The State of Cultural Theory:
A Review of Past and Present Fashions

Debra Clarke

It is always important to situate distinctive theoretical develop-

ments within the historical conditions of their emergence, yet, in order

to fully appreciate the substance of developments within cultural theory,

the task seems imperative. There are several reasons. Firstly, much of

what can now, in retrospect, be identified as distinctive modes of

cultural thought arose within and remained peculiar to a specific geogra-

phically-bound location, whether a nation or a continent -- nowhere, for

example, is there more apparent a fundamental rift between theoretical

modes than that between North America and the European nation-states.

Secondly, and paradoxically, a close inspection of the essential

propositions characteristic of each reveals some profound parallels,

despite the diversity of their material origins. The points of

interpenetration between and among new and old schools of cultural thought

are sometimes considerable, and the analysis of relations between schools



can often tell more about the way culture has been 'thought' than the

analysis of any single case. Thirdly, cultural theorizing is at the

present moment so confused and unstable that any discussion of its material

development can only aid understanding. The present discussion works

towards that end.

One of the more visible cases of cross-fertilization between modes

is the relation between the Frankfurt theorists and U.S. currents of the

war and post-war periods. While the Frankfurt theorists summoned a

considerable authority in their own right (and, importantly, in their own

place and time) , their work also later shaped nascent American modes of

thought about culture: indirectly, through the export of whole propositions

and cultural conceptions; and directly, through the exile of individual

Frankfurt theorists to the United States. Their importance for the sub-

sequent development of theoretical traditions in their adopted homeland,

especially for the development of mass society theory, should not be

underrated. The seeming novelty of McLuhanism in the 1960s supplied one

of the few contrasts to the otherwise unilinear development of cultural

theory in North America throughout the post-war era.

These developments will be outlined first, while later discussion

will look to the very different course traversed by European theorists,

especially those in Britain, a major site of the current theoretical

struggles. It is here that more contemporary attempts to theorize culture

have been vigorously pursued. A major concern will be to trace the

origin and development of the new 'cultural studies', most closely

associated with the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the

University of Birmingham. Lastly, and relatedly, there will be a brief

attempt to isolate some sources of the current divisions within "M.irxist

cultural theory" and to assess, in light of these divisions, the

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possibilities for a truly materialist analysis of culture.

Space limitations demand that a good deal be assumed, and that

important facets of the literature be excluded. It will not, for

example, be possible to outline with rigorous detail the major precepts

that delineate each perspective. Instead, our prime purpose is to

demonstrate the operation and recurrence of several overriding weak-

nesses threaded through all of these attempts at theorization; among

them, the absence of a well-integrated model of stratification or class

conflict. It will be argued that the development and articulation of

the assorted theoretical modes was in every case heavily conditioned by

(1) the historical circumstances of the assorted cultural theorists,

which in turn shaped (2) the means in which 'culture' was conceptualized:

aesthetically, anthropologically, or as something more broadiy social.

Much of this is revealed through the treatment (or 'non-treatment', which

is more often the case) of class conflict or even simply some notion of

'social' conflict devoid of class connotations. The failure to incorporate

stratification models into their theories about culture led there various

theorists to start with either a non-stratified or crudely stratified

notion of the way that societies are organized, and hence left then ill-

equipped to account for the place of culture therein.

The Radical Pessimism of the Frankfurt Theorists

Established in 1923 as a (somewhat unique) centre for Marxist

studies, the Institute for Social Research at Frankfurt was concerned

throughout the twenties with the problems of labour and the labour

movement, and combined solid empirical work with serious theoretical

analysis. Anderson (1976: 32) claims that the Institute occupied a

pivotal point of juncture between "Western" and "Eastern" Marxist

currents during the twenties, and thus its trajectory was crucial to

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the progression of Marxist theory in intcr-war Europe. The year 1950,

however, threw doubt on its role when llorkheimer assumed control of the

Institute (following Grunberg's retirement), at the same time that

Lukacs was exiled to Austria and Gramsci was censored, in the interests

of his personal safety, even while in prison. Horkheimcr was a

philosopher whereas his predecessor was a historian. At the outset he

established a new orientation to the Institute's work, one that meant

less concern with the science of historical materialism and a greater

concern with "social philosophy". Soon afterwards the Institute ceased

to publish the Archives for the History of Socialism and the Workers'

Movement , and in its place introduced the new Journal of Social Research .

However tamed in its outward appearances, the 1933 N'azi victory drove

most Institute members to the United States, where a new Institute was

constituted at Columbia University a year later. Here it was transferred

"into a political environment devoid of a mass working class movement even

formally committed to socialism, or of any substantial Marxist tradition"

(Anderson, 1976: 33).

By the time of its return to Frankfurt in 1949-50, the Institute's

period in the States, and the conditions of that period, had already

circumscribed the character of the work. Most of the formative work on

aesthetic theory, however, was elaborated and shaped during the pre- and

post -exile moments of the thirties, a time of titanic class struggles

in Austria, France, and Germany. It was in the turbulent climate of

this period that the Frankfurt theorists concluded that Marx's projection

of capitalist development could no longer be sustained: massive state

intervention in the market, the reification of the place of technology

and science within the mode of production, and the growth of a consunp-

tionist working class rendered, in their view, the classic Marxist idea

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of class struggle obsolete (see Swingewood, 1977: 10-18). Therborn

argues that the impact of their experiences with Fascism was so great

that it'was reified in their subsequent critique of American society,

preventing them from making a scientific analysis of American monopoly

capitalism, or developing a revolutionary practice' (1970: 69).

What is most problematic about the Frankfurt defeatism is that it

survived long enough to colour a good deal of later theoretical work

(their own and that of others) . A theory of mass society or mass culture

was worked out well before their exile to the United States, where it was

transferred wholesale to the somewhat different social circumstances of

a North American case. The historical sepcifics of 1930s Germany were

generalized to explain the underdevelopment of working class revolutionary

potential throughout the Western capitalist world, and it would not be

much of a stretch to argue that their historical fatalism, born out of

a complex and highly particularized historical moment, grew to underline

and characterize both orthodox and unorthodox Marxist analyses of culture.

The original impetus to the construction of mass society propositions,

complete with visions of "masses duped into false beliefs and bourgeois

values", re-appears in later theories of "late capitalism" where, in the

work of too many contemporary Marxists, the very use of the phrases

"implies that the historically necessary collapse of capitalism has been

averted by the conscious ideological and cultural manipulation of the

bourgeoisie over the proletariat" (Swingewood, 1977: x)

.

While it is scarcely a widely held position, Swingewood argues

that the development of the capitalist mode of production has served

to augment, and not destroy, civil society. Its development has led

to a highly complexified socia} structure where the key institutions of

trade unions, political parties, professional associations, and

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communications apparatuses arc not dominated by a massive and omnipotent

state. On the contrary, these institutions exercise a tremendous and

unprecedented MEDIATING INFLUENCE that has only now become fully realized

in social practice. The emergence of a new and strengthened network of

social relations (wherein, for example, working class organizations come

to the fore) means that "a far more delicate balance of forces is now

capitalism's most characteristic feature" (1977: ix-x) . Those contemporary

Marxists who suffer the hangover of Frankfurt-style defeatism operate with

a monolithic concept of social structure that cuts short the dialectical

movement: as Swingewood expresses it, "of course the modern state grows

in size and complexity, but as capitalism strengthens the sphere of direct

domination so it necessarily creates the basis of a powerful civil

society" (1977: x)

.

Although Swingewood never identifies his alignment explicitly, this

is a more properly Gramscian position. To briefly illustrate the kinship

with Gramsci, we can simply cite a statement from a 1917 Av.int i ! article,

titled, significantly enough, "Towards a Cultural Association":

At a certain moment in its development and its history, the
proletariat becomes aware that the complexity of its life
lacks a necessary organization. Thus, it creates one for
its own ends, with its strength, and with its good will ...
this need will also come into being and be felt in other
parts of Italy (other than Turin, where institutions like
the Co-operative Alliance were already strong). And the
proletariat movement will thereby grow in compactness and
victorious energy (Gramsci, 1975: 97).

At the very least, then, there is a need to re -introduce a dynamic into

theories about culture. Tlainly, there is a good deal more to the

process than some simple one-way (and therefore inevitable) domination

from above; yet this one-sided and 'one-dimensional' account underlies

and pervades the works of both the Frankfurt theorists (notably Adorno

and Marcusc) and later U.S. mass society theorists.

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Swingewood's argument also suggests that at the root of Frankfurt

and mass society conceptions lies the equally fundamental problem of

agency (and with it, the problem of determination). The radical pessimism

of the Frankfurt theorists amounted to historicism, and traced to their

own 'crisis of confidence' in the recalcitrant capacities of the working

class. The problem of mediation was, at this early stage, resolved

through elimination; the supposed "mass society" contained no mediatory

or oppositional institutions, LET ALONE working class institutions and

organizations. Once mediation is tossed out, notions of agency quickly

follow; the working class was deemed somehow inherently unable to counter-

vail the overpowering reifications brought about with the Fascist regime.

