Page 251 - Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies

ANGELA MCROBBIE 239

and the margins of academic life, and because several of the New Times
writers, most notably Stuart Hall, were inextricably linked with both
fields, the scathing criticisms of New Times were then also applied to its
sister discipline, cultural studies. But there was also something else going
on which is worth noting. A few figures from a new generation of cultural
studies graduates were getting jobs which in the past would have been
reserved for those with Oxford Firsts. Positioned inside arts programming
in the BBC or Channel 4 cultural studies ideas suddenly received a new
kind of outlet in slots like The Late Show (BBC2); Wall to Wall (Channel 4)
and in the Guardian newspaper. The popularization of cultural studies has
ironically perhaps produced the greatest storm of criticism from two
writers who have themselves, more than most, moved between ‘popular’
journalism (i.e. rock criticism) and academic writing. Later I will comment
on Frith and Savage’s attack on both ‘cultural populism’ and the
popularization of cultural studies. I will suggest that the claim of populism
is misplaced and the aim of keeping cultural studies pure and its hands
clean and out of reach of the predatory, slick prose-style of the likes of
Julie Burchill and Toby Young of the Modern Review unrealistic and
unnecessarily protective.
To return to New Times, it was a vulnerable target because the articles
were written in a deliberately journalistic, accessible and, to some extent,
provocative tone. However this stepping outside of the academy and
bringing into the world of politics, both a new set of concepts for
understanding social change, and simultaneously a strong defence of the
‘politics of theory’, as Stuart Hall has put it, remains, in my mind, an
important task. It is all the more curious, then, that Simon Frith and Jon
Savage—both figures who, as I have just indicated, have themselves moved
between higher education and popular journalism—should take such
exception to those strands in this kind of popularizing of new ideas by
virtually placing New Times, in its so-called embracing of ‘cultural
populism’, alongside the neo-right magazine Modern Review owned and
overseen by Julie Burchill. Of course as the several critics of the New Times
work have suggested (myself included), there were a number of issues
which were either ignored or else pushed to the side. There was the
downside of consumption, for example, through its connection with
domestic labour and social reproduction, often for women hard and
unrewarding activity. There were also the more limited pleasures of
shopping ‘when every penny counts’. In ‘New Times in cultural studies’ I
argued that there was a tendency in this work to extol the shared enjoyment
of aspects of consumption at the expense of the high cost of living and the
way in which so many are excluded from these enjoyments (McRobbie,
1991). This point was not made, as McGuigan implies, in an accusatory
tone of puritanical and political condemnation. It was more of a gentle
rejoinder. More significant was the absence of what I will here label the