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Cultural
Bulimia
John Beagles & Dave Beech
Famously, Raymond Williams argued that culture is one of the most complicated
words in the English language.1
It would be reasonable to assume that its complications are accretions,
i.e. that an original and simple word, meaning, say, to grow, has been
stretched, morphed and twisted around to the loss of any core reference
it once possessed. Anyone harbouring suspicion of the academic world could
no doubt explain this by wagging a finger at meddling academics prone
to too much intellectual monkey business.
Yet they would be wrong as, according to Williams, from the beginning
the word had a range of meanings. Colonies, cults and cultivation were
there at the outset, like a chain linking habitation, worship and natural
growth. To paraphrase Williams, culture may be ordinary but it has also
always existed in a state of flux. What gives contemporary complications
of the word culture their special quality is that they are flavoured with
all sorts of contestation, rivalry, dispute and fissure, which have effects
and consequences beyond the confines of academia.
It is one thing for a word to have a number of meanings, to be prone to
semantic slippages, but it is quite another for those meanings to be incompatible.
Here a common set of beliefs gels protagonists together in such a way
that arguments are primarily disagreements over the interpretation of
accepted rules, etc. However with the word culture, and its possible meanings
and interpretations, we are confronted with the wedge which splits and
tears this neat and tidy social space. Here, there is no shared set of
ground rules. The divisions which spill out from culture flow along frequently
disparate, isolated paths. We would undoubtedly be able to come to an
agreement over semantic differences of a word, but the argument resulting
from setting Beethoven against Tammy Wynette in the cultural stakes would
present infinitely more insurmountable problems. Today, the complications
embedded in the word culture point to incommensurable interpretations.
Ultimately they speak of cultural and social divisions.
The root of much of the division has been the effect and influence of
what has become known as popular culture. Whether it be art, opera, classical
music, literature or ballet, the spectre of this 'other' form
of culture (whose name has shifted from kitsch to mass- to popular-) has
shadowed the paths of these more traditional, accepted examples of culture
(what we might once-upon-a-time have referred to as Culture with a Capital
C ). Existing in a peculiar parental relationship, popular culture was
in its earlier more lumpen incarnations often tarred as the bastard, vampiric
child of Culture with a Capital C. Contemporary forms of communication
such as film and television have frequently been abused for feeding on
and sucking the life from these noble inhabitants of Culture's lofty
palaces. While today such black and white, slap dash cartooning of the
cultural landscape would be unthinkable (for all but the most mule-like
conservative), it's worth remembering that our present more enlightened
cultural habitat is a relatively new phenomenon.
While popular culture may be an elusive, shape shifting, mischievous body
which academics, artists and intellectuals tussle over, previous theorised
incarnations didn't have the same trouble. Throughout the first half
of the twentieth century, the notion of kitsch had certain, specifiable
properties over which there was a broad intellectual consensus. Similarly,
the idea of mass culture conformed to a given set of social and economic
relations. What unified the intellectual reference to kitsch and mass
culture was not just the obligatory disparagement of "the debased
and academicized simulacra of genuine culture."2
The formulation of the concepts of kitsch and mass culture also shared
the critical, even radical, analysis of the relationship between low cultural
value and the overarching presence of management and marketeering. This
was best summed up in the term culture industry, understood as the primacy
of industrial and commercial interests in the production of goods that
are barely cultural at all. In this schema, the stench of business ensured
that consumers of such products were relegated to the cultural wasteland.
The idea of being banished to a cultural wasteland is a potent one; it
is what fuelled the dystopian, alienated landscape of cultural conservatives
such as T.S.Eliot, and fuelled some of Clement Greenberg's more extreme
pronouncements on art and culture. Entrenched and seemingly intractable,
it was this conception of culture which held sway. Such a dystopian view
of the corrupting evils of popular culture's beguiling charms enabled
dedicated protectors of all that was noble and right to scaremonger publicly
about the contaminating effects of film and television.
The culture which has no name
The term popular culture was initially brought in to protect radical or
authentic culture (a modern version of folk art) from the same criticisms.