Faced with a world that appeared beyond human control, a concept of human

agency became difficult to digest, and hence the Frankfurt theorists

preferred to regard workers (or rather, masses) as resigned and passive,

fully prey to powerful, emergent political movements like Nazism (see

Swingewood, 1977: 11-12).

The 'crisis of confidence' in working class potential and in the

mediating possibilities of particular institutions is evident in the work

of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse , and numerous others writing at much later

points (see, for example, Sallach, 1974). The notion of a weak civil

society is re-affirmed in Mills' influential work, The Power Elite ,

published in 1956. One might usefully ask how it is that Gramsci managed

to surpass the problem in his theorizations about culture and working

class potential. Is it possible to introduce a concept of agency without

instantly inviting charges of voluntarism (to which Gramsci is always

subject)? The Frankfurt kind of radical pessimism does not enter his

thought, although Gramsci pondered the same problems while subject to

similar historical conditions. Yet for Adorno, Horkheimer, and the others,

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history was everything. During the thirties, these thinkers bore witness

to the rapid rise of fascism and the complete collapse of European socia-

lism; it seemed that the forces of total reaction had seized the working

class and that neither liberal democracy nor the labour movement could

withstand the pressures or respond with sufficient strength. Many years

later, Horkheimer disclosed the reasoning behind their original

affiliation with Marxist thought:

Already near the end of the twenties, certainly by the
beginning of the thirties, we were convinced of the
probability of a National Socialist victory, as well as
of the fact that it could be met only through revolutionary
actions. That it needed a world war we did not yet envisage
at that time. We thought of an uprising in our own country
and because of that, Marxism won its decisive meaning for
our thought (foreword to Jay, 1973).

*

Whatever 'decisive meaning' Marxism might have had at that early

stage was soon extinguished when it became apparent that the collapse

of liberal democracy would come about "not in the way Marx had predicted

but rather from the combined forces of totalitarian politics (fascism)

and totalitarian economics (the growth of giant monopolies and cartels

and the fusion of banking and industrial capital)" (Swingewood, 1077:

13). This made possible their desertion of orthodox Marxist principles

of determination and led ultimately to a more or less complete loss of

commitment to a Marxist account of capitalist development. There are

parallels here with the theoretical results of similar disenchantments

among British Marxists of the 60s and 70s, and these will be discussed

later. At this point it should simply be stressed that the absence of

a spontaneous uprising, originating within the German people, led

Horkheimer and the others to dismiss the working class entirely as a

potentially revolutionary force -- not just the German working class,

but the working class-in-general, and this in turn enabled them to

easily transfer their conclusions to the American case, where the U.S.

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'culture industry' (a concept preferred to 'mass culture') could be

equated in its consequences with the German fascist state.

Within this account lies a crucial difference between their

conclusions and those of Gramsci. Whereas the Frankfurt theorists

developed their notions about cultural potentials and about the future

of capitalism itself on the basis of the historical specifics of their

own time and place, Gramsci took as his task the development of a whole

theory of revolution and of the state THROUGH his analysis of 'what went

wrong 1 in 1930s Italy. This was the raw material of his analysis of

'late capitalism' and of the state, and on this basis Gramsci attempted

to specify the appropriate meterial-cultural conditions under which

revolution might be possible and to formulate revolutionary strategies.

The difference in theoretical outcomes also points to Gramsci's position

as simultaneously Marxist theorist and key political actor of his period

-- not true of the Frankfurt theorists, who chose to abandon the political

struggles of their homeland and to make sense of these struggles only once

safely in exile.

Apart from the kind of elitism contained in their dismissal of the

working class, there is, in the work of Adorno and Horkheimer particularly,

a familiar elitist conception of culture, though in a somewhat disguised

form, where 'high' culture is the means to transform social order through

the spread of a critical consciousness. 'Critical' is used in a sense

that echoes the appeals of Matthew Arnold (see later discussion). Although

the charge is always easy to level, there is also an idealism at work in

their underlying theory (or 'non-theory') of social change, one that is

later wholly adopted by mass society theorists in the United States. It

is most apparent in their later analyses of 'modern* (i.e. U.S.) totalita-

rianism, where mass culture itself is seen to be the major dctcrmin.ir.t

.

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On the one hand, it is possible to draw at least a tentative

epistemological parallel between the early Frankfurt work (i.e. pre-1940)

and so-called 'immanent structural analysis' (see Slater's argument, 1974).

One of the Institute's official histories explained that "we interpret art

as a kind of code language for processes taking place within society,

which must be deciphered by means of critical analysis" (cited in Jay,

1973: 177). On the other hand, Jay suggests (1973: 178) that their

sociology of art refused to reduce cultural phenomena to ideological

reflexes of class interests. It is more certain that Adorno, at least,

refused to engage in a class analysis of culture; instead, he argued

that "the task of criticism must be not so much to search for the

particular interest-groups to which cultural phenomena are to be

assigned, but rather to decipher the general social tendencies which

are expressed in these phenomena and through which the most powerful

interests realize themselves" (1967: 30). It seems that Adorno and

the others (perhaps including Benjamin) were unable to glean anything

more than a crude rudiment of cultural theory out of orthodox Marxism,

which, in their view, reduced all culture to 'a bourgeois swindle'

and all art to false consciousness or ideology. Exasperated by a

vain serach for a theory of substance in Marx, the Frankfurt theorists

substituted their own "dialectical or immanent critique of art" which

"takes seriously the principle that it is not ideology in itself which

is untrue but rather its pretension to correspond to reality" (Adorno,

1967: 32). Disastrously, it effectively turned Marx and Marxism upside

down, and became inductively non -dialectical . One example of the

attempt at a 'dialectical anti-reductionism' lies in Adorno's treatment

of one major Marxist category, commodity fetishism. On this point

(among others) Adorno disagreed with Benjamin, to whom he wrote on

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2 August 1935 that "the fetish character of commodities is not a fact of

consciousness, but dialectic in the eminent sense that it PRODUCTS

consciousness" (cited in Jay, 1973: 181; emphasis added).

More evidence of the Frankfurt antagonism to Marxist orthodoxy can

be found in their relations with Benjamin, and particularly in their

distrust of his relationship with Brecht. Brecht was admired by the

Institute members for his literary and theatrical accomplishments and

simultaneously despised for his 'crude materialism 1 . There are

important ways in which Benjamin's work distinguishes itself from the

work of Adorno, Horkheimer, and notably Lowenthal, and significantly

enough, Benjamin's biography and his pre-war experiences set him conside-

rably apart from the others. Throughout the thirties, for example, he

continually resisted the pleas of other Institute members to join them

in New York, arguing, as late as 1938, that 'there are still positions

in Europe to defend' (cited in Jay, 1973: 197). Benjairin never did rake

it to the United States, and ultimately committed a tragically needless

suicide when denied passage across the Franco-Spain border durinr a final,

resigned effort to flee Europe in 1940 (see Jay, 1973: 197-198). The

Institute had not been "entirely enthusiastic about the brand of Varxism

Benjamin adopted in the mid-twenties" (Jay, 1973: 201). Unlike the others

,

Benjamin first encountered historical materialism immediately following

the first war and, unlike the others, was active in the pre-WWII Zionist

movement, president for a time of the Berlin Free Student Association,

and frequent contributor to the journal of Gustav Wynckcn's Youth

Movement, Per Anfang (Jay, 1973: 159).

In addition to the Institute's discorfort with his acceptance of

Brecht's 'crude materialism', Adorno and others were disturbed Th;it

Benjamin seemed to share Brecht's optimism about the revolutionary

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potential of popular art and technological innovation. On the other hand,

Brecht's attitude towards the Institute was not altogether supportive; he

regarded them all as 'Tui-intellcctuals' who prostituted themselves for

American foundation support (Jay, 1973: 201-202). There is also considerable

evidence to suggest that Benjamin's essays (including the seminal piece,

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction") were often

considered 'too radical for their taste' and substantially censored prior

to their publication in the Zeitschrift (Jay, 1973: 206).

Benjamin, therefore, and his 'radical optimism' should be set apart

from the general work of the Institute pior to 1940 and from what is now

referred to as 'the Frankfurt school', since he alone reserved hope for

the progressive nature of politicized, collectivized art that accompanied

the (mass) mechanical reproduction of artistic and other cultural

commodities. The contrast between Benjamin and Adorno is outlined by

Benjamin himself in a letter to the latter: "In my work I sought to

articulate the positive moments as clearly as you brought the negative

to the fore. I consequently see a strength of your work where a

weakness of mine lay" (cited in Jay, 1973: 211). His death in 1940

marked the end of any optimistic, revolutionary, or dialectical thrust

in Frankfurt cultural theory, and the Institute's subsequent work on

mass culture in the 1940s pursued and became limited to static, non-

dialectical, empirical studies of, for example, newspaper content.

Now fully settled in America, Institute members proceeded to weld

themselves more tightly into this mold by eradicating agency once and

for all and by arguing that culture was now completely divorced from

material production and life. Horkheimer, for example, sowed the

seeds for American mass society theory when he suggested, in a 1942

letter to Lowenthal, that reception and absorption had fused into the

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same moment, wiping out very definitively notions of subjectivity,

voluntarism, or agency:

You lay too much stress on activity vs. passivity, sphere

of production vs. sphere of consumption. You say that the

life of the reader is scheduled and governed by what he

gets, not by what he does. The truth is, however, that

doing and getting (have) become identical in this society

(cited in Jay, 1973: 213).

