History is the subject of a structure whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time filled by the presence of the now.
Walter Benjamin (1939/1977:26) argued for a history to conjure up images of a humane future. His preoccupation was with a history, a set of images, that not only would stir the imagination, but feed action. This paper takes as its starting point that all history is a fabrication, formed always within the concerns of the present, by the politics of the present. It argues that in studying popular culture we must ask what does it do, what is its agenda — its project for the present and the future? And it suggests that this field of study in Australia will be useful when it provides a history that not only critically reassesses the nationalist myths of Anzac and the rural tradition, but gives us quite different images of our past and our present.
In a paper on the social production of popular memories, Keith Tribe warns of the danger for women's history or people's history in believing their task to be one of retrieval — 'of a neglected point of view' (Tribe 1981) or of restoring the whole truth to historical discourse. History, he argues, is not a collection of past events, some of which have been neglected or excluded by previous historians. As a fabrication, a combining together of materials within a specific theoretical framework, all history, he insists, is perpetually constructed within a specific conjuncture. To put women into history is not to unlock its real truth, but to engage in politics, to seek to strengthen the political demands of the women's movement. But, by the same token, to engage in women's history or people's history is not of necessity politically progressive. We have always to ask what does it do, what is the object of this history?
The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) has sought to deal with contemporary and historical issues with a clear sense of engagement or commitment, of being clear about the object of their work. Popular culture as a field of study in England is most closely identified with the style of analysis developed by this Centre.
1 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4: 7 (1986)
This paper will proceed by giving a brief account of their cultural studies approach as it has recently been discussed by two of the main figures associated with the CCCS. It will then go on to discuss those accounts and the subsequent agenda which has been proposed for the study of popular culture. This proposal will be explored and extended, and finally, compared with Australian trends in the field of popular culture.
Cultural Studies
Founded by Richard Hoggart in 1964, the CCCS at first worked within a framework heavily influenced by Hoggart, Raymond Williams and E.P. Thompson; a framework which has since been characterized by members of the Centre as 'culturalist' (Johnson 1979). In a discussion of cultural studies since the late 1950s, Stuart Hall analysed the projects of these three authors as acts of 'recovery,' of constituting traditions. Hoggart, in his book, The Uses of Literacy, both re-presented a tradition of cultural debate about 'mass society' and a tradition of English working-class culture. Raymond Williams in Culture and Society constituted the culture-and-society tradition of a particular group of English intellectuals and E.P. Thompson's The Making of the English Working Class recovered a tradition of working-class political culture. Between them, says Hall, these books were the founding impulse for cultural studies, but not, he insists, in the sense of their being text-books for a new academic discipline. As intellectual works, they were 'focused by, organized through and constituted responses to, the immediate pressures of the time and society in which they were written' (Hall 1980:58). Their projects of recovery, of constituting specific traditions, were clearly formed in this manner — as a means of engagement with contemporary concerns. In thus defining the space of cultural studies, they had also prescribed an approach to culture.
In characterizing these authors as 'culturalist,' both Stuart Hall and Richard Johnson have identified the focus of this paradigm (as they have described it) in questions about how people experience their conditions of life. The culturalist's method is to begin with experience or 'culture' and to read down from there: to look at other structures and relations from a prior understanding of how they are lived. The second moment of cultural studies, as depicted by Hall and Johnson, was ushered in by the arrival of structuralism(s) on the intellectual scene. Within this paradigm it was argued that, on the contrary, experience was not the ground of analysis; it was not an authenticating source. Experience was the effect or product of classifications, frameworks, language or discourses; and the focus of cultural
2 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
studies shitted to this arena. Questions of ideology and structures of domination took over from questions about culture or experience.
Both Hall and Johnson in constructing the history of cultural studies emphasize shifts in paradigms or significant breaks. Certainly the work of the CCCS, as represented by works such as Resistance through Rituals (a collection of papers on youth culture) and On Ideology (papers on various theoretical approaches to ideology), appears remarkably different. The terms, the level of analysis, the foci appear quite opposed. The first concentrates on popular resistance, detailed empirical studies of culture, an emphasis on experience, and a reading of cultures as expressions of class relations; the second on theoretical concepts, structures of domination and the work of intellectuals. Both Hall and Johnson conclude their accounts with a discussion of the necessity to make the best elements of both paradigms and to pursue questions about the dialectic between conditions and consciousness, between conditions and culture.