Richard Hoggart's book The Uses of Literacy, coupled with his setting
up of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University
in 1963, ensured that he is widely seen - as Jim McGuigan has written
in his overview of the history and evolution of cultural studies, Cultural
Populism - as being responsible for a shift in British cultural debate
from "a stark opposition between elitist minority culture and lowly
mass culture towards a serious engagement with the value and values of
majority cultural experience." If cultural theory schools across
Britain have a theoretical godfather it is Hoggart, not Williams.
After the popular culture explosion in the late '50s and early '60s,
the term popular culture became more capacious in its use, referring to
experiences that had once been thought kitsch and commercial. Hoggart's
rather romantic, genteel conception of popular culture was quickly replaced
by the white heat of a far more robust, hungry form of popular culture.
A determined group of radicals campaigned against the use of such divisive
stereotypes of culture and cultural consumption, turning such terms as
kitsch and mass culture into anachronisms.
If the substitution of the term popular culture for its predecessors had
done away with conservative and radical anxieties about it, then popular
culture would possibly be no more than an anthropological term referring
to an heterogeneous field of cultural and economic activity. Instead,
it is one of the most contested and misconstrued pieces of jargon of the
20th and 21st Century.
Stuart Hall, one of the pioneers of Cultural theory, remarked that symbolic
aggression against mass culture was always, though perhaps cryptically,
a version of aggression against the masses. It is worth pursuing the hypothesis
that repressed fear and loathing for the working class returns as contempt
for mass culture, but the argument has to go further than that. The term
popular culture was coined by intellectuals, aesthetes and the educated
in order to refer to the culture of others. From the outset it was a projection.
If the term popular culture refers to anything at all it is not the people
or the culture it purports to name but the fantasies and anxieties of
those who are doing the naming. This is why it is often said that popular
culture means nothing, that it picks out no specifiable set of cultural
norms or qualities; popular culture is nothing other than the culture
which is excluded from legitimate or cultivated culture (and defined from
within legitimate culture as its other). This results in a very confused
or at best weak sense of popular culture's own identity.
It gets worse. If popular culture is defined negatively and relationally,
then the radical incorporation of popular culture into the university
and the gallery creates even more problems. When the academics of cultural
studies include popular culture as a legitimate object of intellectual
study then the last remaining criterion of its identity is fudged. The
same sort of thing happens when artists and curators sidle up to popular
culture, permitting its access to galleries and artworks in a radical
gesture that erases the divisions which maintain art's privilege.
The effect is that popular culture doesn't only attain its longed
for prestige but loses its distinctive character. If popular culture is
excluded culture, then its inclusion turns this empty category into an
indeterminable boundary. This is, roughly speaking, what has emerged as
the current cultural impasse: the divide between art and popular culture
has slackened or disappeared so that either value and criteria has to
be found to reinstate cultural division3
or we should no longer think in terms of cultural division. Neither option
is satisfactory.
Culture is Ordinary
Williams almost filed for adoption papers on the word culture. Nobody
since Matthew Arnold has had such an impact on the way the term is used.
It was Arnold's evangelical tub-thumping about the value of Culture - for
it to represent "the best that has been thought or known in the world
current everywhere" - which, Williams recognised, was the trigger
for the now widespread suspicion of all talk about culture.
It would be wrong to say that Williams' concept of culture was not
normative. But, he argued so much against the normative conception of
Culture that he produced an ethics of the value of the forms of life which
that normative conception of Culture brushes aside. An extended and serious
engagement in culture based on the fact of division and difference might
have extended the scholarship of the connoisseur to every last hiding
place of dignity in the lives of ordinary people, annihilating the toffee-nosed
superiority-complex while reinvigorating the intelligent aspirations of
culture. Instead, culture became the battleground of ideological sectarianism,
postmodernist posturing, identity politics, political correctness and
post -colonial, -feminist, -Marxist studies.
Williams may still prove to have the requisite subtlety to outdo most
of our misgivings about the holistic approach to cultural analysis and
social transformation. It is Richard Hoggart's legacy, however - his
establishment of cultural studies as an academic exercise - which takes
the limelight today. It is not through lack of respect that we hesitate
to call it an academic discipline; cultural studies is internally resistant
to having strict demarcations placed on its interdisciplinary activities.