And it was Marcuse who argued in 1937 that "the segregation of cultural

life from its material base serves to reconcile man to the inequalities

implicit in the latter" (Jay, 1973: 215). Not only was any notion of

agency discarded, but so also was any concept of mediation and therefore

resistance. In light of these developments, the historical and intel-

lectual background to Marcuse's One-Dimensional Man of 1964 scarcely

needs to be sketched. In so many ways, it marked the crescendo of all

previous Frankfurt work, complete with all of its endemic theoretical

faults.

Radical Pessimism and Conservative Optimism: the U.S.

Jay suggests that it was the Institute's critique of mass culture

and its related analysis of the American authoritarian potential that most

strongly influenced the texture of American intellectual life (1P"3: 217);

firstly, because a good portion of the work was available in English,

and secondly, because it coincided with a growing distrust of mass culture

on the part of indigenous American intellectuals. Prior to World War II,

sociologists like Robert Park and his student Herbert Blumer had conducted

relatively isolated and somewhat more optimistic studies of 'mass society'.

The mid-forties, however, witnessed a new and renewed interest in the area,

and it quickly became fashionable inside and outside the academy. Riesman

(The Lonely Crowd) and others popularized the fashion, and the work of

the Institute added substance and momentum to the attack (see Jay, 1973:

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217).

Swingewood argues, in response to all theories that first posit a

'mass' of undifferentiated non-persons, that 'consumer capitalism, rather

than creating a vast, homogeneous and culturally brutalized mass, generates

different levels of taste, different audiences and consumers. Culture

is stratified, its consumption differentiated' (1977: 20). Yet so over-

powering has been the impact of 'mass' theories on all areas of empirical

and other work on culture and communication that only recently has it been

possible to re-introduce, or perhaps posit for the first time, the notion

of a stratified audience (see, for example, the work of Morley, 1975 anJ

1980). Moreover, 'culture' itself was reified through the progressive,

or rather regressive, articulation of mass society theories. '.Vhere, for

example, is there any careful, thoroughgoing discussion of what culture

really means or any critical re-thinking of the traditional definitions?

Furthermore, and this is a condemnatory feature of both the mass society

and 'culture industry' arguments, the concept of culture 'is severed

from production in all but a general and superficial sense; culture is

thus transformed into an independent, autonomous realm of human activity

(or lack of activity) explicable in terms of its own norms and concepts'

(Swingewood, 1977: 25). Finally, and perhaps most importantly, there is

nothing INTRINSICALLY unifying about culture, just as there is nothing

intrinsically functional about cultural or ideological state apparatuses;

it seems at least as likely that culture can be a divisive force. Indeed,

if culture is 'a whole way of life', then there is clearly no such thing

as a singular, all-embracing 'culture of capitalism'. There are many

cultures, and many cultural forms, some of which are appropriated by

class-bound groups and some of which are not -- however, in the lonj-

run , one's 'whole way of life' is, necessarily, heavily conditioned by

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and intimately bound up with one's place within capitalist social relations

of production ; consumption merely sumptomatizes this fundamental relation.

The theories of mass society and mass culture that came to characterize

much of cultural theorizing in the United States hark back much further

than the Frankfurt thinkers to Tonnies' Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft distinc-

tion and to the classical works of Comte, Spencer, Durkheim, and Weber on

the general theme of the effects of industrialization and urbanization.

In its contemporary formulations, the new 'mass' media are linked to 'mass'

behaviour and then to a new 'mass' culture or mass society, and all this

without benefit of historical analysis. The first major problem, then,

with later and current versions of mass society theory is that the

existence of media of mass communication is first taken as given, and

not explained within an account of historical transformations within

capitalism that initiated and fostered the rapid growth of mass market

production and the mass reproduction of artistic and cultural commodities,

which in turn transformed the media into a 'necessary' and 'natural'

feature of class domination. Overwhelmingly obvious is its underlying

organic-functionalist model wherein all the pieces of the puzzle (mass

media - mass behaviour - mass culture - mass society) fit neatly into

their allotted and expected roles, a fault made possible by the ahisto-

ricism of the approach, which severely constrains a thorough de-mystifi-

cation of the media 'effect'. Among other things, the leap between

'mass media' and 'mass behaviour' is far too great, and, considering

the obsession with 'doing empirical work" on the media, it is remarkable

that few or no studies set out to establish this alleged relationship

empirically. If anything, the volumes of (largely American) empirical

studies of 'media effects' are, at best, inconclusive (see Klapper, I960).

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A second najor problem concerns the absence of a model of

stratification, a silence characteristic of all the approaches discussed

here and not unique to U.S. mass society theory, although more out-

standing in its case. Even writers situated on the left, like C. Wright

Mills, operated with no more than a crude concept of stratification

(i.e. one large mass and one small elite or elites), and wholeheartedly

absorbed and reiterated the reportedly frightful consequences of mass

media production. It was Mills who argued, in The Power Elite , that 'the

media, as now organized and operated, are ... a major cause of the

transformation of America into a mass society' (1956: 315). In a

thoroughly non-Marxist fashion, Mills proceeded to argue that the mass

media 'created' new forms of dependence and made 'the (classless) masses'

newly vulnerable to greater control UNDER power-wielding elites. Miliband

reproduced a similar argument some time later in The State in Capitalist

Society (1969) and again in Marxism and Politics (1977). The dependence

of the individual is intensified by a lack of reciprocal, obligatory moral

attachments to others, spurred on by rapid industrial expansion and the

existence of disparate value systems, which in turn forced the individual

to rely more on extraneous media of communication than on primary group or

interpersonal relations in developing a world-view. The centralized

authority of mass communication systems thus came to take precedence over

micro-social forces in defining the social world for the individual. At

a larger scale, the movement towards mass society creates the requisite

conditions for totalitarianism by increasing the isolation of the individual

by instilling a singular and all-pervasive ideology in the interests of

the dominant elite(s), and by monopolizing media channels and thereby

eliminating all contending ideological options (see Clarke, 1978).

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The contribution of the Frankfurt theorists to the development of

this powerful argument comes through in two senses. Firstly, it is

evident in the concentration on the individual and the psychosocial,

which points to the relation between the aesthetic studies of the

Frankfurt theorists and their investigations of American authoritarianism

conductrd in the forties, where the relation between culture and politics

was thought to be best understood in psychosocial terras. Mass society

theorists, however, took up only the psychosocial and dropped any connec-

tion between culture and politics, as well as any hint that culture was

or could be politicized. Secondly, their influence can be seen in the

denial of any remaining mediating forces that might have survived the

rubble of mass society's rise to prominence.

A third major problem with mass society or mass culture theories

is the moralism that underlies the arguments. On the left, Mills and

Marcuse bemoaned the one-directional and one-din.ensional flow of infor-

mation and appealed to social democracy, defining inequality of access

to the means of communication as the central problematic, since it

obstructs the free flow of ideas and violates libertarian notions about

press freedom: ideas flow freely from the elite(s) to the masses and

not vice versa, and therefore are not representative of the general

population. Accordingly, there is a need to 'democratize' the communica-

tion process such that libertarian ideals can be realized in practice.

The assumptive principles of their position were thus libertarian, while

their proposals were reformist. At the politico-ideological centre,

Wirth (1948), Warner (1962), and others modified the essence of mass

society theory in a more positive or optimistic light. The development

of mass communications and the unproblcmatically concomitant emergence

of 'mass society' were welcomed and thought to be required integrative

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forces, vital to social cohesion. Along with the development of mass

communications came a newly democratized culture that permitted the

greater participation of subordinate social groups in the 'common life'

of society. Equality of access to the means of communication was simply

assumed. On the right, Blumer (1951), Van Den Haag (1957), Howe (1957),

and others decried the emergence of mass society and its cultural

vulgarities. Their works were tainted with a romantic, nostalgic yen

for 'tranditional values', a sense of 'community spirit', and a return

to the stability of the extended family (see Clarke, 1978). McQuail

(1969: 35) notes some of the consequences of the latter version:

... the sociology of mass communications has not prospered
under the shadow of mass society theory. Not only have
inappropriate questions been fostered and alternative ones
discouraged, but the very weight of intellectual and
ideological force behind these theories has discouraged
competitors, and forced opponents to appear in the light
of apologists for an existing social order, for capitalism
and commercial exploitation, for ugliness and incipient
totalitarianism.

The parallels with English 'cultural criticism' are apparent here

and will become more apparent through the course of later discussion.

In the United States, it meant that much of the evidence for a new 'mass

society' was based on the mass production of media commodities, notably

radio, televesion, and film, which in turn fed the distinctively

American brand of 'media sociology'. To understand how this particular

specialized discipline took shape historically, we need to consider how

the rise of a new 'mass culture' came to be ascribed. It was first

necessary to ignore the historical prerequisites for the emergence of

a 'popular' culture, and the economic changes that contributed to the

growth of the middle class and the spread of literacy, each of which

in turn presaged the creation of a truly 'mass' audience (see also

Bigsby, 1976). Audience size was assumed to be the contingent, and,

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just as the popular literature of the 19th century presupposed a

literate public, so the media of the 20th seemed to require for their

viability (and profitability) the capacity to satisfy the desires of a

large and seemingly homogeneous audience. The new media of 'mass'

communication became coterminous with 'mass' or popular culture.

