Alternative Approaches to Structuralism PDF

Alternative Approaches to Structuralism Structuralism was criticized for its focus on abstract, universal structures at the expense of individual agency, historical context, and power dynamics. The rise of poststructuralism, Marxism, feminism, postcolonial theory, and other critical perspectives addressed these shortcomings, offering more dynamic, context-sensitive approaches to understanding culture, language, and society. These critiques ultimately led to the decline of structuralism as a dominant theory in the humanities and social sciences, giving way to more flexible, pluralistic approaches that acknowledged the complexity and contingency of human experience. Poststructuralism  Structuralism’s focus on static structures led to criticism for its inability to account for change, conflict, or dynamic shifts in culture and society. Structuralism tended to emphasize the stability and permanence of underlying systems, often overlooking how social structures evolve or how culture is shaped by historical and political movements. This limitation was challenged by poststructuralism, which emphasized the fluid, contingent nature of meaning and identity.  Key figures like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault argued that meaning is never stable, fixed, or determined solely by underlying structures. Instead, meaning is always in flux, contingent on context, and shaped by power relations.  Derrida’s concept of deconstruction challenges the idea of fixed meanings, showing how texts and cultural artifacts contain internal contradictions and ambiguities that reveal multiple interpretations.  Foucault’s analysis of discourse focuses on how language and cultural practices shape knowledge and power relations in society. He examines how institutions (such as prisons, schools, and hospitals) use discourse to control and regulate populations. Poststructuralism  Poststructuralism emerged as an alternative that focused more on individual experience, agency, and the ways in which people actively construct and interpret meaning within their lives.  Structuralism was seen as ignoring or downplaying the role of individual subjectivity, agency, and experience. In structuralist frameworks, the individual was often subsumed by the system or structure, with little attention given to personal experience or the subjective dimensions of culture and identity. Poststructuralism  Structuralism, particularly in the work of thinkers like Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Lévi-Strauss, often relied on binary oppositions (e.g., life/death, nature/culture, man/woman) to explain cultural structures. Critics, especially poststructuralists, argued that these binary frameworks oversimplified the complexity of meaning and cultural differences by forcing them into rigid categories.  Poststructuralists like Derrida deconstructed these binary oppositions, arguing that meaning is not stable or fixed but is always in flux and dependent on context. The over-reliance on binary oppositions was seen as limiting and reductive. Marxism and Cultural Materialism Structuralism was often criticized for neglecting the role of power and ideology in shaping social and cultural structures. By focusing on neutral structures, it overlooked how these structures might be used to perpetuate domination, control, and inequality. Marxist and critical theory perspectives highlighted the need to examine the ways in which ideologies and power relations were embedded in cultural forms. The structuralist model of neutral, objective systems was seen as inadequate for understanding the political and economic forces that shape culture. Feminist and Gender Studies Feminist theorists, including Judith Butler, critique structuralism's reliance on binary gender roles. They argue that structuralist approaches often reinforce gender binaries, overlooking fluid and socially constructed aspects of gender. Postcolonial Theory Thinkers like Edward Said and Homi Bhabha have criticized structuralism's universalism, arguing that it often marginalizes or misrepresents non-Western cultures. Postcolonial theory focuses on power relations between colonizers and the colonized and emphasizes the voices and perspectives of historically marginalized groups. Reception Theory Influenced by Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School, this approach emphasizes the active role of audiences in interpreting texts and cultural artifacts. Reception theory considers how different social groups interpret cultural meanings differently, focusing on the agency of audiences rather than viewing them as passive recipients of culture. The Psychoanalytic Approach Psychoanalytic thinkers like Jacques Lacan have introduced psychoanalysis to analyze unconscious desires and symbolic meanings within culture. Unlike structuralism’s emphasis on objective structures, this approach delves into subjective and psychological dimensions of culture. Cultural Studies & Marxism Introduction Marxism can make a strong claim to being the most important theoretical paradigm within cultural studies at the moment of its foundation. Introduction Cultural studies writers have had a long, ambiguous but productive relationship with Marxism so that, while cultural studies is not a Marxist domain per se, it has drawn assistance and support from it while also subjecting it to critique. Indeed, many of the leading figures associated with the ‘origins’ of cultural studies – Williams, Thompson, Hall – all engaged with Marxism as an economic, social, cultural and political theory of immense importance. Stuart Hall, perhaps the most significant figure in contemporary cultural studies, still makes claims to be ‘a Marxist’. Key Terms In the upcoming slides, we will examine the key intersections between cultural studies and Marxism, focusing on several important terms:  Base and Superstructure,  Hegemony,  Ideology,  Critique of Mass Culture,  Class, Power and Resistance  Globalisation and Post-Marxism The Base and Superstructure According to Marx, society consists of an economic base (the forces and relations of production) that influences the superstructure (culture, politics, law, and ideology). The Base and Superstructure  Economic Base (Foundation): Imagine a building where the foundation represents the economic base. This foundation consists of the forces of production (like labor, technology, and raw materials) and the relations of production (the relationships between different classes, such as workers and owners). Just as a solid foundation is necessary for the stability of a building, the economic base is essential for the functioning of society. It shapes how goods are produced, who controls resources, and how wealth is distributed.  Superstructure (Building Structure): The visible part of the building—its walls, roof, windows, and design—represents the superstructure. This includes culture, politics, law, and ideology. While the superstructure emerges from the foundation, it is also influenced by it. For instance, a building’s design may reflect the wealth and power of its owners, just as cultural norms and political systems can reflect the interests and values of the ruling class. The Base and Superstructure If the foundation is strong and well-resourced (a prosperous economy), the building can have elaborate and intricate designs (rich cultural expressions, stable political systems). Conversely, if the foundation is weak (an impoverished economy), the building may be poorly constructed (unstable social structures, lack of cultural expression). The Base and Superstructure Marx’s concept of the base and superstructure played a key role in shaping cultural studies. Cultural studies scholars drew on this idea to explore how cultural practices and institutions (the superstructure) are shaped by material conditions (the base). They were interested in exploring how cultural forms (films, books, art, media) reflect and reinforce the economic and social structures of capitalism. Practice: Exercise  Identify examples of economic bases and their corresponding superstructures in contemporary society and analyze how the economic base (forces and relations of production) influences the superstructure (culture, politics, law, and ideology) Examples:  1.Tech Industry (Economic Base) and Digital Culture/Politics (Superstructure)  2.Fossil Fuel Industry (Economic Base) and Climate Policy/Environmentalism (Superstructure)  3. Media Industry (Economic Base) and Cultural Representation (Superstructure) The Base and Superstructure Over time, cultural studies modified this view to consider the ways the superstructure (culture and ideology) can also influence and reshape the base (the economy and material conditions), making the relationship more reciprocal than deterministic. Hegemony  Antonio Gramsci did modify the traditional Marxist view that the economic base solely determines the superstructure (which includes culture, politics, law, and ideology). He argued that the superstructure, particularly ideology and culture, can also influence the economic base.  Gramsci's concept of hegemony is indeed central to cultural studies; it describes how dominant classes maintain power not just through coercion, but by shaping cultural and ideological norms that secure consent from the masses. Hegemony Gramsci’s notion of hegemony suggested that cultural domination and dominant ideologies are not just imposed from above but is also constantly maintained, negotiated and contested by subordinate groups. Gramsci argued that the ruling class maintains control not just through force but through cultural leadership, by securing the consent of the governed. This happens when dominant cultural ideas and practices become taken for granted as "common sense.“ Hegemony The ruling class creates a « common sense » ideology whereby their own values are the « norm » in order to maintain status quo. Capitalism: the production of capital and consumption of surplus value as a life goal Patriotism: To love, support and protect one's country and its people. Marriage and family: the "right way" to live is to marry an opposite-sex partner and have children. Male superiority: Men are more suited to positions of power, and more suited to decision-making at work and at home. Find other “common sense “ ideologies Hegemony Gramsci’s idea that culture is a site of both domination and resistance became central to cultural studies, leading scholars to analyze how popular culture could be both a tool for maintaining power and a space for subversion and resistance through everyday practices. Exercise: 1. Find examples that illustrate how hegemony operates today. 2.Find examples that illustrate how popular culture could be both a tool for maintaining power and a space for subversion A compelling example of how popular culture can serve as both a tool for maintaining power and a space for subversion and resistance is the use of music, particularly hip-hop. Mainstream hip- hop can sometimes reinforce societal norms and values that align with corporate interests or dominant ideologies. For instance, certain artists may promote consumerism, materialism, or specific lifestyles that align with the interests of powerful entities, such as brands or political figures. This can create a narrative that normalizes inequality and distracts from systemic issues. Conversely, hip-hop has also historically served as a powerful medium for social critique and resistance. Artists like Public Enemy, N.W.A, and more recently, Kendrick Lamar, use their platforms to address issues such as racial inequality, police brutality, and social injustice. Through their lyrics and performances, they challenge the status quo and provide a voice for marginalized communities. This form of expression empowers individuals to engage in activism and foster a sense of community and solidarity.  