lewis levenberg Histories of Cultural Studies Dr. Dina Copelman 19 December 2010 Essay 3 Cultural Studies, from the Birmingham School to Hebdige and Gilroy. The University of Birmingham's Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies birthed the fields of study that concern us and on which we continue to build. Exemplified by the work of Richard Hoggart and E.P. Thompson, the Birmingham Center took up questions of post-war British culture, combining diverse research strategies including literary, historical, and sociological methods. By the late 1970s, as Stuart Hall and others began to contribute their insights, the Center's focus extended beyond determining the activities and interests of the white working class there. They began to concentrate on issues of race, class, gender, and age. In so doing, they took advantage of their growing critical distance from post-war British society, but also maintained a focus on its many implications. Dick Hebdige observed the development of subordinate cultural movements, especially youth protest movements, in terms of how they deployed style. Paul Gilroy investigated Black social movements, and their tendentious relationship to cultural categories of 'race' as an element of identity, and racism as a set of beliefs and behaviors. Through a summary and analysis of the latter two theorists' works, this essay reflects on the questions facing cultural studies another generation later. Dick Hebdige's 1979 study, Subculture: the meaning of style, traces the interrelationships between the various youth protest movements that arose in Britain in the mid- to late-twentieth century. He shows how each movement drapes itself in, and uses as signifying mechanisms, hislevenberg 1
torically particular styles. Locating subculture in its reaction against hegemonic or dominant cultural norms, Hebdige addresses "the graffiti... the meanings embedded in the various post-war styles." 1 He does so in two broad strokes. First, by examining the musical, sartorial, linguistic, and political signals that differentiate various subcultures from one another as well as from dominant culture, he names Rastafari, punks, hipsters, beats, glam rockers, mods, and teddy boys as his 'case studies.' He then presents a systematic interpretation of how these various subcultures, focusing most closely on punks, use their styles. Accounting for the significant functions of style such as communication and revolt, and noting their historical specificity in each case, Hebdige thus attempts to uncover the depth of meaning beneath the superficial visual and other criteria that form his evidence base. Methodologically, he approaches that evidence using a threefold theoretical and analytical construct. First, he draws deeply on the poet T.S. Eliot's definition of culture, as the set of interests and activities unique to "a people," and extends this unifying conception to each subcultural group he examines. Second, he adopts another poet's interest in and articulation of deviance and Refusal, continually referring to the life and work of Jean Genet. Finally, he invokes and re-works the cultural semiotics of Roland Barthes, emphasizing the sociological and materialist aspects of that theorist's approach to signs and symbols. Hebdige blends poetic and literary phrases with scholarly research to enhance the significance of even (especially) mundane articles of clothing, figures of speech, and musical preferences. 1. Hebdige 1979, p. 3. levenberg 2
His semiotic insights remain of particular interest today. He takes a novel approach to decipher social messages that he reads as embedded or encoded in stylistic choices made by these subcultural groups. Most significantly, he argues that, through their style, members of subcultures refuse to participate in the perceived norms of the dominant culture that surrounds and encloses them. He works hard to unravel certain paradoxes in the constitution of these groups, such as their simultaneous appeals to and against capitalist logic and patterns. In so doing, he solidifies an approach to the study of subculture that confronts, and moves beyond, its own contradictory risk, of making banal, precisely through detailed study and academic interpretation, those very subcultures. Although he argues that Black cultural movements such as Rastafari gave rise to white movements such as punk, and that the punks' stylistic and musical choices reflected a direct inverse relationship to their Black inspirational antagonists, Hebdige leaves aside the implicit issues of race relations in the second half of his book, at which point he turns almost exclusively to a deep analysis of punk life. His consistent use of the term 'negro' underscores this lack of attention to questions of race, while his commentary on gender remains cursory and largely confined to his description of glam rock style. In this context, the book stands as an historical document in its own right, depicting by example the state of cultural studies in the late 1970s. Its concern with locating and analyzing working class British culture, that is, its overriding concern with culture as a class relationship, reflects that documentary status. For a deeper understanding of issues of race, cultural studies would have to wait eight years longer. levenberg 3