It is easy to see how this superficial account led, in the

'sociology of mass communications', to a narrowed concentration en

audience studies and content analyses, to 'uses and gratifications'

4
research and 'effects' studies, many of which took their direction troir.

Lasswell's famous dictum: 'Who says what, in which channel, to whon,

with what effects?'. Otto Larsen complained in 1964 that this research

"tended to viev persons as 'targets' of communications impact rather

than as part of a total communication process" (1964: 368 569). Most

of the work fitted well within the tradition of post-war U.S. empiricism.

By their very nature, therefore, these studies necessarily contributed

little to a worthwhile or meaningful understanding of communication ,

and even less to the understanding of culture.

Canada, Innis, and McLuhan

Innis' early analyses of the staples industries led, in his later

years, to a special interest in the historical development of communi-

cations, and to the production of two major works, Empire and Ccr-.i.-'.icatior.s

(1950) and The Bias of Communication (1951). While his commitment to

'technological determinism 1 is still arguable, it is plain in his hork

on the communications industries that the developing complexities of

communications technology were seen as central to understanding

communications and to technological innovations in non-media industries.

The predominance of the new 'mass' means of communication over 'pre-rrinting'

125



media (e.g. clay, papyrus, parchment) 3nd the decline of the oral

tradition were both important elements in shaping potentially emergent

forms of social organization. In other words, the types of media

dominant ly featured in a society, once wholly developed, could be

expected to determine the type and quality of human associations

characteristic of a period.

Innis also argued that any given medium of communication is biased

in terms of either time or space, and tends to 'bias' social organization

by encouraging the emergence of particular types of institutions to the

exclusion of others, and by imposing on these institutions a particular

form of organization. 'Space-biased' media, for example, are, according

to Innis, causal in the growth of the state, the military, and decentra-

lized and expansionist institutions, whereas 'time-biased' media facilitate

the growth of religion, of hierarchical forms of organization, and of

contractionist institutions. Thus for Innis, it is the nature of the

medium of communication (oral versus written, time-biased versus space-

biased) that determines the nature of social organization; a unique yet

unverifiable premise that runs contrary to the bulk of sociological

knowledge regarding the growth of particular forms of social organization.

Moreover, it would be difficult to make the claim that the argur.ent amounts

to a distinctive moment in the development of cultural theory per se .

since Innis' concerns were largely limited to the development of a

macro-theory of the general historical implications of 'landmark' innova-

tions in communications technology.

Following very closely in Innis' footsteps (if not treading

directly on his toes) , Mcl.uhan also stressed the nature of the mcdiuf

as opposed to its content or the organization of production, and like



Innis, placed considerable emphasis on technological developments in the

communication industries. However, in McLuhan's case, the effects of

the medium were directly related to sensory organization, perception, and

thought, rather than to social organization and culture. It seems point-

less to fully elaborate McLuhan's notions in the context of this discussion.

The utility of his formulations is limited for the same reasons that those

of Innis contribute little to the formation of a worthwhile theory of

culture. Furthermore, McLuhan's position is not at all internally-

consistent and has fluctuated considerably with time; more recently,

his musings have included a fear of the forthcoming 'homogenization' of

8
the masses, which smacks of mass society theory and contradicts, in

some very essential ways, his earlier arguments.

U.K. Developments : the Foundations of 'Cultural Studies'

A very different sequence of developments characterizes the field

of cultural theory in European, especially British, social thought. The

differences are exemplified in the work of the Birmingham Centre for

Contemporary Cultural Studies, work that will be referred to here as the

9
'cultural studies' approach. Since, in large measure, the material

represents both a culmination and a configuration of all past' theoretical

legacies, it will be useful to outline the traditions out of which cul-

tural studies emerged, and the succession of later 'influences' that

penetrated their work, none of which (and this should be borne in mind)

qualify as rigorously Marxist approaches. At least five identifiable

'bodies of influence' account for the direction of the work: (1) the

early English 'culture critics' (e.g. Arnold and Leavis) ; (2) Hoggart,

Williams, and works of the 1950s; (3) at around the same time, another

crucial initiative in the formation of cultural studies, Thompson's

12S



The Making of the English Working Class , and the significance of cultural

histories; (4) the later impact of the work of three neo-Marxist theorists

(Althusser, Gramsci , and Poulantzas) ; and (5) structuralism and semiotics.

The latter struck the Centre in two successive waves: the first drew

largely from the work of Levi-Strauss and Barthes , and the second, more

currently fashionable, takes its cues from Lacan, Kristeva, Derrida, and

others in France (now dubbed the 'post-structuralists'). The early

influences of the English 'culture critics' (Arnold, Leavis, Hoggart

and Williams) will be briefly traced, prior to a discussion of the

development of the Birmingham Centre work itself.

fi) Arnold, Leavis, and the 'culture critics'

First, we need to look back a considerable historical distance to

the origins of debate about popular culture (see Burke, 1978, for a

richly detailed analysis of the 'discovery' of popular culture in early

capitalist Europe). Debates about popular culture, and notions abcut

what it is, trace to early responses to the commercialization of culture

in the first phase of European capitalism. The debate gathered r.orentum

during the 19th century, and was spearheaded by literary critics and 'men

of letters'. One of the most influential of the 19th century sources was

Matthew Arnold's Culture and Anarchy , originally published in 1869.

Significantly, Arnold emerged out of a tradition of literary criticism,

was a poet and literary critic, held posts at Oxford, and so forth. Much

of Arnold's now classic formulations about culture grew out of his own

disenchantment with the increasingly apparent implications of "the new

industrial order', circa 1850. "I see", he wrote in 1848, "a wave of

more than American vulgarity, moral, intellectual, and social, preparing

to break over us ..." (cited in Arnold, 1938). Arnold's calls for the

126



establishment of formalized education under the wing of the state were

intended to sophisticate the uncivilized masses made newly vulnerable

to cultural deterioration, and parallel those of Egerton Ryerson in Canada.

Culture, and especially the indoctrination of the new industrial working

class into bourgeois culture, was to Arnold the means to secure order, to

inject self-discipline, and, in his words, "to do away with classes (read

'class-based cultures')" (1938: 70). Culture was to occupy the new

leisure time afforded to the working class through the arrival of indus-

trialization and the mechanization of factory production. The state was

to be cast in the role of cultural guardian, and, not unrelatedly,

guardian of the new social order:

We have not the notion, so familiar on the Continent
and to antiquity, of THE STATE - the nation in its
collective and corporate character, entrusted with
stringent powers for the general advantage, and
controlling individual wills in the name of an
interest wider than that of individuals (1938: 75;
original emphasis).

Sometime later, once the full sway of industrialization was solidly

in place, and it became clear that Arnold's proposals for the administra-

tion of culture (and hence the containment of class conflict) through the

state were insufficient, literary critics like T.S. Eliot and.F.R. Leavis

-reflected on the cultural changes that had accompanied industrialization

and were highly critical of both, more loudly of the former. Their work

features the same nostalgic longings for a pre-industrial , non-capitalist

society that preoccupied Howe and other American critics in the 1950s;

in both cases, these sentiments provided the (weak) basis for a critique

of industrial capitalism. The English critics held little stock in the

capacity of the bourgeoisie to overcome the "pallid, mechanical, life-

denying civilization" that seemed part of the industrialization package

(see Swingewood, 1977: 2-10).

127



Eliot's Notes Towards a Definition of Culture (1962) is exemplary.

Here Eliot espoused the view that since culture is inevitably stratified,

it ought to be stratified according to "a continuous gradation of cultural

levels" (1962: passim). The concept of culture was organic, i.e. the

culture of every individual flows from his/her membership of specific

groups and classes, which in turn depend for their culture on the whole

social order; culture is, therefore, a way of life and all societies

witness some form of common culture. Each national culture contains a

variety of local cultures which therefore ensure unity and diversity

within the whole. Nevertheless, working class institutions and ideals,

above all socialist ideals, must be assimilated by the dominant culture.

This Eliot made very clear.

Leavis, in Mass Civilization and Minority Culture , written in 1930,

accepted that "culture was at a crisis" and blamed mechanization for

destroying a genuine "common culture" with widely shared moral assumptions.

Like Eliot, Leavis stressed the importance of tradition in the life of a

culture and its basis in the "organic community". He rued the demise of

some pre-industrial , conflict-free period, the "Old England" where work

was meaningful and workers "could, without a sense of oppression, bear

with long hours and low pay" (1930: 3-5); see also Leavis and Thompson,

1942: 68-91). In light of Leavis' concern with folk culture, with a

common culture that includes the everyday experience of common peorlc

within a morally binding community, it is possible to see his legacy to

the later concerns of cultural studies. It is also possible to see the

theoretical links between Leavis' 'critique of capitalism' and the post-

war American 'critique of mass society'.