Find other examples Ideology Marxism’s critique of ideology was crucial to the study of culture. Marxists argued that ideologies are used by ruling classes to justify and perpetuate their control over society. Marx argues that the dominant ideas in any society are the ideas of the ruling class. The most long- lasting and authoritative Marxist account of ideology in the context of cultural studies has come from the writings of Gramsci. For Gramsci ideology is grasped as ideas, meanings and practices which, while they purport to be universal truths, are maps of meaning that support the power of particular social classes. Ideology Cultural studies scholars, especially influenced by Louis Althusser, took up the study of ideological state apparatuses (such as schools, media, education, and religion) to explore how culture reinforces dominant social structures and keeps people in a state of false consciousness— where they do not realize the true nature of their exploitation. Ideology Althusser argued that schools, media, education, and religion function to reproduce capitalist ideology, keeping people passive and complicit in their own oppression. This approach is central to understanding how cultural texts (e.g., films, music, literature) embed and reinforce certain ideologies. Ideology Althusser allowed Cultural Studies scholars to explore how ideology works in the cultural realm, not simply as a set of ideas but as something embedded in the institutions of education, media, religion, and other cultural spaces. Cultural Studies scholars began analyzing how popular culture, language, and media representations reproduce and reinforce dominant ideologies Critique of Mass Culture Marxist theorists, especially members of the Frankfurt School (1920s to 1940s), like Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, were concerned with the rise of mass culture in capitalist societies. They argued that in capitalist societies, culture becomes a commodity, mass-produced for profit. They were concerned that this culture industry promotes conformity and stifles critical thought, serving as a tool for ideological control. They also argued that mass-produced culture (like popular music, television, and film) worked to dull critical thinking and promote conformity, functioning as tools of social control under capitalism. Critique of Mass Culture While early cultural studies scholars were influenced by the Frankfurt School’s critique of mass culture, they also challenged the view that people are simply passive consumers. Scholars like Stuart Hall and the Birmingham School examined how audiences interpret and use mass culture in different ways, often creating meanings that resist dominant ideologies. Class, Power and Resistance  Marxism emphasized the central role of class struggle in shaping society. Marx argued that society is divided into classes with conflicting interests, and this struggle is fundamental to understanding social change  Marxism’s emphasis on class struggle was central to early cultural studies. Cultural studies examined not only how culture is used by elites to maintain power but also how working-class cultures create forms of resistance or alternative ways of life. Scholars examined how working-class cultures resisted dominant bourgeois culture and how popular culture served as a site of class struggle. Class, Power and Resistance  Cultural Studies scholars extended Marxist critiques of class to look at how other forms of power and inequality (e.g., gender, race, and sexuality) intersect with class, leading to a more complex analysis of power in society. While Marx emphasized class struggle, cultural studies expanded this to include other forms of resistance, particularly around issues of race, gender, sexuality, and identity.  The focus on agency—how people use culture creatively to resist or reinterpret dominant meanings—was a key development in how cultural studies applied Marxist theory. Post-Marxism As cultural studies developed in the late 20th century, scholars (Ernesto Laclau & Chantal Mauffe ) began to critique and expand upon classical Marxism to address issues of globalization, race, identity and politics. While maintaining a Marxist emphasis on power and inequality, cultural studies began to integrate insights from postcolonial theory, feminism, and post-structuralism. Conclusion  Marxism provided the foundational tools for cultural critique within cultural studies, particularly its analysis of power, ideology, and class relations.  Over time, cultural studies adapted and modified Marxist ideas to address more complex and intersectional forms of cultural analysis, incorporating elements of race, gender, and sexuality while continuing to interrogate the ways culture both sustains and challenges capitalist power structures. 2 Cultural studies: two paradigms Stuart Hall In serious, critical intellectual work, there are no 'absolute beginnings' and few unbroken continuities. Neither the endless unwinding of 'tradition', so beloved of the History of Ideas, nor the absolutism of the 'epistemological rupture', punctuating Thought into its 'false' and 'correct' parts, once favoured by the Althussereans, will do. What we find, instead, is an untidy but characteristic unevenness of development. What is important are the significant breaks - where old lines of thought are disrupted, older con- stellations displaced, and elements; old and new, are regrouped around a different set of premises and themes. Changes in a problematic do signifi- cantly transform the nature of the questions asked, the forms in which they are proposed, and the manner in which they can be adequately answered. Such shifts in perspective reflect, not only the results of an internal intellectual labour, but the manner in which real historical developments and transformations are appropriated in thought, and provide Thought, not with its guarantee of 'correctness' but with its fundamental orienta- tions, its conditions of existence. It is because of this complex articulation between thinking and historical reality, reflected in the social categories of thought, and the continuous dialectic between 'knowledge' and 'power', that the breaks are worth recording. Cultural Studies, as a distinctive problematic, emerges from one such 11\oment, in the mid-1950s. It was certainly not the first time that its characteristic questions had been put on the table. Quite the contrary. The two books which helped to stake out the new terrain- Hoggart's Uses of Literacy and Williams's Culture and Society- were both, in different ~ays, works (in part) of recovery. Hoggart's book took its reference from e '?litural debate', long sustained in the arguments around 'mass society' ~ m the tradition of work identified with Leavis and Scrutiny. Culture and. oczety reconstructed a long tradition which Williams defined as consisting, tn sum, of 'a record of a number of important and continuing reactions to ~ changes in our social, economic and political life' and offering 'a special d of map by means of which the nature of the changes can be explored' (p. 16). The books looked, at first, simply like updating of these earlier concerns, with reference to the post-war world. Retrospectively, their 32 What is cultural studies? 'breaks' with the traditions of thinking in which they were situated seem as important, if not more so, illan their continuity with them. The Uses of Literacy did set out - much in the spirit of 'practical criticism' - to 'read' working class culture for the values and meanings embodied in its patterns and arrangements: as if they were certain kinds of 'texts'. But the applica- tion of this method to a living culture, and the rejection of the terms of the 'cultural debate' (polarized around the high/low culture distinction) was a thorough-going departure. Culture and Society - in one and the same movement - constituted a tradition (the 'culture-and-society' tradition), defined its 'unity' (not in terms of common positions but in its character- istic concerns and the idiom of its inquiry), itself made a distinctive modem contribution to it - and wrote its epitaph. The Williams book which succeeded it - The Long Revolutian - clearly indicated that the 'culture- and-society' mode of reflection could only be completed and developed by moving somewhere else - to a significantly different kind of analysis. The very difficulty of some of the writing in The Long Revolutian - with its attempt to 'theorize' on the back of a tradition resolutely empirical and particularist in its idiom of thought, the experiential 'thickness' of its concepts, and the generalizing movement of argument in it - stems, in part, from this determination to move on (Williams's work, right through to the most recent Politics and Letters, is exemplary precisely in its sustained developmentalism). The 'good' and the 'bad' parts of The Long Revolution both arise from its status as a work 'of the break'. The same could be said of E.P. Thompson's Making of the English Working Class, which belongs decisi- vely to this 'moment', even though, chronologically it appeared somewhat later. It, too, had been 'thought' within certain distinctive historical tradi- tions: English marxist historiography, Economic and 'Labour' History. But in its foregrounding of the questions of culture, consciousness and experi- ence, and its accent on agency, it also made a decisive break: with a certain kind of technological evolutionism, with a reductive economism and an organizational determinism. Between them, these three books constituted the CJZesura out of which - among other things - 'Cultural Studies' emerged. They were, of course, seminal and formative texts. They were not, in any sense, 'text-books' for the founding of a new academic sub-discipline: nothing could have been farther from their intrinsic impulse. Whether historical or contemporary in focus, they were, themselves, focused by, organized through and constituted responses to, the immediate pressures of the time and society in which they were written. They not only took 'culture' seriously- as a dimension without which historical transforma- tions, past and present, simply could not adequately be thought. They were, themselves, 'cultural' in the Culture and Society sense. They forced on their readers' attention the proposition that 'concentrated in the word culture are questions directly raised by the great historical changes which the changes in industry, democracy and class, in their own way, represent, and to which the changes in art are a closely related response' (p. 16). This was a question for the 1960s and 70s, as well as the 1860s and 70s. And this is perhaps the point to note that this line of thinking was roughly cotermi- nous with what has been called the 'agenda' of the early New Left, to which these writers, in one sense or another, belonged, and whose texts these Cultural studies: two paradigms 33 were. 1his connection placed the 'politics of intellectual work' squarely at the centre of Cultural Studies from the beginning - a concern from which, fortunately, it has never been, and can never be, freed. In a deep sense, the 'settling of accounts' in Culture and Sodety, the first part of The Long Revolution, Haggart's densely particular, concrete study of some aspects of working-class culture and Thompson's historical reconstruction of the formation of a class culture and popular traditions in the 1790-1830 period formed, between them, the break, and defined the space from which a new area of study and practice opened. In terms of intellectual bearings and emphases, this was - if ever such a thing can be found - Cultural Studies II\OJnent of 're-founding'. The institutionalization of Cultural Studies- first, in the Centre at Birmingham, and then in courses and publications from a variety of sources and places - with its characteristic gains and losses, belongs to the 1960s and later. 