Initially, cultural studies had to be of a politically radical hue before
it could maintain that all form of culture is worthy of analysis irrespective
of their relative prestige. The position implies a full-frontal attack
on the realm of aesthetics which dominated cultural discourse and effectively
ruled out any potential alternative by passing itself off as the very
soul of humanity, all else being unworthy of the term culture. So how
did cultural studies turn into the wretched display of subject positions
without recourse to judgement, value and ethics? Before we can answer
that we must finally face up to the high-tide of cultural studies, a scholastic
world in which poor, black kids in inner city Britain 'resist'
and 'subvert' power through the ingenuity of their haircuts.
We don't doubt the radical credentials of the initial intentions
of cultural studies, and the impact the work has had. It would be interesting,
however, to compare it with the history and development of ultraviolence
in Hollywood. At first it was something of a scandal for Hollywood to
depict the lives of the lumpen proletariat in a graphic and realist style,
but at each step when the brutality gave way to charm or flavour the criminality
and frankness had to be stepped up. It was almost enough in itself that
Hoggart wrote seriously and sympathetically about the working class, but
Dick Hebdige, writing in the '70s, was only interested in subcultural,
prickly, indigestible elements of the working class. The idea that heroes
had to be good and wholesome was shot to pieces. What couldn't be
sustained, though, was the tendency in cultural studies to make political
claims on behalf of the yobs, mods or rastas and later the fans of boybands
and romance novels. We don't mean that the politics of resisting
the authority of school teachers or of indulging in mainstream culture
was inflated, we mean that it didn't exist. It exists as a politics
only insofar as the study of them interferes with academic customs and
standards. This is a classic case of projection.
The reason there is now an impasse within academic schools of cultural
studies is that its radical politics was based to some degree on the challenge
to a politically unacceptable, entrenched cultural schema. Within this
orthodoxy a routinised aesthetic gradient cast popular culture out of
serious discussion. Radicals took this normativity by the scruff of the
neck and saw what was valuable in the most detested and debased cultural
forms. What's more, it worked. It turned out that no one behaved
in the manner which cultural prejudice had expected. Writers such as John
Fiske 'discovered' that ordinary people watching TV were active
and discriminatory; the surrender to consumerism was done on an individual
basis, and with intelligence; scholars discovered that different individuals
bought the same newspapers and used them in different ways. Well done,
but why did it take so long and why did we have to disabuse ourselves
of the prejudices against popular culture before we could assault the
myths about art? Now, at long last, you don't have to be an old-style
Marxist to acknowledge that artists are no different from anyone else;
art is just as likely to include rubbish as everlasting truth, galleries
are part of the tourist industry, and the supposed superiority of art
over mass culture has to be tested case by case. Having established these
inversions of established wisdom, though, the radicals of cultural studies
had achieved the academic levelling of art and popular culture (anything
now, it seems, can go into a Ph.D. thesis), but that doesn't mean
that all cultural division has vanished, or indeed that all culture is
of equal value.
Cultural studies failed to question the relationship between the scholar
and culture, it merely extended the range of the scholar's objects
of analysis. The forms of attention expected of an intellectual were not
challenged, even if punks and schoolgirls were magically accorded the
qualities and attitudes which were previously the preserve of the educated.
No, the reason a new aestheticism emerged in the wake of cultural studies
and the social history of art is that the radical politics which furnished
the latter with its progressive vision of culture did not equip it for
an encounter with recidivist philistines (the slightly bruised cultural
conservative who had been saving up arguments about value and quality
just in case the momentum of cultural democratisation would slip). It
makes no sense, and holds no radical promise, to defend the cultural worth
of Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em, The Bay City Rollers or Star Wars.