These assessments or histories of cultural studies by Hall and Johnson, which now have appeared in a number of different contexts, can themselves be interpreted as acts of recovery, of constituting traditions, precisely in the manner of their predecessors. They are not simply engaged in providing an account of cultural studies as handy references for students and academic courses. Representing cultural studies as formed by two theoretical breaks or paradigms serves as a means of hailing a new set of concerns, signalling its need and marking out the terrain. In particular, in re-calling the culturalist paradigm they place on the agenda a particular style of analysis — one that emphasizes detailed studies of particular sites — and an aspect of its politics — the insistence that the cultural is not merely a reflection of something else, but the site of a particular politics which cannot merely be reduced to something else, nor be trivialized as being outside the realm of real political struggle.
These histories have, in part, been formed by the intellectual context in which Hall and Johnson work. Numerous critiques of structuralism and its theoreticism have been mounted and vigorous debates have raged about the value of this particular paradigm. E.P. Thompson's virtriolic attack in The Poverty of Theory (1979) and the various replies to him have continued this debate well beyond the point at which Hall and Johnson produced their histories (Anderson 1980; Samuel 1981). But, at another level, these accounts have been formed by and can be said 'to constitute responses to' the changing political context of their work. In proclaiming the return to questions about how structures of dominance are lived, and in asserting the need to look at both conditions and consciousness, they announce a
3 A ust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
political agenda for intellectual work in the field of cultural studies. These questions are proposed as political questions — as ways of thinking about, and intervening in, the present historical conjuncture in England. The turn to popular culture as a field of study in the past four or five years is a product of this agenda.
Popular Culture
The Study of popular culture in England, as represented by Hall (1981), Johnson (1979), the CCCS and the introduction of an Open University course in this field, seeks to construct an understanding of what is seen as a profound shift in the political and ideological consensus in that society. The transformation identified became most noticeable with the increasing success of Margaret Thatcher; but major changes had already been noted before this time. The CCCS, for example, had begun to analyse what it identified as 'a crisis in hegemony' in a number of different sites. In the work for Policing the Crisis, produced by Stuart Hall and others, and the work of the Education group, whose book appeared much later — Unpopular Education — the CCCS was examining the growing crisis for the social democratic consensus and the manner in which a new, conservative, authoritarian consensus was being constructed. In effect, the success of Margaret Thatcher at the election polls in 1979 gave a particular urgency to this project. The questions posed examined the construction of a new consensus in sites such as the media, the courts and parliamentary politics, but also asserted the need to analyse the manner in which these processes had effected changes in the consciousness of large sections of the population. Popular culture as a field of study, then, was to be conceived within this terrain — as being the study of both the production of ideologies, and the relationship between these ideologies and the practical ideologies or common sense, as it was now referred to, of different sections of the population.
Stuart Hall's paper 'Notes on Deconstructing the Popular' (l981) states these issues in forceful terms. In this paper he defines popular culture as a site of struggle. It is the site where 'the people' in various forms. The people, says Hall, do not exist as such;1 but ways of representing 'the people' do which seek either to constitute them as saying 'yes' to power — in forms, for example, such as 'the nation,' unified and acquiescent to the present social and political arrangements — or, as a popular democratic force against the power bloc. The study of popular culture examines those discourses, their sites and processes of production. But it also seeks, says Hall, to examine how those discourses re-organize, disorganize or become sedimented into
4 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
the common sense or the consciousness of different sections of the population.