'Culture' was the site of the convergence. But what definitions of this core concept emerged from this body of work? And, since this line of thinking has decisively shaped Cultural Studies, and represents the most formative indigenous or 'native' tradition, around what space was its concerns a'nd concepts unified? The fact is that no single, unproblematic definition of 'culture' is to be found here. The concept remains a complex one - a site of convergent interests, rather than a logically or conceptually clarified idea. 1his 'richness' is an area of continuing tension and difficulty in the field. It might be useful, therefore, briefly tp resume the characteristic stresses and emphases through which the concept has arrived at its present state of (in)-determinacy. (The characterizations which follow are, necessa- rily crude and over-simplified, synthesizing rather than carefully analytic.) Two main problematics only are discussed. Two rather different ways of conceptualizing 'culture' can be drawn out of the many suggestive formulations in Raymond Williams's l.Dng Revolu- Hon. The first relates 'culture' to the sum of the available descriptions through which societies make sense of and reflect their common experi- ences. 1his definition takes up the earlier stress on 'ideas', but subjects it to a thorough reworking. The conception of 'culture' is itself democratized and socialized. It no longer consists of the sum of the 'best that has been thought and said', regarded as the summits of an achieved civilization - that ideal of perfection to which, in earlier usage, all aspired. Even 'art'- assigned in the earlier framework a privileged position, as touchstone of the highest values of civilization - is now redefined as only one, special, form of a general social process: the giving and taking of meanings, and the s~w development of 'common' meanings- a common culture: 'culture', in this special sense, 'is ordinary' (to borrow the title of one of Williams's earliest attempts to make his general position more widely accessible). If even the highest, most refined of descriptions offered in works of literature a_re also 'part of the general process which creates conventions and institu- tions, through which the meanings that are valued by the community are shared and made active' (p. 55), then there is no way in which this process c~ lH: hived off or distinguished or set apart from the other practices of the ~.toncal process: 'Since our way of seeing things is literally our way of livmg, the process of communication is in fact the process of community: 34 What is cultural studies? the sharing of common meanings, and thence common activities and purposes; the offering, reception and comparison of new meanings, lead- ing to tensions and achievements of growth and change' (p. 55). Accord- ingly, there is no way in which the communication of descriptions, understood in this way, can be set aside and compared externally with other things. 'If the art is part of society, there is no solid whole, outside it, to which, by the form of our question, we concede priority. The art is there, as an activity, with the production, the trading, the politics, the raising of families. To study the relations adequately we must study them actively, seeing all activities as particular and contemporary forms of human energy.' If this first emphasis takes up and re-works the connotation of the term 'culture' with the domain of 'ideas', the second emphasis is more deliber- ately anthropological, and emphasizes that aspect of 'culture' which refers to social practices. It is from this second emphasis that the somewhat simplified definition - 'culture is a whole way of life' -has been rather too neatly abstracted. Williams did relate this aspect of the concept to the more 'documentary'- that is, descriptive, even ethnographic- usage of the term. But the earlier definition seems to me the more central one, into which 'way of life' is integrated. The important point in the argument rests on the active and indissoluble relationships between elements or social practices normally separated out. It is in this context that the 'theory of culture' is defined as 'the study of relationships between elements in a whole way of life'. 'Culture' is not a practice; nor is it simply the descriptive sum of the 'mores and folkways' of societies- as it tended to become in certain kinds of anthropology. It is threaded through all social practices, and is the sum of their inter-relationship. The question of what, then, is studied, and how, resolves itself. The 'culture' is those patterns of organiza- tion, those characteristic forms of human energy which can be discovered as revealing themselves - in 'unexpected identities and correspondences' as well as in 'discontinuities of an unexpected kind' (p. 63) - within or underlying all social practices. The analysis of culture is, then, 'the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the complex of these relationships'. It begins with 'the discovery of patterns of a characteristic kind'. One will discover them, not in the art, production, trading, politics, the raising of families, treated as separate activities, but through 'studying a general organization in a particular example' (p. 61). Analytically, one must study 'the relationships between all these patterns'. The purpose of the analysis is to grasp how the interactions between these practices and patterns are lived and experienced as a whole, in any particular period. This is its 'structure of feeling'. It is easier to see what Williams was getting at, and why he was pushed along this path, if we understand what were the problems he ad~, and what pitfalls he was trying to avoid. This is particularly necessary because The Long Revolution (like many of Williams's works) carries on a submerged, almost 'silent' dialogue with alternative positions, which are not always as clearly identified as one would wish. There is a clear engagement with the 'idealist' and 'civilizing' definitions of culture - both the equation of 'culture' with ideas, in the idealist tradition; and the Cultural studies: two paradigms 35 assimilation of culture to an ideal, prevalent in the elitist terms of the 'cultural debate'. But there is also a more extended engagement with certain kinds of Marxism, against which Williams's definitions are con- sciously pitched. He is arguing against the literal operations of the base/ superstructure metaphor, which in classical Marxism ascribed to domain of ideas and of meanings to the 'superstructures', themselves conceived as merely reflective of and determined in some simple fashion by 'the base'; without a social effectivity of their own. That is to say, his argument is constructed against a vulgar materialism and an economic determinism. He offers, instead, a radical interactionism: in effect, the interaction of all practices in and with one another, skirting the problem of determinacy. The distinctions between practices is overcome by seeing them all as variant forms of praxis - of a general human activity and energy. The underlying patterns which distinguish the complex of practices in any specific society at any specific time are the characteristic 'forms of its organization' which underlie them all, and which can therefore be traced in each. There have been several, radical revisions of this early position: and each has contributed much to the redefinition of what Cultural Studies is and should be. We have acknowledged already the exemplary nature of Wil- liams's project, in constantly rethinking and revising older arguments - in going on thinking. Nevertheless, one is struck by a marked line of con- tinuity through these seminal revisions. One such moment is the occasion of his recognition of Lucien Goldmann's work, ando through him, of the array of Marxist thinkers who had given particular attention to super- structural forms and whose work began, for the first time, to appear in English translation in the mid-1960s. The contrast between the alternative Marxist traditions which sustained writers like Goldman and Lukacs, as compared with Williams's isolated position and the impoverished Marxist tradition he had to draw on, is sharply delineated. But the points of convergence- both what they are against, and what they are about- are identified in ways which are not altogether out of line with his earlier arguments. Here is the negative, which he sees as linking his work to Goldmann's: 'I came to believe that I had to give up, or at least to leave aside, what I knew as the Marxist tradition: to attempt to develof a theory of social totality; to see the study of culture as the study o relations between elements in a whole way of life; to find ways of studying structure... which could stay in touch with and illuminate particular art Works and forms, but also forms and relations of more general social life; to replace the formula of base and superstructure with the more active idea of a field of mutually if also unevenly determining forces' (NLR 67, May-June 1971}. And here is the positive- the point where the convergence is marked ~een Williams's 'structure of feeling' and Goldmann's 'genetic structur- alism': 1 found in my own work that I had to develop the idea of a structure of feeling.... But then I found Goldmann beginning... from a concept of structure which contained, in itself, a relation between social and literary facts. This relation, he insisted, was not a matter of content, but of mental structures: "categories which simultaneously organize the etnpirical consciousness of a particular social group, and the imaginative World created by the writer". By definition, these structures are not 36 Whlzt is cultural studies? individually but collectively created.' The stress there on the interactivity of practices and on the underlying totalities, and the homologies between them, is characteristic and significant. 'A correspondence of content between a writer and his world is less significant than this correspondence or organization, of structure.' A second such 'moment' is the point where Williams really takes on board E.P. Thompson's critique of The Long Revolution (cf. the review in NLR 9 and 10) - that no 'whole way of life' is without its dimension of struggle and confrontation between opposed ways of life - and attempts to rethink the key issues of determination and domination via Gramsci's concept of 'hegemony'. This essay ('Base and superstructure', NLR 82, 1973) is a seminal one, especially in its elaboration of dominant, residual and emergent cultural practices, and its return to the problematic of determinacy as 'limits and pressures'. None the less, the earlier emphases recur, with force: 'we cannot separate literature and art from other kinds of social practice, in such a way as to make them subject to quite special and distinct laws'. And, 'no mode of production, and therefore no dominant society or order of society, and therefore no dominant culture, in reality exhausts human practice, human energy, human intention'. And this note is carried forward - indeed, it is radically accented - in Williams's most sustained and succinct recent statement of his position: the masterly condensations of Marxism and Literature. Against the structuralist empha- sis on the specificty and 'autonomy' of practices, and their analytic separa- tion of societies into their discrete instances, Williams's stress is on 'constitutive activity' in general, on 'sensuous human activity, as prac- tice', from Marx's first 'thesis' on Feuerbach; on different practices con- ceived as a 'whole indissoluble practice'; on totality. 