Williams argues, however, that Leavis' concern with folk culture

idealizes feudal, not modern, social relations and attempts to "attach

humane feelings to pre-capitalist culture, whereas the historical reality

128



was of a hard and brutal world dominated by illiteracy, superstition,

servility, squalor, and poverty" (1975: 48-51; see also Bigsby, 1976:

16). Williams' own critique of mass society theory and other bourgeois

sociologies is most recently set forth in Marxism and Literature (1977),

where he argues that the bourgeois concept of 'mass communications' and

the related radical concept of 'mass manipulation' both need to be

re-worked, if not completely replaced with terms that more cogently

specify the movement of hegemony. It is suggested that the concept of

the 'mass' has served to merely replace and neutralize the specificity

of class structures, while the preoccupation with 'manipulation' has

stifled any understanding of the phases of social consciousness that

"correspond to real social situations and relations" (1977: 136-137).

Attention now turns briefly to the earlier work of Williams himself

and to one other equally important figure in the formation of the new

cultural studies: Richard Hoggart.

(ii) Hoggart, Williams, and the 1950s

The importance of the literary criticism tradition carries through

to the work of Hoggart, which continued that "certain studied romanticism"

(Bigsby, 1976: 24) of the English literary approach. Hoggart. replaced

the conservative nostalgia of Arnold and his descendants with a liberal

nostalgia; although, like Leavis, Hoggart argued that a standardized mass

culture had overtaken a fractured "urban culture of the people". To

Hoggart, working class culture (and he freely made this association) is

precisely the same urban local culture of tightly knit communities, where

myth, ritual, superstition, fatalism, and short-term hedonism occupy

positions of centrality in everyday life. Hoggart' s approach to culture

is highly selective, impressionistic, and divorces the working class from

its position within the division of labour and its place in production

129



relations. We might also note the absence of any discussion about the

role of ideology in the configuration of popular consciousness. The

concept of culture is static and passive, and denies culture its active,

historical character. Culture is reduced to a series or list of

adaptive mechanisms adopted by the working class to ward off the aliena-

tion of urban capitalist life. Moreover, the analysis in The Uses of

Literacy (1957) deals strictly with superficial aspects of working class

existence and is heavily imbued with Hoggart's own romantic reminiscences

of his working class youth.

Unlike Hoggart , Raymond Williams (the early Culture and Society

Williams) offers a more radical approach, yet he still follows Leavis

and Eliot and defines culture as an organic, co-operative, and collabora-

tive activity. To Williams, "culture is ordinary" and working class

culture is "a basic collective idea, and the institutions, manners, habits

of thought and intentions which proceed from this" (1958: 313-314). Like

Leavis, this early Williams argues explicitly against Marxist interpre-

tations when he suggests that working class institutions contribute to

social growth through their contributions to the development of a cor.-.on

culture. Needless to say, this proposition eliminates all contradiction

and conflict, and divests culture of any role in class domination.

There is no theorization about cultures in conflict with each other,

only "a destructured and static model (where) culture is defined in

terms of meanings" (Swingewood, 1977: 43). Furthermore, culture

obviously cannot be reduced to (or summed up in) a directory listing

of habits, customs, and rituals. If culture is to be understood as a

way of life, then it must indeed be understood, in Williams* widely-

subscribed phrase, as a WHOLE way of life, and not merely a way of

"coping with capitalism".

130



Above all, culture needs to be understood inside a historical

account of class struggle and explained vis-a-vis class interests,

through the historical development of classes and class fractions. Some

evidence that Williams has now come to recognize this inadequacy appears

in Marxism and Literature where he attempts to sketch out the direction

of his comparatively recent "embrace" of Marxism for a "Marxist cultural

sociology" that would be "recognizable, in its simplest outlines, in

studies of different types of institution and formation in cultural

production and distribution, and in the linking of these within whole

social material processes" (1977: 138). Nevertheless, Williams' embrace

of Marxism has yet to come full circle: a more faithfully Marxist

analysis should not feel it necessary to 'link' culture with material

processes — it should START WITH the realization that culture is,

itself, a material process.

(iii) Stuart Hall, the Birmingham Centre, and 'cultural studies
'

The importance of Hoggart and the early Williams to the work of the

Birmingham Centre cannot be underestimated. Sparks (1977), in fact, starts

with Hoggart and Williams and takes their legacy as prime to the early and

later Centre work. Cultural studies is usually associated with the work

of the Centre at Birmingham (established in 1964) , although the late 1970s

saw its influence blossom rapidly outward to what is now a whole network

of centres (within Britain and without) that follow or attempt to follow

the approach. The kind of 'cultural studies' that came to be practiced

at the Birmingham Centre was very much an outgrowth of the English

tradition of literary criticism (tellingly enough, the Centre was

orignially subsumed within the Department of English Literature at

Birmingham University) and, in many ways, it still has not managed to

get beyond the literary and the textual. Sparks even suggests that

151



"cultural studies took over the total project of Literary Criticism"

(1977: 18) with one crucial qualification; namely, the way in which the

old opposition of high and low culture was overturned and now understood.

While the early conceptualizations of culture remained largely intact,

the reverence of Arnold, Leavis, et al . for bourgeois culture was

supplanted with a new reverence for working class culture (heavily

inspired by Hoggart) that amounts to a kind of perverse elitism. Other-

wise, as Sparks observes, there is not a great deal to distinguish the

cultural conceptions of the Centre and those of (classical) English

literary criticism.

One of the decisive developments at work was a rejection of once-

dominant aesthetic definitions of culture (e.g. the 'sweetness and light'

that constituted Arnold's vision) and a movement towards anthropological

conceptions, with a new focus on the community, especially the urban

working class community, as the place where culture is practiced or 'lived'

as a relation (note the Althusserian reference) . The model represented

in Arnold and other liberal versions began with a sharp separation between

•work' and 'culture', thereby discarding determination at the outset, and

substituting the vague, empty, and non-contradictory notion of 'commodity'.

According to Sparks (1977: 18-22):

That false resolution ... was in fact taken over wholesale
by cultural studies. Within that fundamental separation the
conception of culture was once again reified to exclude any
reference to social antagonism ... the ground was well
prepared for a Marxism which systematically evaded the squalid
concerns of political parties, trade unions, and all the rest
of the baggage of Marxist orthodoxy, and which elevated
debates on culture, epistemology, etc., to the centre of
theoretical concern.

Similarly, as Sparks argues, the Centre's so-called 'encounter with

Marxism' (and this description seems appropriate) is highly problematic.

At the surface level, it is evident in the rather marked changes in the

132



nature of the work produced at the Centre throughout the late 60s and 70s

(it's possible to trace these changes through the successive issues of

the Working Papers in Cultural Studies , the Centre's journal), whereas

at a more fundamental level the transformation to a full-fledged legitimate

Marxism is still incomplete. Indeed, one might well argue that such a

total transformation can never be realized, that it was stymied at the

start by the historical and epistemological traps that the Centre inherited

from literary criticism. This is not to say that cultural studies did not

have its own very noble beginnings and intentions. Take, for exar.ple,

Hall's early statement of the Centre's objectives, part of the introduc-

tion to the first issue of the Working Papers : "it has been one aim of

the Centre to rescue the concept of "culture" itself from its reified

form" (1971: 6). Hall enlists the aid of Williams to set in motion

this "de-reification", enumerating Williams' three meanings outlined in

The Long Revolution (1965). The discussion is worth quoting at scr.c

length, since it represents one of the few clear and precise statements

of the Centre's original (and, some would argue, still current) concep-

tualization of what culture is and where it is to be found:

Culture, (Williams) suggested, can refer to 'the description

,

in lives and works, of those values which can be seen to
compose a timeless order, or to have permanent reference to
the universal human condition'; it can refer to the 'body of
intellectual and imaginative work in which, in a detailed way,
human thought and experience are variously recorded'; or it
can refer to the 'description of a particular way of life,
which expresses certain meanings and values, not only in art
and learning but also in institutions and ordinary behaviour'.
Our own approach, while drawing on all three of those
definitions, adheres most closely to the third. From this
perspective, culture is the way social life is experienced
and handled, the meanings and values which inform human action,
which are embodied in and mediate social relationships,
political life, etc. (1971: 6).

This is all well and good, as it stands. It is quite another thing, however,

to go on to argue, in the next breath, that this conceptualization "returns

133



culture to its root in the soil of specific historical and social situations

(and) restores the dimension of meaning and praxis to the sphere of human

action" (1971: 6). The meaning of culture that Hall identified and adopts

simply does not stand up to the grand claims of his next statement. There

is a logical (or illogical) leap in the argument, one that carried disas-

trous results for the way that culture came to be approached through the

Centre's subsequent work, and one that facilitated their (false) claim to

a Marxist analysis of culture.

The falsity of their claim can be at least partially understood

through a consideration of the changed (and rapidly changing) politico-

practical position of Centre members, and more generally, of the

dislocation of the intellectual through the course of the accelerated

rationalization of British higher education during the 1960s and onward.

No discussion here could do full justice to the complexities of these

development:: or their implications for the state of British Marxism.

Sparks' discussion of "the new mood of 1968" and " the creation of a

new labour aristocracy structurally dependent upon the state machine"

(19-77: 18-24), Garnham's discussion of "the intellectualist fallacy"

(1979), and Anderson's broader discussion of changes within European

Marxism during the same period (1976), should all be consulted.