In marking out the field of popular culture, Hall examines a number of definitions of this concept. The first definition is more akin to a concept of mass culture; it is the culture provided for the masses or for the mass market. This is the definition around which a debate has been constructed about popular culture as manipulative versus popular culture as the truly authentic culture of the people or the working-classes. In Australia the debate has been conducted frequently by recruiting figures such as Adorno and Benjamin as representing either side (e.g. Docker 1982). Hall rejects this definition of popular culture and the terms of the debate. Such modes of discussing culture, he says, raise important questions about the cultural industries and the production of culture; but it is not a matter of people being cultural dupes or there being an authentic popular culture outside the field of cultural power and domination. Hall insists on the need to examine culture as a site of 'continuous and necessarily uneven and unequal struggle' in which the dominant culture works constantly to enclose and confine all cultural forms within its definitions. Cultural forms are never wholly corrupt or wholly authentic: they are 'deeply contradictory' (Hall 1981:233). Precisely because they function on the terrain of the 'popular,' he argues, the provided commercial cultural forms carry elements of recognition, of displaying their responsiveness to, the forms in which the people already recognize themselves, or experience their lives.
The second concept purports to be descriptive or anthropological: it equates popular culture with all the things 'the people' do and enjoy. Embedded in this notion, says Hall, is an opposition between the elite or dominant culture and the culture of the 'periphery.' This distinction is valuable in drawing our attention to the way in which particular institutions such as schools work to create and police this opposition. But it is not a descriptive definition says Hall; it relies on a notion of the people versus the non-people, a distinction precisely constituted by the discourses about culture conducted in such institutional sites. Cultural forms have no fixed position on this hierarchy, but move up and down according to their recruitment to these discourses of legitimate and non-legitimate culture.
Stuart Hall rejects these two definitions, then, and proposes to speak of popular culture as the site where 'the people' are constituted, are fought or struggled over, and struggle. In particular, his concern is with the processes by which 'the people' are defined as consenting to the exercise of power over their lives, to the handing over of power; versus their being defined as opposed to such relations of
5 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
domination. It is thus a profoundly political concept of popular culture.
However, in this paper (and others he has written on the topic) Hall provides only momentary glimpses of what this analysis of popular culture might look like. The focus of this work in recent years has been the analysis of Thatcherism and the construction of an authoritarian-popular consensus in Britain. In its attack on trade unions, welfare bureaucracies, and more generally, the institutions of the social-democratic state, Hall argues, this populist discourse constitutes the people as being opposed to the power bloc, precisely in order to construct a new consensus. Similarly, Hall has examined the way in which consent was constructed around the Falklands War crisis. 'The people' again were called on in this instance by evoking memories of Britain in its 'finest hour' (a memory that could be relied upon because of its continual construction through television and film, documentary and fiction). This constituting of the people, as Judy Brett has noted in an interview with Stuart Hall, was selective (Hall/Brett 1983:194). It claimed as 'the people' specifically those who had been in Britain (in fact or tradition) during the Second World War; those who had no memory of this time — the immigrants who had arrived in large numbers since then — had no place within this discourse. This populism has a 'racist subtext' (Hall/Brett).
In his published writings in this area Hall concentrates on Thatcherism as a discourse being produced in a range of different sites. He makes references to Thatcherism's success in changing popular consciousness, of having awakened 'the strong elements of traditionalism and conservatism within popular working-class culture' (Hall/Brett 1983:193), for example; but the thrust of his analysis is not in this direction. It is not clear what a study of the common-sense conceptions within which Thatcherism roots itself, or works upon, would look like. A possible example of this type of analysis — where a study of both the production of ideologies and their effects in the popular consciousness or common sense is announced — may be the CCCS book heavily influenced by Hall: The Empire Strikes Back (CCCS 1982). This book argues that 'the construction of an authoritarian state in Britain is fundamentally intertwined with the elaboration of a popular racism in the 1970s' (CCCS:9). Yet the paper in this collection which is most centrally concerned with the way in which racist ideologies have taken hold in the common sense of the working-classes provides evidence only of the elaboration of these ideologies in the populist discourses of daily newspapers, the statements of certain politicians, the police and the practices of institutions such as schools (Lawrence 1982:9).