'Thus, contrary to one development in Marxism, it is not "the base" and "the superstructure" that need to be studied, but specific and indissoluble real processes, within which the decisive relationship, from a Marxist point of view, is that expressed by the complex idea of "determination"' (1977, pp. 3(}....31, 82). At one level, Williams's and Thompson's work can only be said to converge around the terms of the same problematic through the operation of a violent and schematically dichotomous theorization. The organizing terrain of Thompson's work - classes as relations, popular struggle, and historical forms of consciousness, class cultures in their historical particu- larity- is foreign to the more reflective and 'generalizing' mode in which Williams typically works. And the dialogue between them begins with a very sharp encounter. The review of The Long Revolution, which Thompson undertook, took Williams sharply to task for the evolutionary way in which culture as a 'whole way of life' had been conceptualized; for his tendency to absorb conflicts between class cultures into the terms of an extended 'conversation'; for his impersonal tone- above the contending classes, as it were; and for the imperializing sweep of his concept of 'culture' (which, heterogeneously, swept everything into its orbit because it was the study of the interrelationships between the forms of energy and organization under- lying all practices. But wasn't this- Thompson asked- where History came in?). Progressively, we can see how Williams has persistently rethought the terms of his original paradigm to take these criticisms into account - Cultural studies: two paradigms 37 though this is accomplished (as it so frequently is in Williams) obliquely: via a particular appropriation of Gramsci, rather than in a more direct JI\odification. Thompson also operates with a more 'classical' distinction than Williams, between 'social being' and 'social consciousness' (the terms he infinitely prefers, from Marx, to the more fashionable 'base and superstructure'). Thus, where Williams insists on the absorption of all practices into the totality of 'real, indissoluble practice', Thompson does deploy an older distinction between what is 'culture' and what is 'not culture'.'Any theory of culture must include the concept of the dialectical interaction between culture and something that is not culture.' Yet the definition of culture is not, after all, so far removed from Williams's: 'We must suppose the raw material of life experience to be at one pole, and all the infinitely complex human disciplines and systems, articulate and inarticulate, formalised in institutions or dispersed in the least formal ways, which "handle", transmit or distort this raw material to be at the other.' Similarly, with respect to the commonality of 'practice' which underlies all the distinct practices: 'It is the active process - which is at the same time the process through which men make their history- that I am insisting upon' (NLR 9, p. 33, 1961). And the two positions come close together around - again - certain distinctive negatives and positives. Negatively, against the 'base/superstructure' metaphor, and a reductionist or 'economistic' definition of determinacy. On the first: 'The dialectical intercourse between social being and social consciousness- or between "culture" and "not culture"- is at the heart of any comprehension of the historical process within the Marxist tradition.... The tradition inherits a dialectic that is right, but the particular mechan- ical metaphor through which it is expressed is wrong. This metaphor from constructional engineering... must in any case be inadequate to describe the flux of conflict, the dialectic of a changing social process.... All the metaphors which are commonly offered have a tendency to lead the mind into schematic modes and away from the interaction of being-conscious- ness.' And on 'reductionism': 'Reductionism is a lapse in historical logic by which political or cultural events are "explained" in terms of the class affiliations of the actors.... But the mediation between "interest" and "belief" was not through Nairn's "complex of superstructures" but through the people themselves' ('Peculiarities of the English', Socialist Register, 1965, pp. 351-52). And, more positively - a simple statement ~hich may be taken as defining virtually the whole of Thompson's histor- Ical work, from The Making to Whigs and Hunters, The Poverty of Theory and beyond- 'capitalist society was founded upon forms of exploitation which are simultaneously economic, moral and cultural. Take up the essential defining productive relationship... and turn it round, and it reveals itself now in one aspect (wage-labour), now in another (an acquisitive ethos), and now in another (the alienation of such intellectual faculties as are not required by the worker in his productive role)' (ibid., p. 356).. H~, then, despite the many significant differences, is the outline of one 81sni;ficant line ?f thinking in Cultural Studies - some would say, the ~onunant paradigm. It stands opposed to the residual and merely-reflec- tive role assigned to 'the cultural'. In its different ways, it conceptualizes 38 What is cultural studies? culture as interwoven with all social practices; and those practices, in tum, as a common form of human activity: sensuous human praxis, the activity through which men and women make history. It is opposed to the base- superstructure way of formulating the relationship between ideal and material forces, especially where the 'base' is defined as the determination by 'the economic' in any simple sense. It prefes the wider formulation- the dialectic between social being and social consciousness: neither separable into its distinct poles (in some alternative formulations, the dialectic between 'culture' and 'non-culture'). It defines 'culture' as both the mean- ings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and classes, on the basis of their given historical conditions and relationships, through which they 'handle' and respond to the conditions of existence; and as the lived traditions and practices through which those 'understandings' are expressed and in which they are embodied. Williams brings together these two aspects- definitions and ways of life- around the concept of 'culture' itself. Thompson brings the two elements - consciousness and conditions - around the concept of 'experience'. Both positions entail certain difficult fluctuations around these key terms. Williams so totally absorbs 'defini- tions of experience' into our 'ways of living', and both into an indissoluble real material practice-in-general, as to obviate any distinction between 'culture' and 'not-culture'. Thompson sometimes uses 'experience' in the more usual sense of consciousness, as the collective ways in which men 'handle, transmit or distort' their given conditions, the raw materials of life; sometimes as the domain of the 'lived', the mid-term between 'conditions' and 'culture'; and sometimes as the objective conditions themselves - against which particular modes of consciousness are counterposed. But, whatever the terms, both positions tend to read structures of relations in terms of how they are 'lived' and 'experienced'. Williams's 'structure of feeling' - with its deliberate condensation of apparently incompatible elements - is characteristic. But the same is true of Thompson, despite his far fuller historical grasp of the 'given-ness' or structuredness of the relations and conditions into which men and women necessarily and involuntarily enter, and his clearer attention to the determinacy of produc- tive and exploitative relations under capitalism. This is a consequence of giving culture-consciousness and experience so pivotal a place in the analysis. The experiential pull in this paradigm, and the emphasis on the creative and on historical agency, constitutes the two key elements in the humanism of the position outlined. Each consequently accords 'experience' an authenticating position in any cultural analysis. It is, ultimately, where and how people experience their conditions of life, define them and respond to them, which, for Thompson defines why every mode of produc- tion is also a culture, and every struggle between classes is always also a struggle between cultural modalities; and which, for Williams, is what a 'cultural analysis', in the final instance, should deliver. In 'experience', all the different practices intersect; within 'culture' the different practices interact - even if on an uneven and mutually determining basis. This sense of cultural totality - of the whole historical process - over-rides any effort to keep the instances and elements distinct. Their real interconnection, under given historical conditions, must be matched by a totalizing movement 'in Cultural studies: two paradigms 39 thought', in the analysis. It establishes for both the strongest protocols against any form of analytic abstraction which distinguishes practices, or which sets out to test the 'actual historical movement' in all its intertwined complexity and particularity by any more sustained logical or analytical operation. These positions, especially in their more concrete historical rendering (The Making, The Country and the City) are the very opposite of a Hegelian search for underlying Essences. Yet, in their tendency to reduce practices to praxis and to find common and homologous 'forms' underlying the most apparently differentiated areas, their movement is 'essentializing'. They have a particular way of understanding the totality - though it is with a small't', concrete and historically determinate, uneven in its correspon- dences. They understand it 'expressively'. And since they constantly inflect the more traditional analysis towards the experiential level, or read the other structures and relations downwards from the vantage point of how they are 'lived', they are properly (even if not adequately or fully) char- acterized as 'culturalist' in their emphasis: even when all the caveats and qualifications against a too rapid 'dichotomous theorizing' have been entered. (Cf. for 'culturalism', Richard Johnson's two seminal articles on the operation of the paradigm: in 'Histories of culture/theories of ideol- ogy', Ideology and Cultural Production, eds M. Barrett, P. Corrigan et al., Croom Helm, 1979; and 'Three problematics' in Working Class Culture, Clarke, Critcher and Johnson, Hutchinson and CCCS, 1979. For the dan- gers in 'dichotomous theorizing', cf. the Introduction, 'Representation and cultural production', to Barrett, Corrigan et al..) The 'culturalist' strand in Cultural Studies was interrupted by the arrival on the intellectual scene of the 'structuralisms'. These, possibly more varied than the 'culturalisms', nevertheless shared certain positions and orienta- tions in common which makes their designation under a single title not altogether misleading. It has been remarked that whereas the 'culturalist' paradigm can be defined without requiring a conceptual reference to the term 'ideology' (the word, of course, does appear: but it is not a key concept), the 'structuralist' interventions have been largely articulated around the concept of 'ideology': in keeping with its more impeccably Marxist lineage, 'culture' does not figure so prominently. Whilst this may be true of the Marxist structuralists, it is at best less than half the truth about the structuralist enterprise as such. But it is now a common error to condense the latter exclusively around the impact of Althusser and all that has followed in the wake of his interventions -where 'ideology' has played a ~, but modulated role: and to omit the significance of Levi-Strauss. Yet~ m strict historical terms, it was Levi-Strauss, and the early semiotics, Which made the first break. And though the Marxist structuralisms have superseded the latter, they owed, and continue to owe, an immense theoretical debt (often fended off or down-graded into footnotes, in the 5earch for a retrospective orthodoxy) to his work. It was Levi-Strauss's ~cturalism which, in its appropriation of the linguistic paradigm, after ussure, offered the promise to the 'human sciences of culture' of a Paradigm capable of rendering them scientific and rigorous in a thor- ~~~y new way. And when, in Althusser's work, the more classical vlarxist themes were recovered, it remained the case that Marx was 40 What is cultural studies? 