It's not that these are irredeemably 'bad' examples of
culture, or even that it is not possible to enjoy them with a sizeable
degree of intellectual, moral or political savvy. But the procedure of
attending to popular culture for the purposes of those intellectual, moral
or political principles leaves something to be desired. Again, we're
not trying to insist on the irreducible worthlessness of those who love
popular culture, quite the opposite, what is frustrating, infuriating,
is that their affection for it is being turned into its opposite.
Insofar as intellectuals translate popular pleasures into radical gestures,
the things which count in popular culture - the forms of attention
and affection which popular culture lives off - the very things which
guarantee its popularity, are being sidelined. In other words, cultural
elitists regard popular pleasures to be hardly worthy of the title pleasure,
and radical commentators fail to attend to this normative ranking of pleasure
because they prefer a different vocabulary entirely, to speak of political
acts rather than entertaining experiences. Artists have done the same,
reclaiming popular culture for artistic forms of attention. A whole genre
of art has built itself out of an anthropological relationship between
the artist and popular culture. It is what Hal Foster calls the 'ethnographic
turn of contemporary art':
"In our current state of artistic-theoretical ambivalences and cultural-political
impasses, anthropology is the compromise discourse of choice".4
One reason why anthropology seems so desirable to contemporary artists,
especially in their relations with popular culture and everyday life,
is that it simultaneously holds out a generous hand to the downgraded
aspects of social life and guarantees that the artist's own privileged
position will not be infected by the values of the befriended culture.
Anthropology offers a model in which the artist can engage in 'low'
culture with the emphasis squarely on knowledge rather than pleasure,
in circumstances where the pleasures of popular culture are hardly considered
to merit the term pleasure at all.
Questions about art's relationship to popular culture are rarely
pitched with anything but the most scant ethical attention. When writers
are not merely observing the traffic between two worlds, they moan about
standards or exclusions - quality or equality. It generally depends
on whether the writer thinks that the two worlds ought to remain firmly
separated or nicely, kindly, democratically fused. It is as if the elitist
is happy to think of cultural rivalry so long as elitist culture is on
top, whereas the populist is not happy unless rivalries within culture
have been dissolved. Think, for instance, of the Leftist recoil from young
British art's avowed populism or somatic pleasures, its media fuelled
glamour or unmediated mundanity. This art since the late '80s, it
seems, has broken into a retreat from the critical, intellectual, mature
business of taking culture seriously. Or, 'high art lite' - to
use Julian Stallabrass' slogan - carries 'a marked lack of
seriousness.'
Stallabrass' argument - that there is an 'anti-theoretical
heart of high art lite' - can be read as a demand to return to
established modes of thinking, a rearguard attempt to reinstate an old
hierarchy of pleasures and knowledges. But art today cannot rely on such
pedigree - not because serious thinking is haughty or corrupting, but
because the situation requires us to think differently.
The problem is not just with critics who demand that artists take art
seriously. Artists too have often sidled up to popular culture with their
enthusiasm dampened by anxiety. Fair enough, perhaps: no artist wants
their romance with popular culture to consume their romance with art.
The danger, though, as we've often seen, is that of being branded
unserious and uncritical, to be seen as part of the culture of the spectacle
and thus to have fallen through the safety net of art's autonomy.
The anxiety is related to real effects but it is almost always overplayed.
It is as if every tentative step toward the popular has to be followed
by an over compensatory gesture of resistance to it, a theatrical restatement
of art's need for its ablution of the philistine impulses in entertainment
and commerce. Such artists are the bulimics of popular culture, the more
they are drawn to it the more forcefully they immunise themselves against
it.
Notes
1 Raymond Williams, Keywords, Fontana, p.87
2 Clement Greenberg, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch", Pollock and After,
Francis Frascina (ed), Harper and Row, 1985, p.25
3 Conservative, art critics like Hilton Kramer put their considerable
weight against the incursions of popular culture into the vaunted confines
of art with a number of caveats. The traditions he is defending, the modernist
legacy of high-powered cultural vangardism, happen to be replete with
hostilities towards an older form of conservative immobility. When Hilton
Kramer hears the word 'revolver' he reaches for his culture
because he is scared someone is about to play a Beatles album.
4 Hal Foster, The Return of the Real, MIT press, p183
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