6 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
The problem for Hall and others working within a similar framework is not simply a question of evidence. It is not a matter of it being easier to study the production of ideologies in newspapers, political debates or police records. The problem lies in the theoretical status of concepts such as consciousness, or the popular consciousness or the national popular culture. In his papers on popular culture and cultural studies Hall has argued for a necessarily dialectic approach to conditions and consciousness, but this concept of consciousness is not fully explored. Similarly, when he refers to lived cultures or 'common sense,' their theoretical status is gestured towards rather than developed within a clear framework, and terms such as 'working-class culture' or 'popular culture' slide into the analysis.
But the problem does seem to be one which can be at least shelved in the analysis of popular culture. Hall has argued that there is no fixed content to the category 'the people,' that popular culture is the site where 'the people' are constituted, and that popular culture is thereby a site of struggle. The nature of cultural and ideological struggle is the struggle between forces which seek to define 'the people' as saying yes to 'power,' opposed by definitions of 'the people' which constitute them as a genuinely popular, genuinely democratic force. Thatcherism as a discursive formation elaborated in a range of different sites constitutes the people, as Hall (1981:239) has stated, as needing to be 'disciplined more, ruled better, more effectively policed, whose way of life needs to be protected from 'alien cultures'.' To study popular culture is to study the production of such discourses. But most importantly, it is to study the way in which these have effectively excluded other discourses, other modes of representing 'the people' and it is to study those sites where oppositional representations have been or are being elaborated.
To take an example: Hall in his analysis of the Falklands War and in discussions in Australia on his recent visit here talked of the way in which images of British History had been activated during that crisis to establish particular understandings of the Government's actions. Britain at war was evoked as the time when the country was most united: 'the nation and the people [were brought together] in a massively effective way around deeply traditionalist chauvinistic symbols' (Hall/Brett: 198). Histories with their images of 'the people,' 'our past,' 'the nation,' thus have been effectively appropriated by the new Right. Hall argues that the construction of a quite different set of historical understandings of the past and the putting up of a fight, as it were, for the symbols and images already operating in historical discourses is a central task for 'intellectual' work.2 The terrain of popular culture includes, then, an analysis of those sites where a different sense of 'the people' is to be furnished, to re-call forms in
7 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
which 'the people' were constituted as a democratic force and to draw attention to the way in which alternative, oppositional definitions of the people have consistently been eliminated or trivialized in those sites where they have emerged.
This analysis can be most usefully clarified and extended by turning to the field of popular culture studies in Australia — to an examination of what has been done in this field and then to a suggestion of what could be done.
Popular Culture Studies in Australia
Just as the field is very new in England, so it is in Australia, but a number of significant trends have emerged. Taking the field as marked out by discussions in journals such as Arena and Overland and by the books edited by Spearitt and Walker (1979) — Australian Popular Culture, some major problems can be identified. First, popular culture is frequently seen as a matter of the celebratory recovery of those things which 'the people' have indulged in or enjoyed. So Walker (1979:2) in his introduction to the book Australian Popular Culture speaks of its project in terms of providing a broader notion of 'our cultural heritage.' This is very much in the vein of the 'retrieval of a neglected point of view.' Apart from pointing out, then, that this approach neglects or shelves crucial questions about the production of culture and relations of power and dominance in the field of culture, we have also to ask 'what does it do?' The celebratory approach to poplar culture does nothing to challenge or disrupt the dominant representations of 'the people.' It works rather to constitute them as acquiescing to the present social arrangements; popular culture is simply a neglected part of our cultural heritage.
Second, this approach has also at times been linked with a claim to be concerned with the authentic popular culture or the authentic working-class of popular culture as identifying 'genuine' or 'authentic' working-class values and enjoyments. These included the importance of luck and gambling, an insistence on one's own language style, and enjoying activities in a group of family or friends.3 Although Docker gestures towards Hall's analysis of popular culture as a contested site, he purports to be able to read particular television programmes as giving expression to these authentic working-class values and preferences. Both Hall and Johnson have dismissed the notion that there is an authentic working-class or popular culture. They argue that the traditional working-class culture which has consistently been identified as embodying these authentic values — as for example, depicted in Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy4 now
8 A ust J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
has to be understood as being one form through which the working-class has been represented. Indeed, as Stuart Hall (unpub.:14) points out, these particular cultural practices emerged at a specific historical moment — the 1880s and 90s — and disappeared again fairly quickly. A cultural practice or style cannot be identified as truly authentic or organic to a particular class.