'read' - and reconstituted - through the terms of the linguistic paradigm. In Reading Capital, for example, the case is made that the mode of production - to coin a phrase - could best be understood as if 'struc- tured like a language' (through the selective combination of invariant elements). The a-historical and synchronic stress, against the historical emphases of 'culturalism', derived from a similar source. So did a pre- occupation with 'the social, sui generis' - used not adjectivally but sub- stantively: a usage Levi-Strauss derived, not from Marx, but from Durkheim (the Durkheim who analysed the social categories of thought - e.g. in Primitive Classification - rather than the Durkheim of The Division of Labour, who became the founding father of American structural- functionalism). Levi-Strauss did, on occasion, toy with certain Marxist formulations. Thus, 'Marixism, if not Marx himself, has too commonly reasoned as though practices followed directly from praxis. Without questioning the undoubted primacy of infrastructures, I believe that there is always a mediator between praxis and practices, namely, the conceptual scheme by the operation of which matter and form, neither with any independent existence, are realized as structures, that is as entities which are both empirical and intelligible'. But this - to coin another phrase - was largely 'gestural'. This structuralism shared with culturalism a radical break with the terms of the base/ superstructure metaphor, as derived from the simpler parts of The German Ideology. And, though 'It is to this theory of the super- structures, scarcely touched on by Marx' to which Levi-Strauss aspired to contribute, his contribution was such as to break in a radical way with its whole terms of reference, as finally and irrevocably as the 'culturalists' did. Here - and we must include Althusser in this characterization - culturalists and structuralists alike ascribed to the domains hitherto defined as 'super- structural' a specificity and effectivity, a constitutive primacy, which pushed them beyond the terms of reference of 'base' and 'superstruc- ture'. Levi-Strauss and Althusser, too, were anti-reductionist and anti- economist in their very cast of thought, and critically attacked that transi- tive causality which, for so long, had passed itself off as 'classical Marxism'. Levi-Strauss worked consistently with the term 'culture'. He regarded 'ideologies' as of much lesser importance: mere 'secondary rationaliza- tions'. Like Williams and Goldmann, he worked, not at the level of correspondences between the content of a practice, but at the level of their forms and structures. But the manner in which these were conceptualized were altogether at variance with either the 'culturalism' of Williams or Goldmann's 'genetic structuralism'. This divergence can be identified in three distinct ways. First, he conceptualized 'culture' as the categories and frameworks in thought and language through which different societies classified out their conditions of existence - above all (since Levi-StraUSS was an anthropologist), the relations between the human and the natural worlds. Second, he thought of the manner and practice through which these categories and mental frameworks were produced and trans- formed, largely on an analogy with the ways in which language itself - the principal medium of 'culture' - operated. He identified what was specific to them and their operation as the 'production of meaning': they Cultural studies: two paradigms 41 were, above all, signifying practices. Third, after some early flirtations with ourkheim and Mauss's social categories of thought, he largely gave up the question of the relation between signifying and non-signifying practices - })etWeen 'culture' and 'not-culture', to use other terms - for the sake of concentrating on the internal relations within signifying practices by means of which the categories of meaning were produced. This left the question of determinacy, of totality, largely in abeyance. The causal logic of determi- nacy was abandoned in favour of a structuralist causality - a logic of arrangement, of internal relations, of articulation of parts within a struc- ture. Each of these aspects is also positively present in Althusser's work and that of the Marxist structuralists, even when the terms of reference had been regrounded in Marx's 'immense theoretical revolution'. In one of Althusser's seminal formulations about ideology- defined as the themes, concepts and representations through which men and women 'live', in an imaginary relation, their relation to their real conditions of existence - we can see the skeleton outline of Levi-Strauss's 'conceptual schemes between praxis and practices'. 'Ideologies' are here being conceptualized, not as the contents and surface forms of ideas, but as the unconscious categories through which conditions are represented and lived. We have already commented on the active presence in Althusser's thinking of the linguistic paradigm - the second element identified above. And though, in the concept of 'over-determination' - one of his most seminal and fruitful contributions - Althusser did return to the problems of the relations between practices and the question of determinacy (proposing, inciden- tally, a thoroughly novel and highly suggestive reformulation, which has received far too little subsequent attention), he did tend to reinforce the 'relative autonomy' of different practices, and their internal specificities, conditions and effects at the expense of an 'expressive' conception of the totality, with its typical homologies and correspondences. Aside from the wholly distinct intellectual and conceptual universes within which these alternative paradigms developed, there were certain points where, despite their apparent overlaps, culturalism and structural- ism were starkly counterposed. We can identify this counterposition at one of its sharpest points precisely around the concept of 'experience', and the role the term played in each perspective. Whereas, in 'culturalism', experi- ence was the ground- the terrain of 'the lived'- where consciousness and conditions intersected, structuralism insisted that 'experience' could not, by definition, be the ground of anything, since one could only 'live' and experience one's conditions in and through the categories, classifications and frameworks of the culture. These categories, however, did not arise from or in experience: rather, experience was their 'effect'. The culturalists had defined the forms of consciousness and culture as collective. But they had stopped far short of the radical proposition that, in culture and in language, the subject was 'spoken by' the categories of culture in which he/ she thought, rather than 'speaking them'. These categories were, however, n~t merely collective rather than individual productions: they were uncon- s~us structures. That is why, though Levi-Strauss spoke only of 'Culture', his concept provided the basis for an easy translation, by Althusser, into the conceptual framework of ideology: 'Ideology is indeed a system of 42 What is cultural studies? "representations", but in the majority of cases these representations have nothing to do with "consciousness"... : it is above all as structures that they impose on the vast majority of men, not via their "consciousness"... it is within this ideological unconsciousness that men succeed in altering the "lived" relation between them and the world and acquiring that new form of specific unconsciousness called "consciousness"' (For Marx, p. 233). It was, in this sense, that 'experience' was conceived, not as an authenticat- ing source but as an effect: not as a reflection of the real but as an 'imaginary relation'. It was only a short step - the one which separates For Marx from the 'Ideological State Apparatuses' essay - to the develop- ment of an account of how this 'imaginary relation' served, not simply the dominance of a ruling class over a dominated one, but (through the reproduction of the relations of production, and the constitution of labour-power in a form fit for capitalist exploitation) the expanded repro- duction of the mode of production itself. Many of the other lines of divergence between the two paradigms flow from this point: the concep- tion of 'men' as bearers of the structures that speak and place them, rather than as active agents in the making of their own history; the emphasis on a structural rather than a historical'logic'; the preoccupation with the con- stitution - in 'theory' - of a non-ideological, scientific discourse; and hence the privileging of conceptual work and of Theory as guaranteed; the recasting of history as a march of the structures (d. passim, The Poverty of Theory): the structuralist 'machine'.... There is no space in which to follow through the many ramifications which have followed from the development of one or other of these 'master paradigms' in Cultural Studies. Though they by no means acount for all, or even nearly all, of the many strategies adopted, it is fair to say that, between them, they have defined the principal lines of development in the field. The seminal debates have been polarized around their thematics; some of the best concrete work has flowed from the efforts to set one or other of these paradigms to work on particular problems and materials. Characteristically - the sectarian and self-righteous climate of critical intellectual work in England being what it is, and its dependency being so marked - the arguments and debates have most frequently been over- polarized into their extremes. At these extremities, they frequently appear only as mirror-reflections or inversions of one another. Here, the broad typologies we have been working with - for the sake of convenient exposition - become the prison-house of thought. Without suggesting that there can be any easy synthesis between them, it might usefully be said at this point that neither 'culturalism' nor 'structur- alism' is, in its present manifestation, adequate to the task of constructing the study of culture as a conceptually clarified and theoretically informed domain of study. Nevertheless, something fundamental to it emerges from a rough comparison of their respective strengths and limitations. The great strength of the structuralisms is their stress on 'determ.ina~e conditions'. They remind us that, unless the dialectic really can be held, 1ll any particular analysis, between both halves of the proposition - that 'men make history... on the basis of conditions which are not of their making' - the result will inevitably be a naive humanism, with its necessary conse- Cultural studies: two paradigms 43 quence: a voluntarist and populist political practice. The fact that 'men' can become conscious of their conditions, organize to struggle against them and in fact transform them - without which no active politics can even be conceived, let alone practised - must not be allowed to override the awareness of the fact that, in capitalist relations, men and women are placed and positioned in relations which constitute them as agents. 'Pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will' is a better starting point than a simple heroic affirmation. Structuralism does enable us to begin to think - as Marx insisted - of the relations of a structure on the basis of something other than their reduction to relationships between 'people'. This was Marx's privileged level of abstraction: that which enabled him to break with the obvious but incorrect starting point of 'political economy' - bare individuals. But this connects with a second strength: the recognition by structuralism not only of the necessity of abstraction as the instrument of thought through which 'real relations' are appropriated, but also of the presence, in Marx's work, of a continuous and complex movement between different levels of abstraction. It is, of course, the case- as 'culturalism' argues- that, in historical reality, practices do not appear neatly distinguished out into their respective instances. However, to think about or to analyse the complexity of the real, the act of the practice of thinking is required; and this necessitates the use of the power of abstraction and analysis, the formation of concepts with which to cut into the complexity of the real, in order precisely to reveal and bring to light relationships and structures which cannot be visible to the na!ve naked eye, and which can neither present nor authenticate themselves: 'In the analysis of economic forms, neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace both.' Of course, structuralism has frequently taken this proposition to its extreme. Because thought is impossible with- out 'the power of abstraction', it has confused this with giving an absolute primacy to the level of the formation of concepts - and at the highest, most abstract level of abstraction only: Theory with a capital 'T' then becomes judge and jury. But this is precisely to lose the insight just won from Marx's own practice. For it is clear in, for example, Capital, that the method - whilst, of course, taking place 'in thought' (as Marx asked in the 1857 Introduction, where else?) - rests, not on the simple exercise of abstraction but on the movement and relations which the argument is constantly establishing between different levels of abstraction: at each, the premises in play must be distinguished from those which - for the sake of the argument - have to be held constant. The movement to another level of magnification (to ~eploy the microscope metaphor) requires the specifying of further condi- tions of existence not supplied at a previous, more abstract level: in this way, by successive abstractions of different magnitudes, to move towards the constitution, the reproduction, of 'the concrete in thought' as an effect of a certain kind of thinking. This method is adequately represented in neither the absolutism of Theoretical Practice, in structuralism, nor in the anti- ~bstraction 'Poverty of Theory' position into which, in reaction, cultural- lStn appears to have been driven or driven itself. Nevertheless it is intrinsi- cally theoretical, and must be. Here, structuralism's insistence that thought 44 What is cultural studies? does not reflect reality, but is articulated on and appropriates it, is a necessary starting point. An adequate working through of the consequences of this argument might begin to produce a method which takes us outside the permanent oscillations between abstraction/ anti-abstraction and the false dichotomies of Theoreticism vs. Empiricism which have both marked and disfigured the structuralism/ culturalism encounter to date. Structuralism has another strength, in its conception of 'the whole'. There is a sense in which, though culturalism constantly insists on the radical particularity of its practices, its mode of conceptualizing the 'totality' has something of the complex simplicity of an expressive totality behind it. Its complexity is constituted by the fluidity with which practices move into and out of one another: but this complexity is reducible, conceptually, to the 'simplicity' of praxis -human activity, as such - in which the same contradictions constantly appear, homologously reflected in each. Structur- alism goes too far in erecting the machine of a 'Structure', with its self- generating propensities (a 'Spinozean eternity', whose function is only the sum of its effects: a truly structuralist deviation), equipped with its dis- tinctive instances. Yet it represents an advance over culturalism in the conception it has of the necessary complexity of the unity of a structure (over-determination being a more successful way of thinking this complex- ity than the combinatory invariance of structuralist causality). Moreover, it has the conceptual ability to think of a unity which is constructed through the differences between, rather than the homology of, practices. Here, again, it has won a critical insight about Marx's method: one thinks of the complex passages of the 1857 Introduction to the Grundrisse where Marx demon- strates how it is possible to think of the 'unity' of a social formation as constructed, not out of identity but out of difference. Of course, the stress on difference can - and has - led the structuralisms into a fundamental conceptual heterogeneity, in which all sense of structure and totality is lost. Foucault and other post-Althussereans have taken this devious path into the absolute, not the relative, autonomy of practices, via their neces- sary heterogeneity and 'necessary non-correspondence'. But the emphasis on unity-in-difference, on complex unity- Marx's concrete as the 'unity of many determinations' - can be worked in another, and ultimately more fruitful direction: towards the problematic of relative autonomy and 'over- determination', and the study of articulation. Again, articulation contains the danger of a high formalism. But it also has the considerable advantage of enabling us to think of how specific practices (articulated around contra- dictions which do not all arise in the same way, at the same point, in the same moment), can nevertheless be thought together. The structuralist paradigm thus does - if properly developed - enable us to begin really to conceptualize the specificity of different practices (analytically distin- guished, abstracted out), without losing its grip on the ensemble which they constitute. Culturalism constantly affirms the specificity of different practices- 'culture' must not be absorbed into 'the economic': but it lacks an adequate way of establishing this specificity theoretically. The third strength which structuralism exhibits lies in its decentring of 'experience' and its seminal work in elaborating the neglected category of 'ideology'. It is difficult to conceive of a Cultural Studies thought within a Cultural studies: two paradigms 45 Marxist paradigm which is innocent of the category of 'ideology'. Of course, culturalism constantly make reference to this concept: but it does 110t in fact lie at the centre of its conceptual universe. The authenticating power and reference of 'experience' imposes a barrier between culturalism an.d a proper conception of 'ideology'. Yet, without it, the effectivity of 'culture' for the reproduction of a particular mode of production cannot be grasped. It is true that there is a marked tendency in the more recent strUcturalist conceptualizations of 'ideology' to give it a functionalist read- ing - as the necessary cement of the social formation. From this position, it is indeed impossible - as culturalism would correctly argue - to conceive either of ideologies which are not, by definition, 'dominant': or of the concept of struggle (the latter's appearance in Althusser's famous ISA's article being- to coin yet another phrase -largely 'gestural'). Nevertheless, work is already being done which suggests ways in which the field of ideology may be adequately conceptualized as a terrain of struggle (through the work of Gramsci, and more recently, of Laclau), and these have structuralist rather than culturalist bearings. Culturalism's strengths can almost be derived from the weaknesses of the structuralist position already noted, and from the latter's strategic absences and silences. It has insisted, correctly, on the affirmative moment of the development of conscious struggle and organization as a necessary element in the analysis of history, ideology and consciousness: against its persistent down-grading in the structuralist paradigm. Here, again, it is largely Gramsci who has provided us with a set of more refined terms through which to link the largely 'unconscious' and given cultural cate- gories of 'common sense' with the formation of more active and organic ideologies, which have the capacity to intervene in the ground of common sense and popular traditions and, through such interventions, to organize masses of men and women. In this sense, culturalism properly restores the dialectic between the unconsciousness of cultural categories and the moment of conscious organization: even if, in its characteristic move- ment, it has tended to match structuralism's over-emphasis on 'condi- tions' with an altogether too-inclusive emphasis on 'consciousness'. It therefore not only recovers - as the necessary moment of any analysis - the process by means of which classes-in-themselves, defined primarily by the way in which economic relations position 'men' as agents- become active historical and political forces - for-themselves: it also - against its own anti-theoretical good sense - requires that, when properly developed, each moment must be understood in terms of the level of abstraction at Which the analysis is operating. Again, Gramsci has begun to point a way through this false polarization in his discussion of 'the passage between the ~cture and the sphere of the complex· superstructures', and its distinct 'onns and moments. We have concentrated in this argument largely on a characterization of Wha~ seem to us to be the two seminal paradigms at work in Cultural Studies. Of course, they are by no means the only active ones. New d~velopments and lines of thinking are by no means adequately netted With reference to them. Nevertheless, these paradigms can, in a sense, be deployed to measure what appear to us to be the radical weaknesses or 46 What is cultural studies? inadequacies of those which offer themselves as alternative rallying-points. Here, briefly, we identify three. The first is that which follows on from lkvi-Strauss, early semiotics and the terms of the linguistic paradigm, and the centring on 'signifying practices', moving by way of psychoanalytic concepts and Lacan to a radical recentring of virtually the whole terrain of Cultural Studies around the terms 'discourse' and 'the subject'. One way of understanding this line of thinking is to see it as an attempt to fill that empty space in early structuralism (of both the Marxist and non-Marxist varieties) where, in earlier discourses, 'the subject' and subjectivity might have been expected to appear but did not. This is, of course, precisely one of the key points where culturalism brings its pointed criticisms to bear on structuralism's 'process without a subject'. The difference is that, whereas culturalism would correct for the hyper-structuralism of earlier models by restoring the unified subject (collective or individual) of consciousness at the centre of 'the Structure', discourse theory, by way of the Freudian concepts of the unconscious and the Lacanian concepts of how subjects are constituted in language (through the entry into the Symbolic and the Law of Culture), restores the decentred subject, the contradictory subject, as a set of positions in language and knowledge, from which culture can appear to be enun- ciated. This approach clearly identifies a gap, not only in structuralism but in Marxism itself. The problem is that the manner in which this 'subject' of culture is conceptualized is of a trans-historical and 'universal' character: it addresses the subject-in-general, not historically-determinate social sub- jects, or socially determinate particular languages. Thus it is incapable, so far, of moving its in-general propositions to the level of concrete historical analysis. The second difficulty is that the processes of contradiction and struggle - lodged by early structuralism wholly at the level of 'the struc- ture' - are now, by one of those persistent mirror-inversions, lodged exclusively at the level of the unconscious processes of the subject. It may be, as culturalism often argues, that the 'subjective' is a necessary moment of any such analysis. But this is a very different proposition from dismantling the whole of the social processes of particular modes of production and social formations, and reconstituting them exclusively at the level of unconscious psychoanalytic processes. Though important work has been done, both within this paradigm and to define and develop it, its claims to have replaced all the terms of the earlier paradigms with a more adequate set of concepts seems wildly over-ambitious. Its claims to have integrated Marxism into a more adequate materialism is, largely, a semantic rather than a conceptual claim. A second development is the attempt to return to the terms of a more classical 'political economy' of culture. This position argues that the con- centration on the cultural and ideological aspects has been wildly over- done. It would restore the older terms of 'base/superstructure', finding, in the last-instance determination of the cultural-ideological by the economic, that hierarchy of determinations which both alternatives appear to lack. This position insists that the economic processes and structures of cultural production are more significant than their cultural-ideological aspect: and that these are quite adequately caught in the more