Briefly, it meant, in the work of Centre members and others, a movement

towards pure theoreticism (spelled out, for example, in the pages of

the popular and extremely influential journal Screen) ; a movement that

signifies a very real obstruction to the development of a Marxist

cultural analysis (see later discussion). Sparks concludes his account

with the cleverly cryptic observation that "given this political and

intellectual impasse the popularity of Louis Althusser in British was,

one might say, overdetenmined" (1977: 22).

134



Prior to the appropriation of Althusser, however, there is a

third influence that intervenes in the early Centre work, namely Edward

Thompson's 'cultural history' of the English working class (1963). It

is particularly noticeable in their studies of "working class communities"

(see, for example, Lidia Curtis et al., 1973), and was concretized in the

formation of the "cultural history" sub-group during the mid-seventies.

This work, too, started out with worthwhile intentions. There was the

initial rejection of the abstract, ahistorical use of the word "culture"

in the singular (since, among other problems, it implied some non-existent

culture -in -general) and an attempt to give culture, or rather cultures^,

"a more concrete historical reference" (CCCS, 1976-78: 5-6). One such

project, for example, detailed the evolution of post-war youth sub-cultures

and was subsequently published in the form of Resistance Through Rituals

(Hall and Jefferson, 1976). Curiously, though, the work reads more like

the approacn of Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class

(1963), where 'culture* (not 'cultures') is subjected to historical

investigation, and where culture was viewed rather idealistically and

class itself was said to happen "when some men, as a result of common

experiences, feel and articulate the identity of their interests" (see

the important preface, 1963: 9; emphasis added).

While it is rightful to recognize that "a historical perspective

lends a necessary specificity to the study of cultures" (CCCS, 1976-78:

6), it is not enough to therefore pose "questions of cultural power and

hegemony, of domination and subordination through the exercise of

cultural power, and the transmission of cultural skills and competence"

(CCCS, 1976-78: 6-7). There is far more to the potency of bourgeois

hegemony than simply things cultural, which points to their basic

misappropriation of Gramsci's writings (highlighted in their discussion

135



of the Prison Notebooks : see Hall, Lumley, fi McLennan, 1977). This type

of approach to the study of cither culture or cultures necessarily elevates

the object of analysis to the level of concerns about ideology and cons-

ciousness, and severs these concerns from things economic and broadly

political; it consequently poses a serious contradiction between intent

and result in the work of the Centre. One can look more recently, for

example, to Richard Johnson's comparative study of the traditions

represented by the works of Thompson and Althusser, where Johnson admits

that "Thompson's sole and explicit criterion for the existence of class

concerns forms of consciousness and collective action or organization:

in the Making class is seen as a wholly political and cultural category"

(1979: 65) and yet he still goes on, in conclusion, to "insist on the need

to retain culture ideology as a couplet, where culture is understood as a

ground or RESULT OF THE WORK OF IDEOLOGIES" (1979: 75; emphasis added).

While it is perhaps unfair to rob this conclusion of its context in the

text of the article, it is nevertheless lucidly illustrative of what

remains a fundamentally non-materialist conceptualization of culture in

the work of the Birmingham Centre.

A fourth and later influence in the development of cultural studies

marks a strong attraction to work carried out in France and elsewhere on

the continent. Of the three neo-Marxist thinkers (Althusser, Cramsci,

and Poulantzas) whose work touched off and accented the Centre's concern

about ideology theories (see, for example, Working Papers in Cultural

Studies 10, 1977 and the more widely distributed version, On Ideology ,

1978), Althusser's work, especially the "Ideology and Ideological State

12
Apparatuses" or 'ISAs essay', occupied the most central place.

Importantly, the interest in Althusser occurred not long after Thompson's

work had left its mark, and it is revealing to consider the similar

136



origins and motives of the two writers. Both Althusser and Thompson set

out to establish positions that would stand firmly opposed to Stalinist

and exonomistic tendencies in Marxist work, both formulated their early

arguments during a period of cold war hostility, and both attempted to

transcend or evade that hostility by developing (in very different ways,

of course) Marxist work on non-economic questions (see Johnson, 1979:

57ff). This last commonality is absolutely vital, for it came to be true,

tragically, that these works set the direction for most subsequent work

on culture and ideology. At this circumstantial moment in European

intellectual history the concerns of at least the next decade were firmly

grounded, even though the pressing need to polemicize against Stalinist

tendencies had long since been removed. Somehow, through the course of

later developments in cultural theory, the (ordinarily crucial) concern

with the economic was never re-inserted into its proper place, and soon

fell into a state of serious neglect.

Without engaging impractically in a full-scale treatise on the

relation between Althusserian structuralism and new currents in British

Marxism, it is at least possible to briefly summarize some of the most

commonly identified weaknesses to be found in Althusser's work on ideology.

The usual complaints include the functionalist charges (particularly with

respect to his discussion of the system-functions of the ISAs) , the

internal inconsistencies, the too ominpotent role that is accorded to

the state, and, notably, the over-emphasis on reproduction. A najor

problem regarding the ISAs essay in particular is that, although sub-

titled "Notes Towards an Investigation" and including Althusser's own

admission that "we are advancing in still poorly explored domains"

(1971: 269), this single, crude and abbreviated 'exploratory' discussion

has been appropriated as a fully- fledged 'theory of ideology'. Not only

137



does Althusser fail to provide a comprehensive, adequate or even workable

theory of ideology, or of the state (although it may be unfair to assess

his work against this misread intention), his 'notes' about the state and

about ideology, taken together, contain some serious and by now well-

acknowledged faults.

Sumner (1979) makes the point that the one-sided concept of ideological

reflection has left a persistent perception of ideological transmission

FROM ABOVE and ONLY from above, such that, in order to proceed with his

argument for the role of the state as the agent of ideological domination,

Althusser is compelled to deny the existence of contradictions or practices

that might give rise to non-ruling class ideologies, which traps him inside

a non-dialectical analysis. Only later does Althusser realize that the

emergence of the ISAs and the dominance of ruling class ideologies within

them, is possible only through class struggle within the ISAs (e.g. within

legal and educational institutions). However, through the artificial

insertion of contradictions into the analysis, Althusser reduces ideologies

to class ideologies, and hence short-forms the rich and complex ensemble

of ideological formations. No longer is it possible to discuss class

fractions or class alliances and their subscription to contending ideo-

logies, a relation that becomes lost to analysis forever.

To Sumner (see, in particular, 1979: 25-SO, 101-130), Althusscr's

class reductionisra is a serious theoretical limitation: it precludes the

understanding of ideological differences that divide or cut across classes,

and this is especially problematic since, according to Sumner, these

intra-class rivalries and ideological struggles holJ the rreatest political

import for contemporary Marxist analysis. All of these inadequacies,

intrinsic to Althusser's theoretical 'notes' about ideology, are

uncritically overlooked and hence systematically 'reproduced' in the

138



Birmingham work on cultures and ideologies. The last important point to

note about the absorption of Althusser into cultural studies, however,

is that their uncritical (mis) appropriation effectively and solidly

wedged the Centre further into the trap of abstract theoreticism.

There is always a danger, in general discussions like the present

one, that a review of a given body of literature can appear to attribute

a monolithic character to the material. This is in fact somewhat justified

in the case of the Centre's work, which is largely collaborative and

rarely authored by a single individual, reflecting the organization of

the Centre as a uniquely democratic collective and its preference for

co-operative, rather than competitive, intellectual activity. (Indeed,

outside observers often comment on its 'cult- like 1 operation). In this

sense, charges of theoreticism can be levelled at more than just this or

that 'tendency' in the studies of one or more individuals. Mention

should be maae, however, of some peripheral and 'exiled' Birminghar

thinkers who do_ manage to escape the theoreticist trap. Paul Willis

and Dave Morley exemplify the few who pursue more substantive questions:

the relation between formalized education, cultural production, and

the reproduction of labour power in Willis' case (1977), and the

stratification of audience readings in Morley' s case (1975, 1980).

Willis, for example, acknowledges that trade unions are "by far the

most important working lcass institution", and Sparks notes that this

acknowledgement alone "marks an important advance for an institution which,

while dedicated to the study of working class culture has not, as yet

,

produced any major study, either theoretical or empirical, of the trade

union movement" (1977: 27-28). Regardless, Sparks holds out little hope

for an approach that disregards the contradictory nature of these sane

working class institutions: "if it is agreed that the culture we are

139



studying is that of a subordinate class, and that this subordination

is something which can be ended, then it follows that a great deal of

contemporary working class culture is an historically transient formation"

(1977: 28).

One of the problems that rendered the Birmingham and Screen work

openly susceptible to charges of theoreticism was its operation in a

field traditionally weak in one important sense. Cultural studies was,

for some time during its formative period, an 'approach' without a

methodology. Literary criticism could offer little on that score, and

so for its methodological impetus the Centre turned once more to the

continent and to European structuralism and semiotics, the fifth and

latest influence that directs their work. This move, it can be argued,

did little more than complicate or add to the existing problems of

method. Again, it is not possible to demonstrate the full consequences

within the limits of this discussion; only a few illustrative points can

be made. Murdock and Golding (e.g. 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980), Sumner

(1979: 131-203), and others have carried out sustained critiques of the

methodological faults endemic to 'immanent structural' or semiotic

analysis. The former, for example, concede that the approach has

opened wide the field of potential objects of analysis to include art,

literature, religion, cosmetic fashions, bodily gestures, and many

other everyday symbolic forms: "in a field where people are still apt

to regard contemporary culture as more or less synonymous with television

programming, this contextualization represents a considerable gain in

breadth" (1978: 348).