In his 1987 work, There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack, Paul Gilroy argues that race must be understood as a crucial element of identity, but without an essential or predetermined character. He rejects the Right s attempt to cast British national identity in terms of an exclusively (and exclusionary) Anglo-Saxon heritage, by tracing the development of immigrant communities from many parts of the Empire in Britain proper. At the same time, Gilroy rejects the overdetermination of an outdated Marxism that elides racial questions in favor of economics, as well as sociological assumptions about the primacy of national identity over racial identity in determining communal experience and behaviors. Gilroy advances his cultural materialist argument through several core theoretical concepts, an assemblage of research methods, and a clear and organized structure. Because he pays close attention to his language, Gilroy also allows us to pay close attention to the terms in which race and racism are discussed - in public and in private. He combines historical, ethnographic, and textual research to amass evidence for his analyses. He uses an historiographical approach to the archival and news footage and texts, focusing on their represetnations of collective experiences of historical events. He parses the interviews and his immersion in the communities by focusing on discursive statements that aggregate and amplify one another to provide a genealogical representation of his topics. Finally, he reads the texts that round out his evidence base in a similar way to E.P. Thompson and others, emphasizing again the statements, repetitious or unique, that further our understanding of the elements in the racial discourse in Britain with which he is concerned. levenberg 4
Even though Gilroy pursues an eclectic research strategy, through a variety of approaches, the book avoids spiralling out of rhetorical control, because he keeps a clear focus on the appropriate strategy to each research object in his queue. That sense of control appears also in Gilroy s argumentative tactics, which he scales up from description through explication, analysis, and and synthesis, for each piece of evidence. That structure allows Gilroy to construct an historical narrative in his argument, leading one section into the next. In addition to all this, he makes a point of introducing and concluding not only the book at large, but also the body of each of his chapters, subsections, and even most paragraphs. In short, he writes systemically, providing the reader with clear signposts and take-away points from a large and complex argument about a subtle and elusive topic. Gilroy works through his project in six substantive chapters, each devoted to a facet of the question of race. His first chapter addresses the theoretical context of his study. Then, he turns to the questions of national and ethnic identity, tackling the problem of absolutism in his next chapter. His third chapter breaks apart the conflation of criminality and blackness. Next, he shows how anti-racist discourse appeals sometimes to the same essentialist definitions of race that he has been working to problematize, and other times to a politically reactionary and outright racist (separatist, nationalist) rhetoric that serves racially oppressive purposes. After tackling these (perhaps intractable but certainly dynamic) political problems, Gilroy turns to the manifestation and expression of those issues in and through creative cultural production, especially music. He concludes the book by connecting British black identity to paticular urban spaces, and the attendant social concerns that arise in such communities, often outstripping but also somelevenberg 5
times amplifying, racial issues. In his introduction to the revised 2002 edition, Gilroy points out that the categories and meanings of race still matter very deeply in society, and that our own analyses of how people live must continue to account for them. Through an examination of both Hebdige's and Gilroy's studies, a more complete picture of cultural studies towards the end of the Cold War begins to form. The books draw on the earlier work of the Birmingham Center by adopting many of their methodologies and theoretical constructs. Most important in that regard are the works of Stuart Hall, Raymond Williams, and E.P. Thompson. However, both Hebdige and Gilroy go beyond the concerns of the earlier Birmingham School. Hebdige works to understand style as an explicit and material 'structure of feeling,' like the one theorized by Williams. In so doing, he expands on earlier cultural and subcultural studies by proposing an overarching conceptual framework through which they can each continue to be studied. Gilroy, meanwhile, confronts questions of race as an element of identity and culture on the same level as class, that is, structurally. His study provides deeper insight than any earlier cultural work on the significance of racial definitions of culture, at a political and social scale. Both writers illuminate previously unexamined areas of culture, highlighting topics and concerns that earlier cultural studies (including the works of Hoggart, Williams, Thompson, and Hall) had ignored. In so doing, they turn to and invoke theorists from outside the traditional domains of English, history, or sociology, to include insights from Continental thinkers such as Gramsci, Barthes, and Foucault, for example. They turn a critical eye on their own training in the same way, reflecting on the traditions and privileges that allowed cultural studies to develop with levenberg 6