classical terminology of Cultural studies: two paradigms 47 profit, exploitation, surplus-value and the analysis of culture as commodity. It retains a notion of ideology as 'false consciousness'. There is, of course, some strength to the claim that both structuralism and cu}turalism, in their different ways, have neglected the economic analysis of cultural and ideological production. All the same, with the return to this ~~tore 'classical' terrain, many of the problems which originally beset it also reappear. The specificity of the effect of the cultural and ideological dimen- sion once more tends to disappear. It tends to conceive the economic level as not only a 'necessary' but a 'sufficient' explanation of cultural and ideological effects. Its focus on the analysis of the commodity-form, simi- larly, blurs all the carefully established distinctions between different practices, since it is the most generic aspects of the commodity-form which attract attention. Its deductions are therefore, largely, confined to an epochal level of abstraction: the generalizations about the commodity- form hold true throughout the capitalist epoch as a whole. Very little by way of concrete and conjunctural analysis can be derived at this high-level 1ogic of capital' form of abstraction. It also tends to its own kind of functionalism - a functionalism of 'logic' rather than of 'structure' or history. This approach, too, has insights which are well worth following through. But it sacrifices too much of what has been painfully secured, without a compensating gain in explanatory power. The third position is closely related to the structuralist enterprise, but has followed the path of 'difference' through into a radical heterogeneity. Foucault's work currently enjoying another of those uncritical periods of discipleship through which British intellectuals reproduce today their dependency on yesterday's French ideas- has had an exceedingly positive effect: above all because - in suspending the nearly-insoluble problems of determination Foucault has made possible a welcome return to the concrete analysis of particular ideological and discursive formations, and the sites of their elaboration. Foucault and Gramsci between them account for much of the most productive work on concrete analysis now being undertaken in the field: thereby reinforcing and - paradoxically - supporting the sense of the concrete historical instance which has always been one of culturalism's principal strengths. But, again, Foucault's example is positive only if his general epistemological position is not swallowed whole. For in fact Foucault so resolutely suspends judgment, and adopts so thoroughgoing a scepticism about any determinacy or relationship between practices, other than the largely contingent, that we are entitled to see him, not as an agnostic on these questions, but as deeply committed to the necessary no~-correspondence of all practices to one another. From such a position !'ather a social formation, nor the State, can be adequately thought. And ~deed Foucault is constantly falling into the pit which he has dug for himself. For when - against his well-defended epistemological positions -he stumbles across certain 'correspondences' (for example, the simple fact that all the major moments of transition he has traced in each of his studies - on the prison, sexuality, medicine, the asylum, language and political ~onomy - all appear to converge around exactly that point where indus- trial capitalism and the bourgeoisie make their fateful, historical rendez- 48 What is cultural studies? vous), he lapses into a vulgar reductionism, which thoroughly belies the sophisticated positions he has elsewhere advanced. 1 I have said enough to indicate that, in my view, the line in Cultural Studies which has attempted to think forwards from the best elements in the structuralist and culturalist enterprises, by way of some of the concepts elaborated in Gramsci's work, comes closest to meeting the requirements of the field of study. And the reason for that should by now also be obvious. Though neither structuralism nor culturalism will do, as self-sufficient paradigms of study, they have a centrality to the field which all the other contenders lack because, between them (in their divergences as well as their convergences) they address what must be the core problem of Cultural Studies. They constantly return us to the terrain marked out by those strongly coupled but not mutually exclusive concepts culture/ideology. They pose, together, the problems consequent on trying to think both the specificity of different practices and the forms of the articulated unity they constitute. They make a constant, if flawed, return to the base/superstruc- ture metaphor. They are correct in insisting that this question - which resumes all the problems of a non-reductive determinacy- is the heart of the matter: and that, on the solution of this problem will tum the capacity of Cultural Studies to supersede the endless oscillations between idealism and reductionism. They confront - even if in radically opposed ways - the dialectic between conditions and consciousness. At another level, they pose the question of the relation between the logic of thinking and the 'logic' of historical process. They continue to hold out the promise of a properly materialist theory of culture. In their sustained and mutually reinforcing antagonisms they hold out no promise of an easy synthesis. But, between them, they define where, if at all, is the space, and what are the limits, within which such a synthesis might be constituted. In Cultural Studies, theirs are the 'names of the game'. Note 1. He is quite capable of wheeling in through the back door the classes he recently expelled from the front. Here are some contemporary examples of how hegemony operates today, reflecting Antonio Gramsci's idea that dominant classes maintain power not only through coercion but by shaping cultural norms and securing the consent of the masses: 1. Corporate Control over Digital Platforms Dominance: Tech giants like Google, Facebook (Meta), and Amazon control vast portions of the digital economy. Their algorithms, business models, and policies shape what information people access and how they communicate, giving them immense influence over public discourse. Consent: Most users freely use these platforms and services, accepting their terms without fully questioning their power or influence. People often believe these platforms are neutral, but they are subtly reinforcing capitalist ideologies, consumerism, and surveillance. Hegemony: These corporations have normalized their control over the internet by creating systems that seem indispensable, thereby securing public consent while maintaining dominance over information flow and economic activity. 2. Consumer Culture and Fast Fashion Dominance: Companies like Zara, H&M, and Shein lead the fast fashion industry, which thrives on cheap labor, mass production, and global supply chains, catering to the demands of capitalist consumerism. Consent: Consumers participate willingly, motivated by low prices, trends, and convenience, often ignoring the environmental damage and exploitation behind these products. Fast fashion becomes a "common-sense" part of daily life, accepted without questioning the larger impact. Hegemony: The capitalist-driven fashion industry embeds its practices into popular culture, making excessive consumption seem normal and desirable, which ensures continued economic dominance while reinforcing class inequality. 3. Patriotism and Nationalism Dominance: Governments and political elites promote nationalism and patriotism through media, education, and political discourse, often aligning these values with their political or economic agendas. Consent: Citizens adopt these values, often viewing loyalty to the nation as a moral obligation. For example, in times of conflict or crisis, patriotism can be used to garner public support for military actions or controversial policies. Hegemony: Nationalistic rhetoric is presented as "common sense" (loving and protecting one’s country), but it often serves the interests of ruling elites, justifying actions that maintain their power and control while suppressing dissent. 4. Gender Norms and Patriarchy Dominance: Traditional gender roles, which position men as leaders and breadwinners and women as caregivers, are reinforced through institutions like family, religion, media, and education. Consent: These norms are widely accepted and internalized by both men and women. Many people, even if they reject overt sexism, still participate in and reinforce gendered expectations, e.g., women being judged for choosing careers over family or men facing stigma for showing vulnerability. Hegemony: Patriarchal values are embedded in cultural practices and institutions, which maintain male dominance by presenting gender roles as natural or inevitable, ensuring that challenges to this power structure are minimal. 5. Mainstream Media and News Outlets Dominance: Major news organizations, often owned by wealthy individuals or corporations, control a large portion of public information. They shape narratives about political, social, and economic events in ways that reflect elite interests. Consent: Audiences accept these media narratives as unbiased or objective, often unaware of the underlying corporate or political interests that shape what is presented as "news." Even alternative or independent media must often conform to certain norms to gain widespread acceptance. Hegemony: The media not only informs but shapes the public's perception of reality, reinforcing the dominant ideology by presenting certain perspectives as neutral or factual, while others are marginalized or dismissed. 6. Climate Change and Greenwashing Dominance: Corporations, especially in high-pollution industries (e.g., fossil fuels, fast fashion), engage in "greenwashing" to appear environmentally responsible without making significant changes to their harmful practices. Consent: Consumers accept these claims (e.g., “eco-friendly” or “sustainable” labels), continuing to support these companies, often without realizing how superficial the environmental efforts are. Hegemony: By shaping the narrative around sustainability, corporations maintain public approval and consumer support, securing their economic dominance while avoiding meaningful regulation or accountability for environmental damage. 7. Workplace Culture and Corporate Power Dominance: Large corporations and businesses enforce rigid workplace norms and productivity standards, often prioritizing profit over worker well-being. Consent: Workers accept these conditions, believing in the idea of hard work and meritocracy. This acceptance perpetuates long working hours, lack of work-life balance, and burnout, seen as the “cost” of success or job security. Hegemony: The capitalist work ethic is normalized as a societal value, making it harder for workers to challenge exploitative conditions. Corporate power is maintained through consent to these norms, presented as necessary for career advancement. These examples demonstrate how hegemony functions through both coercion and the subtle shaping of cultural values, allowing those in power to maintain control by embedding their interests into the everyday "common sense" beliefs of the public. Structuralism and Cultural Studies Introduction Structuralism is an intellectual movement and theoretical approach that emerged in the early 20th century. Structuralism posits that meaning does not reside in individual components but rather in the relationships between parts within a broader system. Structuralism gained considerable influence across various fields, including linguistics, anthropology, and literary theory. Structural Linguistics Structuralism originated in linguistics by Ferdinand de Saussure. Ferdinand de Saussure was a significant figure in linguistics, born in Switzerland in the late 19th century. His ideas laid the foundation for structuralism in linguistics and influenced various fields within the humanities and social sciences. Structural Linguistics Prior to Saussure, linguists had only been interested in studying the history of language, its growth and changes through the years. Historical Linguistics was studied by the Romans and the Ancient Greeks, who tried to reconstruct the origin of foreign words in their own languages. Additionally, linguists were only focused on the written words and texts. Saussure’s Structural Linguistics refers to a linguistic approach that analyzes language as a system of relationships between its elements, such as sounds and concepts. It emphasizes the study of the structures of opposition and co-occurrence within a language, with a focus on their cognitive and communicative effects. Key Concepts 1. Langue and Parole Saussure’s structuralist theory introduced the linguistic dichotomy: langue/parole  Langue: The overall system of language— the rules, structures, and conventions shared by a speech community. It represents the abstract "grammar" of a language.  