred genre’ of intellectual work: it is at once