Third, discussions of popular culture frequently become consumed by theoretical debates: in particular, whether popular culture is totally manipulated or possibly authentic, and whether to focus on the 'text,' the 'context' or both: whether to be culturalist, structuralist, formalist, semiotic and so on. These debates in the Australian setting rarely address the politics of intellectual work except in simplistic terms of 'left optimism' versus 'left pessimism.' Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends is an important example. The editors in their introduction provide a useful summary of the cultural-to-structuralist history of cultural studies as told by Hall and Johnson, but it is a bleached version of their accounts. In this introductory essay, Dermody et al (1982:52) argue for the necessity to break down the dichotomy between text and context, as they characterize the debate, to study 'the text in all its aspects.' This project overrides the political consideration that forms the Hall/Johnson histories. Similarly, the articles which make up the book tend to veer to one side or the other of the dichotomy as presented in the editors' introduction; the book as a whole evades raising serious questions about the politics of popular culture. As Andrew Milner (1982) points out, for example, the book fails to examine the centrality of images of Australian nationalism to popular and radical cultural forms.
The reason for this lacuna is, ironically, partly recognized by the editors of this book. They point to the way in which cultural studies emerges in England out of the culturalist tradition; whereas in Australia, cultural history derives from a tradition of radical nationalism. But this insight is channelled into a consideration of the way in which the text-versus-context issue has been posed in Australia, by this tradition of left nationalism, rather than an analysis of the politics of its approach to cultural studies. The failure to address the issue of nationalism in studies of Australian cultural history — in particular of popular culture — stems from the way in which they, the editors themselves, have been formed by this tradition and its politics. This book represents a continuation of that tradition, rather than its de-construction. The study of popular culture becomes the celebratory restitution of a neglected past or point of view, where true, authentic, Australian values are to be found — in opposition to the manipulative, consumer culture of America or the imperialist, elitist culture of Britain.
9 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
The terrain of popular culture, then, needs to be transformed so that it begins to engage with those issues. As a field of study, popular culture is concerned with the forms in which 'the people' have been constituted. If it fails to address the politics of these cultural forms, practices or institutions, its stance becomes — in spite of itself — political. To celebrate a cultural form, for example, because it addresses 'the people' as being authentic in comparison perhaps to a high cultural form, which addresses 'not the people' — those of 'distinctive,' 'superior' taste — is a form of populism which trivializes what is at stake here and negates or mystifies the battles being fought. We need a study of popular culture which examines the production of ideologies, cultural forms, practices and institutions in which 'the people' are addressed. This will include those forms in which they have been constituted as acquiescent to the structures, the processes, of power and domination; it will include those forms in which they have been constituted as an oppositional force to the structures of domination; and it will involve an examination of the processes by which those 'popular democratic' forms have been elaborated, contained or limited — then eliminated or marginalized in history.
Of central importance, will be the study of those sites in which popular nationalist myths have been constituted. Anzac, for example, is our 'finest hour,' a mythology which has been under attack in crucial ways by the 'Women Against Rape in War' movement. This movement has pointed to, among other things, the way in which this image of 'the Australian people' excludes women and those for whom memories of those times mean quite other things (the women who are survivors of rape in war and the migrants who have come to Australia since those wars). Popular culture studies should similarly be involved in deconstructing those myths and examining the processes by which they have displaced or blocked other images of 'the people.' As a field of study it should be centrally concerned with these processes.