Parole: The specific use of language by individuals in speech or writing. Saussure regarded parole as less crucial for understanding language than langue, which provides the necessary structure for parole to exist. Key Concepts 2. Sign, Signifier and Signified Saussure introduced the concept of the linguistic sign, composed of two parts: the signifier (the sound or form of a word) and the signified (the concept or meaning it represents). Arbitrariness Saussure argued that the relationship between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary and based on social convention, meaning there’s no inherent connection between the sounds and their meanings, which contributes to the diversity of language systems. Key Concepts 3.Binary Oppositions Meanings in language are often structured through pairs of opposites. These opposites are interdependent; one term gains meaning only in contrast to the other. This concept became foundational in structuralism. The binary opposition is the “means by which the units of language have value or meaning; each unit is defined against what it is not”. 4.Impact on Semiotics Saussure’s ideas laid the groundwork for semiotics, the study of signs and symbols in communicative behavior. His insights advanced understanding of how language and other communication systems function within society. Over time, the influence of structuralism expanded to other fields: 1. Anthropology Structuralism in anthropology was championed by Claude Lévi-Strauss 2. Literary Theory Structuralist literary critics, like Roland Barthes and Tzvetan Todorov, analyzed texts as systems of signs. 3. Psychology Jean Piaget applied structuralist principles to cognitive development, proposing that mental structures evolve through stages of increasing complexity. 4. Philosophy Structuralist ideas influenced post-structuralism, particularly in the works of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze. 5. Sociology Structuralist sociology, influenced by Émile Durkheim, viewed social facts as part of a broader system of structures that govern behavior and social order. Later, structuralism shaped theories of culture and power in the works of Pierre Bourdieu and others. Key scholars, such as Claude Lévi-Strauss in anthropology and Roland Barthes in literary theory were instrumental in applying structuralist principles to the study of cultural phenomena and texts. Their work laid the foundation for structuralism's role in cultural studies, offering new ways to analyze and interpret cultural expressions. Claude Lévi-Strauss (structuralism in Anthropology)  Claude Lévi-Strauss was a prominent French anthropologist and a foundational figure in structuralism. He applied a structuralist approach to understand human culture.  Structuralism in anthropology focuses on identifying the underlying structures that govern cultural phenomena, viewing culture as a system of interrelated parts rather than isolated customs or beliefs. Claude Lévi-Strauss Lévi-Strauss exemplified this methodology by analyzing myths. For Lévi-Strauss, the specific details of myths were less important than their underlying structure. Myths from different cultures might tell different stories, but they often follow similar narrative patterns and serve analogous purposes. He emphasized that myths operate through binary contrasts. Identifying recurring structures rather than focusing solely on individual stories allowed him to uncover universal patterns that transcend specific cultural contexts. Claude Lévi-Strauss One of Lévi-Strauss’ most famous works, The Savage Mind, explores how "primitive" and "modern" minds share the same intellectual capacities. Lévi-Strauss argued that the distinction between "primitive" and "civilized" societies is an illusion, as all societies operate according to structured ways of thinking, regardless of their technological or economic development. This perspective significantly shaped modern anthropology, encouraging researchers to examine the systems underlying social practices and cultural expressions. Roland Barthes (structuralism and literary theory)  Roland Barthes was a seminal French theorist whose work fundamentally influenced structuralism, semiotics, and literary criticism. His ideas reshaped the analysis of texts, moving away from authorial intent toward a focus on the underlying structures that shape meaning.  His essay "The Death of the Author" (1967) argues that a text’s meaning is not controlled by its author but produced by the reader. This idea was radical at the time, challenging traditional views of authorship and opening up literary interpretation to new perspectives where meaning is fluid and participatory. Roland Barthes In (1970), Barthes applied structuralist methods to literary analysis by deconstructing a Balzac story and dissecting its various codes and layers of meaning. This approach laid the groundwork for later developments in post- structuralism, where Barthes himself ventured, advocating that texts are "writerly" (open to multiple interpretations) rather than "readerly" (delivering a single, fixed message). In essence, Barthes’ theories encourage readers to view texts as sites of multiple meanings, shaped by the social and linguistic structures within which they are embedded. His ideas remain central to literary theory, semiotics, and media studies, influencing our understanding of literature and popular culture. Roland Barthes In his work Mythologies (1957), Barthes analyzed modern cultural phenomena, interpreting various elements, from advertising to wrestling, as "myths" that perpetuate cultural ideologies. Roland Barthes’ work on mythologies is a prime example, where he analyzed everyday cultural phenomena as signifiers with underlying ideological meanings. This methodology allows cultural studies scholars to deconstruct texts and symbols within popular culture to understand their social and political significance. Structuralism in Brief Structuralism is an intellectual movement that emerged in mid-20th century France, analyzing how meaning emerges from relationships between elements within systems rather than from the elements themselves. Key characteristics: 1. Systems thinking: All cultural phenomena (language, literature, society) are viewed as interconnected systems where elements gain meaning through their relationships. 2. Binary oppositions: Meaning is created through contrasts and oppositions (good/evil, nature/culture). 3. Synchronic analysis: Focuses on studying systems at a particular moment rather than their historical development. 4. Universal patterns: Seeks underlying structures common across different cultures and phenomena. 5. Anti-humanism: Challenges the idea of autonomous individual subjects, viewing human behavior as shaped by cultural systems. Main figures include Claude Lévi-Strauss (anthropology), Ferdinand de Saussure (linguistics), and Roland Barthes (literary theory), who applied these principles to their respective fields. Structuralism influenced fields ranging from anthropology and literary criticism to psychology and sociology. The main criticisms of structuralism include: 1. Ahistorical approach: Critics argue it ignores historical context and change, treating systems as static structures frozen in time. 2. Deterministic view: Structuralism is criticized for reducing human agency, viewing individuals as merely products of underlying structures rather than active agents. 3. Binary opposition limitations: The emphasis on binary oppositions (good/bad, nature/culture) is seen as oversimplified and failing to capture complex social realities. 4. Methodological problems: Critics point to difficulties in empirically verifying structural analyses and the risk of imposing structures that may not actually exist. 5. Western-centric perspective: Structuralism is criticized for universalizing Western concepts and failing to account for cultural differences. 6. Language-centrism: The application of linguistic models to all cultural phenomena is seen as reductive and sometimes inappropriate. Structuralism and Cultural Studies Introduction  Structuralism postulates that human language, thought, and culture can be better understood by analyzing the underlying structures that shape them, including language, symbols, myths, rituals, and social practices. This perspective has significantly influenced cultural studies in two key ways: 1. By reshaping how scholars analyze culture. 2. By emphasizing the processes through which meaning is created.  By likening culture to a language, structuralism provides a framework for exploring how cultural meanings are constructed through systems of relationships. Pre-structuralist approaches Pre-structuralist approaches treated culture as a collection of distinct phenomena tied to specific histories, contexts, or individuals.  Example1: A scholar studying ancient Egyptian religion would focus on its historical evolution, the specific deities worshipped, and the sociopolitical context of religious practices. The analysis would emphasize Egypt's unique history and treat its religious culture as distinct.  Example2: When analyzing a painting by Leonardo da Vinci, pre-structuralists would concentrate on the artist's biography, intentions, and the cultural conditions of Renaissance Italy, interpreting the artwork as a product of individual genius and historical circumstance. Structuralist Approaches to Culture  Structuralism, by contrast, emphasized the universal and systematic nature of culture, analyzing how shared structures (e.g., language, myths, and symbols) produce meaning across societies.  Example1: Structuralists analyzing myths like the Greek tale of Oedipus would look at the universal patterns underlying myths, such as binary oppositions (e.g., kinship vs. conflict, order vs. chaos), rather than focusing solely on the myth's specific historical context.  Example2: Structuralists analyzing advertisements would explore how the images and text form a system of signs. For instance, a luxury car ad might be interpreted as a sign system that conveys ideas of wealth, power, and freedom, focusing on the shared cultural codes rather than the specific details of the ad. By integrating structuralism’s methodical approach to analyzing cultural patterns with cultural studies’ emphasis on context, power, and ideology, this intersection allows for a richer understanding of how meaning is produced, maintained, and contested in society. Examples  Example1: Advertising and Semiotics  Structuralists view advertisements as systems of signs that communicate meaning through symbols, colors, and text.  A perfume ad using imagery of luxury (gold, elegant models) produces meaning by associating the product with wealth, desire, and exclusivity. This meaning is created by drawing on shared cultural codes.  Example2: Nationalism and Cultural Symbols  Structuralism helps analyze how flags, anthems, and national holidays maintain collective identity.  A country’s flag acts as a sign representing unity, history, and values. These meanings are continuously reinforced through rituals like flag- raising ceremonies and patriotic speeches. Examples  Exampl

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