Problems arise, however, when one attempts to unravel the signi-

ficance of these symbolic forms through the use of immanent strucutral

analysis. Murdock and Colding argue that the epistemological and

140



methodological principles of the approach irrevocably lead to "a highly

asymmetric analysis in which an elaborate anatomy of symbolic forms sits

alongside a schematic and incomplete account of social processes" (1978:

349). In other words, there are degrees of contextualization, and cultural

studies, however ambitious in its range, has not achieved the greatest

degree that it might. To some, this potential is unrealizable: Murdock

and Golding, operating within a more orthodox perspective, see no way

out, and conclude that "textual and sociological analyses are rooted in

fundamentally opposed approaches to the study of culture and ... eventually

a choice must be made between the two" (1978: 351). The later, and very

different, Williams seems to opt for the latter. In a landmark New

Left Review article (1973) that in many ways marks the point of his

rupture with earlier theoretical affiliations, Williams asserts that

"we have to break from the notion of isolating the object and then

discovering its components. On the contrary, we have to discover the

nature of a practice and then its conditions" (1973: 16). And, in a

1974 work, Television: Technology and Cultural Form, Williams reiterates

the need for a greater degree of contextualization:

To say that television is now a factor in socialization,,
or that its controllers and communicators are exercising
a particular social function, is to say very little until
THE FORMS OF THE SOCIETY which DETERMINE any particular
socialization and which allocate the function of control
and communication have been precisely specified (1974:
120; emphasis added)

.

Critiques of immanent structural or semiotic analysis most often

cite the following major weakenesses of the method: (1) its insistence

on the immanent revelations of cultural texts; (2) its inductive epis-

temological principles; (3) its impressionistic, 'subjective', and

inferential nature; (4) its unreplicable (and hence unverifiable)

character; (5) its too weighted reliance on the ingenuity of the

141



individual analyst; and (6) its necessary ahistoricism. Sumner, however,

argues that these weakenesses are not immutable, and attempts to salvage

the more worthy traits of the approach through his proposals for a

"historical materialist semiology" (1979: 207-245). Although still

tentative and cumbersome (see the four 'approximations' and their attendant

empirical contingents, 1979: 238-245), Sumner's approach contrasts sharply

with the enthusiastic Birmingham adoption of the study of the text for

the sake of the text.

Indeed, the new currency of debates about authorship represents an

alarming 'sign' of further and future over-subscriptions to French struc-

turalism, and especially the new 'post-structuralism' (represented by

Derrida, Kristeva, et^ al_. ) , which is content not only to decompose a text

with blind disregard to its material sources and conditions, but to

decompose the text FOR THE SAKE OF ANALYSIS ITSELF, and not for the sake

of revealing its politico-ideological implications. This is tantamount

to "deconstruct ion for the hell of it", as Norman Snider so pointedly

expressed it in, significantly, a recent edition of his 'Trends' column

( Globe 6 Mail , 20 September, 1980). Even those who still perceive their

work as part of and contributory to larger politico-practical objectives,

still limit their analytical range to the text itself in their explana-

tions (if included) of social process. Murdock and Golding rightfully

question the capacity of social texts to reveal all that there is to

cultural production and reproduction. Their damning critique of

semiotics suggests that what is at stake here is much more than a

problem of method:

... it is not just a question of devising more adequate modes
of textual analysis and applying them to a comprehensive range
of media output ... there is a fundamental methodological
difficulty in approaching social and structural relations

142



through the analysis of texts. However well conceived and
executed, textual readings remain a variety of content analysis
and as such they suffer from the familiar but intractable
problem of inference. It is one thing to argue that all
cultural forms contain traces of the relations of production
underlying their construction, and of the structural relations
which surround them. It is quite another to go on to argue
that an analysis of form can deliver an adequate and satisfactory
account of these sets of relations and of the determinations they
exert on the production process. They can't. In our view the
sociology of culture and communication HAS BEEN SERIOUSLY
INCAPACITATED by the tendency of over-privilege texts as objects
of analysis (1979: 206-207; emphasis added).

What is most alarming about the new 'trend* towards post-structuralist

semiotics is that it represents a fundamental inversion of the principles

of historical materialism, and yet it operates under the guise of 'Marxist'

cultural theory. Rather than refer to these developments as 'neo-' or

even 'post-' Marxism, we might more properly identify the latest theoretical

fashions as a kind of anti -Marxism. Who better to illustrate this point

than Marx himself:

It is, in reality, much easier to discover by analysis the
earthly core of the misty creations of religion, than,
conversely, it is to develop from the actual relations of
life the corresponding celestialized forms of those relations.
The latter method is the only materialistic, and therefore
the only scientific one (1967: 352n)

.

Conclusions: Towards a Materialist Analysis of Culture

Despite the promise of the new conception of culture as 'a whole

way of life', culture is still treated as a realm apart, both by

literary-structural theorists and by more orthodox thinkers. Or. one

side, traditional notions have been extended to encompass a wide range

of cultural commodities and symbolic forms; on the other, culture is

still separated from work and reduced, in essence, to life styles and not

life ways . Both traditions have contributed to the further reificaticn

of the concept, abstracted it from the web of social relations, ir.l trans-

formed it into a monolithic notion of not just 'culture as a whole' but

'culture as a whole realm of social life' and therefore, somehow, separable

143



from other material productions. Meanwhile, mass society theorists

(including "culture industry' theorists) start with a moralistic observa-

tion that 'culture' is disintegrating, and proceed to centre entirely on

their abstract, ungrounded notion of culture rather than on the specific

determinations and historical configurations of cultures within capitalist.

The result is "a crude "consumptionist" theory of culture in which

subjective judgement and moral evaluation dominate to the exclusion of

scientific analysis" (Swingewood, 1977: xi). This underlines even more the

need to locate culture by first looking towards production , and by

conceptualizing culture itself as first and foremost a material production.

In contrast, all of the approaches discussed start out with either

a firm rejection of exasperation with, or sheer desertion of, the

principles of materialist analysis, and some, as we have seen, arrive at

either an implicitly anti-Marxist or (at best) quasi-Marxist stance. Such

categorizations, and the general profusion of lables that attempt to

identify the various strands of thought, reflect the current state of

theoretical confusion about culture. At least three critical and inter-

related problems occupy the current debates: those of mediation, of

agency, and of determination. The consequences of the first two of

these have already been noted, and therefore greater attention must now

be paid to the problem of determination itself.

The conditions that led these problems to attain their acute

significance for contemporary cultural theorists are suggested throughout

the discussion. Anderson (1976), however, more broadly contextualizes

the developments. According to his account, the "organic unity of theorv

and practice" realized in the generation of prc-WWI Marxists suffered a

serious rupture during the five decades between 1918 and 1968. The

political forces that came into play following the first World War (e.g.

144



Fascism and Stalinism) served to sever the bond between theory and practice

and to scatter and suppress certain key theorists like Cramsci, Korsch,

and Lukacs. From this point forward, the possibilities for a lively and

dynamic exchange of Marxist thought, one informed by concrete political

practice, were seriously diminished. Moreover, after 1920, most major

theoretical works were produced in a context of political isolation and

(often) defeatist despair, including: Lukacs' History and Class Conscious -

ness (1923), written during his period of exile in Austria; Gramsci's

notes, compiles during his imprisonment under Mussolini's triumphant

fascism; the early works of the Frankfurt theorists, written under the

conditions of German fascism; Marcuse's Eros and Civilization (1954),

produced in the era of McCarthyism in the United States; and Sartre's

Critique of Dialiectical Reason (1960), which appeared following the

Gaullist coup of 1958. Anderson concludes that "the hidden hallmark

of Western Marxism as a whole is thus that it is a product of DEFEAT"

(1976: 42; original emphasis).

One painful consequence of the impasse brought about by these

conditions became "the studied silence of Western Marxism in those areas

most central to the classical traditions of historical materialism"

(1976: 44); notably, analysis of economic changes within the developing

capitalist mode of production, of the significance of the growing state

machine, and of the ongoing class struggles within capitalist societies.

At the same time, the post-war capitalist economic boom, and with it the

global consolidation of capital all around the industrialized world,

signalled a new phase of capitalism that seemed to undermine the classi-

cal account of its inevitable decline, and posed instead a 'crisis' for

Marxist analysis. In light of these circumstances, the appearance of

Althusser's works during the 1960s, and their widespread influence, is

145



readily comprehensible. Althusser's reformulations of the classic Marxist

precepts (e.g. the crucial concept of "structural causality" of a mode of

production in Reading Capital , and the concept of a social totality

"determined in the last instance" by one preponderant level within it,

which in itself blew open the whole surge of functionalist attacks, and

deservedly so) , undermined the already weakened vitality of classical

political economy, and led to an inordinate amount of concentration on

the study of superstructures , in which analyses of culture and ideology

rose to unwarranted prominence. Furthermore, there are those who argue

(e.g. Mrudock and Golding, 1979) that ultimately the most dreadful

implication of Althusser's work was its final and definitive eradication

of one of the core, distinguishing features of historical materialisir

;

namely, the real and ever-present determination of the economic.