With such an agenda the study of popular culture will examine areas perhaps which overlap with other fields. For example, it might examine the independent working-class education movement in the early 20th Century, the move by the NSW Trades and Labour Council to establish 2KY radio station in Sydney as a means of class communication, the development of a popular women's magazine such as the Women's Weekly, SP betting in the 1930s, Australian films in the 1970s, or a women's collective during the Second World War. These topics could be variously studied as labour history, women's history, social history, media studies, educational history, and so on. As studies of popular culture, they would focus on questions of the
10 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986
processes by which particular images of the people were produced, elaborated, excluded, marginalized, or fought over in these sites. One of the major strengths of popular culture studies should be the way in which they draws attention to the range of sites in which political struggles are fought. They should also be central to the processes of constructing, or fabricating, a history which provides positive images of our past, images which point the way foreward to a future of democratic, 'popular,' action or politics.
Lesley Johnson teaches at the University of Melbourne.
Notes
1. This is a reference in Hall's work to Raymond Williams' claim in
Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1966) that the 'masses' do not exist
as such, only ways of talking about them.
2. Intellectual work is broadly defined here: that is in sites such as
the media, the schools, the universities, community arts, etc.
3. Docker's (1982:82) viewpoint is shared by Keith Windschuttle
(l984:168f.) who, in his discussion of television and popular cul
ture, characterizes popular programs such as Paul Hogan specials,
as giving expression to an authentic Australian working-class tra
dition of anti-authoritarian humour.
4. Raymond Williams (1966) also speaks of the authentic cultural
forms of the working-class. Vestiges of his notion of a traditional
working-class culture in English cultural studies can still be seen
in works such as Paul Willis' Learning to Labour (1977).
5. Milner also points out that some of the papers in this collection
themselves subscribe to a form of radical nationalizm.
6. It is important to see these traditions as sharing preoccupations
too. The culturalist tradition arises at a specific conjuncture
which these intellectuals saw as re-posing the 'condition of En
gland' question as had the intellectuals of the culture-and-society
tradition.
This question shares many similar preoccupations with left nationalism
in Australia — for example, with authentic national character versus
Americanization, or the search for an authentic radical popular tradition.
11 Aust. J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986)
References
Anderson, P., (1980) Arguments within English Marxism, London: Verso.
Benjamin, W., (1977) 'Theses on the Philosophy of History,' XIV, in Illuminations, (trans.) Harry Zohn, London: Fontana/Collins.
Bennett, T., et al (eds.) Popular Television and Film, London: OU/BFI.
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (1982) The Empire Strikes Back, London: Hutchinson.
Clarke, J., et al (eds.) Working Class Culture, London: Hutchinson.
Davidson, A., (1983) 'People's History and Popular Culture,' paper delivered to the Culture Studies Seminar, University of Melbourne, July 11, 1983.
Dermody, S., Docker, J., Modjeska, D., (1982) Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends, Sydney: Kibble Books.
Docker, J., (1982) 'In Defence of Popular Culture,' Arena, 60.
Hall, S., (1980) 'Cultural Studies: two paradigms,' Media, Culture and Society, 2.
.......... , (unpub.) 'Popular culture, politics and history', typescript
of paper to Open University Popular Culture course staff.
.......... , (1981) 'Notes on Deconstructing the 'Popular',' in Samuel,
R.,(ed.).
........... , (1983) 'Thatcherism, Racism and the Left,' interview by
Brett, J., Meanjin, Vol. 42 No. 2.
Johnson, R., (1979) 'Three Problematics: elements of a theory of working-class culture' in John Clarke et al (eds.).
Lawrence, L., (1982) 'Just Plain Common Sense: the 'roots' of racism,' in CCCS.
Milner, A., (1982) 'Review of Nellie Melba, Ginger Meggs and Friends,' Thesis II, 5/6, 311-316.
12 Aust J. Cultural Studies, 4:1 (1986
Samuel, R., (ed.) (1981) People's History and Socialist Theory, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Spearitt, P., and Walker, D., (eds.) (1979) Australian Popular Culture, Sydney: Allen and Unwin.
Thompson, E.P., (1979) The Poverty of Theory, London: Merlin Press.
Tribe, K., (1981) 'History and the Production of Memories,' Popular Television and Film, Tony Bennett et al {eds.).
New: 20 October, 2019 | Now: 6 November, 2019