the blind spots that they seek to address. One question raised by each writer's work, for example, is how gender interacts with their age-based or race-based studies. Despite their own limitations, including their historically specific focus on British postwar cultures, both studies hold important implications for contemporary and international questions of race, racism, subculture, and style. Following Gilroy's analysis of Afro-American music as a bridge between Britain's imperial and diasporic communities, that takes advantage of already-installed networks of relationships across national boundaries, we can work towards examinations of how racial and racist cultural production operates online. Similarly, building on Hebdige's polysemic semiotics of style as a contradictory union of antithetical (or at least antagonistic) cultural elements, we can continue to examine youth movements that rely increasingly heavily on computer- or cell phone-mediated communication, rather than just physical gatherings or cultural commodities. However, we must also consider changing global demographics when we address questions of race and culture, such as the rapidly dwindling population of Western countries relative to the rest of the world. And when we think about youth protest movements and their styles, the unprecedented ability of information and cultural objects to flow around the globe confronts the vast disparities in wealth as well as the growing importance of non-western religions such as Islam. We must continue to take account of these proliferation of specific complications to the study of culture. However, we can also keep concentrating on the larger questions facing these fields, namely, the interaction between categories of race, 'age,' class, and 'gender' with those levenberg 7
of technology, religion, politics, and ideology. Finding that balance of specific and general concerns remains the challenge of cultural studies. Since the generation of many core ideas unique to this inter-discipline around sixty years ago, its development has continually confronted its own contradictions and incorporated new concepts to help solve internal paradoxes. After the Birmingham Center's adoption of core methodological and theoretical approaches from English, history, and sociology, the next generation of theorists needed to look further afield than Anglo-Saxon academic traditions. So, the work of Hebdige and Gilroy exemplifies that middle generation of cultural studies, during which the work of French, Italian, and German theorists, from beyond Marxist ideological critique, folded into the ability of cultural scholars to address concerns beyond class and literacy. Hebdige's location of protest among youth subcultures brought style into focus as a meaningful cultural signifier, and a tenuously holistic construct. Gilroy's work destabilized common-sense notions of 'race,' allowing for a more fruitful, productive, and historically contingent discussion of racial issues to take place regarding the movement of people and ideas across continents and oceans. These seminal studies, along with others that dealt with renewed questions of classed and gendered cultural objects and movements, allowed cultural studies to transition from an insular and obscure theoretical experiment, into a better-established and institutionally more secure inter-discipline in its own right. As a new generation of scholars now taking up the concerns of cultural studies for ourselves, we must continue to build upon and press beyond the innovations and insights found in these works. levenberg 8
REFERENCES Gilroy, Paul. There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack: The cultural politics of race and nation. (1987). Classics Edition. London: Routledge, 2002. Green, Michael. "The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies." in Storey, John, ed. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996. pp. 49-60. Hall, Stuart. "Cultural studies: two paradigms." in Storey, John, ed. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader. London: Arnold, 1996. pp. 31-48. Hebdige, Dick. Subculture: the meaning of style. (1979). London: Routledge, 2002. Hoggart, Richard. The Uses of Literacy: Aspects of working-class life, with special references to publications and entertainments. London: Chatto and Windus, 1971. Thompson, E.P. The Essential E.P. Thompson. Ed. Dorothy Thompson. New York: The New Press, 2001. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977. levenberg 9