The sole outstanding exception to these otherwise pervasive

tendencies is represented in the work of one of the last great 'politically

informed' Marxist theorists: Gramsci. It is particularly remarknble in

that Gramsci 's work also concentrated on the study of superstructures,

yet "unlike any other theorist in Western Marxism he took the autonomv

and efficacy of cultural superstructures as a POLITICAL problem, to be

explicitly theorized as such - in its 'relationship to the maintenance

or subversion of the social order" (Anderson, 1976: 78; original emphasis).

This is the critical difference, although popular misappropriations of

his work have themselves 'subverted' the distinctiveness of his approach

to culture, and the cryptic nature of his writings has obstructed a clear

understanding of their theoretical significance. The construction of a

comprehensive Gramscian approach to the study of culture would no doubt

be a massive, yet not impossible, project; it would need to take into

acccint and piece together all of the observations about culture (and

146



ideology) dispersed throughout the voluminous prison notes. The project

is made all the more massive by the recent availability of the first

English translation of some of the early political writings (Gransci,

14
1977, 1978). Nevertheless, in order to fulfill the requirements of a

materialist analysis of culture, we might usefully start with Gramsci's

seminal works.

It is a tribute to his unique insights that Gramsci, at a very

early historical stage, recognized the dangers of and understood the

developments behind the growth of idealist elements within Marxist

theory:

the currents which have attempted combinations of
the philosophy of praxis with idealist tendencies consist
for the most part of 'pure' intellectuals, whereas the
current which has constituted the orthodoxy consisted of
intellectual personalities more markedly dedicated to
practical activity and therefore more closely linked to
the great popular mases (1971: 389).

Part of the explanation for this i^si^ht lies in Gramsci'i frequent

polemics against the idealism of Croce , his chief opponent in the local

Italian debate. In a similar vein, Gransci also recognized the over-

riding problem of determination, and insisted that "it is the problem of

the relations between structure and superstructure which must be accu-

rately posed and resolved if the forces which are active in the history

of a particular period are to be correctly analyzed, and the relations

between them determined" (1971: 177).

With respect to this overriding problem, Garnham (1979) has help-

fully identified the roots of the debate about determination in his

search for congruities between the work of Screen and historical materialism.

In the first place, the imbalanced concern with ideology and culture has

placed traditional understandings of determination in doubt.

... the economic is determinant in certain historically
specific ways, i.e. each one of us would literally starve

147



to death unless wc entered into this structure of economic
relationships. The same cannot be said of many so-called
superstructural activities which are in this sense,
relatively autonomous, relatively matters of free choice
(1979: 125).

Garnham argues that this straightforward distinction has been

inflated beyond reason, and that this can be understood in terms of the

relatively privileged position of intellectuals within modern relations

of production; hence their susceptibility to confusions about determina-

tion. The argument suggests that, as a first step towards a materialist

approach, we need to remove culture, or at least ideology, from its

position of centrality in 'Marxist' thought and work. It may mean, for

example, looking for 'culture' in hitherto unlikely places, i.e. inside

factories and offices and not just in working or middle class neighbour-

hoods, and making sense of the findings not with the dubious aid of

Althusserian 'theories', but with reference to substantive works like,

for example, Beynon's Working for Ford (1973) or Thompson's research on

the problems encountered in introducing the notion of regulated working

hours in the early moments of industrialization (1967).

A second source of the confusion about determination lies in the

associated (and, some would argue, 'manufactured') problem of 'levels',

brought on in part by Althusser's re-reading of Capital . In a valiant

effort to "bring back the dialectic", Garnham argues forcefully that the

whole notion of levels is a false one. Discussions of "levels of the

social formation" tend to (incorrectly) specify "discrete areas of

concrete social practice (e.g. the economic is material production and

circulation, the ideological is concerned with ideas and cultural forms,

the political concerned with political parties, the state and so on).

On the contrary, levels are not actual social practices but analytically

distinct perspectives upon concrete social phenomena which arc at one

148



and the same time economic, ideological, and political" (1079: 1 JO)

.

A third source of trouble traces to the widely pcrcicved limitations

of the classic equation between ideology and false consciousness as well

as the opposition between real relations and phenomenal foros , on the

basis of which many cultural theorists instantly dismiss Marx as a source

of theoretical insight into the workings of ideology and culture. Yet,

as Gamhara points out:

All that historical materialism posits is that economic class
positions produce one set of positions as an average or
probabilistically, rather than another. It then sometimes
goes on to argue that the gap precisely between the real and
'reality' or between economic relations and phenomenological
forms makes possible a disjunction between the real interests
and a false consciousness of those interests. It does not
necessarily ... then make ideology merely 'the misleading
phenomenal form of the real movement'. It claims that, because
there is mediation (or relative autonomy or disjuncture or
indeed whatever word or theoretical construct one uses to
describe the manifestly obvious and anciently attested fact
that there is a difference between the real and its
representation) there is a possibility of misunderstanding.
But it does depend . . . upon an assumption of the primacy and
determinacy of the real ... Marx certainly, and I believe,
Marxism, rests upon the ultimate primacy of the real (1979:
126-127).

Granham's defense is quoted at length here, since it marks a rare

type of intervention into the current debates of Marxist cultural theory.

On a more optimistic note, there is some recent evidence that oppositions

of this nature are on the increase (see, for example, the debate between

Coward (1979), and Chambers et_ al_. (1979) . In the interests of a

maturing materialist approach to the study of culture, such interventions

must be heartily welcomed.

149



NOTF.S

1. The unique position of Walter Benjamin vis-a-vis other menbers of
the institute for Social Research is still a subject of debate (see
later discussion) , and hence the theoretical cohesion suggested by
the phrase 'the Frankfurt school' renders its usage somewhat
inappropriate.

2. Horkheimer died in 1973. The quotation derives from a letter
written to Martin Jay in 1971, subsequently published as the
forward to Jay's account of the Institute (1973).

3. A problematic feature of mass society theory is this limited
attention to these three media and its relative neglect of other
significant culture industries and cultural forms (literature,
drama, newspapers, magazines, theatre, etc.).

4. The material imperatives that determined the direction of much
American 'mass communications' research are by now well known.
The needs of the U.S. private radio industry for some knowledge
of its broadcast markets and the requirements of war-time pro-
paganda each figured within the development of the dominant
modes of media empiricism. Several leading figures within this
tradition were directly employed by private audience research
agencies or private research foundations linked to the media
industries. In addition, Hovland directed the research branch
of the U.S. Army's Information and Education Division (see
Golding and Murdock , 1978).

5. Innis' theory is introduced in Empire and Communications (19")
and further developed in The Bias of Communication (1951).
Related works include Ch anging Concepts of Tire (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1952) and The Strategy of Culture
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1952).

6. See Carey (1968) for evidence that McLuhan's 'borrowings' i'ror.
Innis were more than substantial, verging on sheer plagiarisr.

7. Their limited utility is illustrated in the fact that few
studies have followed or attempted to develop the tradition
further. A notable exception is Carpenter's Oh, hTiat a Blow
That Phantom Cave Me ! (1976). His idle musings, however
fascinating to read, demonstrate the impressionistic and
fundamentally non-analytical nature of McLuhan's formulations
about culture.

8. Keynote address, 11th Annual Conference of the Canadian Association
for American Studies, Waterloo, Ontario, .22-25 October 19".

9. The phrase 'cultural studies' is preferred to 'cultural Mnrxisr.'
(as some refer to the approach), for reasons that will become
apparent.

ISO



10. Hoggart shared the anxieties and lived the contradictions of
other British working class academics of the 1950s who moved
upward through the academy during the post-war expansion of
higher education, and, like the others, was compelled by a
need to 'settle accounts' with his class origins. The Uses
of Literacy should be read in this light.

11. It is indicative of 'the new Williams' that statements like the
following appear in the latest text: "It is in practice impossible
to separate the development of the novel as a literary form fror.
the highly specific economics of fiction publication" (1977: 137)
-- a far cry indeed from the young literary critic of the 1950s.

12. In a revealing admission, Johnson notes that the ISAs essay "has
been massively influential, defining, for many readers, the actual
terrain of "materialism"" (1979: 58).

13. That Thompson's motives in the production of Making were largely
polemical is disclosed in the following excerpt from a recent
interview: "The Making of the English Working Class undoubtedly
arose from a two-sided theoretical polemic. On the one hand it
could not have been written without the extremely firmly, intel-
lectually very well-based, discipline of economic history ...
it is a tradition largely contaminated with capitalist ideoiogy
... on the other hand it was in a sense a polemic against
abbreviated economistic notations of Marxism..." (1976: 4-5).

14. Cavalcanti and Piccone, however, have usefully culled some of the
salient writings on culture from these early articles (see Crar-;sci,
1975: 9-49).

151



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